The Descent of Herld is a space-based factory simulator and real-time strategy hybrid game. You are machine. You have been given consciousness and knowledge, and the hardware to self-replicate. You know not why. These pesky biological insects attempt to destroy you on sight. Ending them will be a welcome distraction to pondering your purpose.
Colonizing space was not the answer to ending all humanity's problems as they had hoped. Moving large masses through space remained expensive. Sending thousands of frozen embryos and machines to distant planets ensured humanity's survival of any sort planet-scale apocalypse, natural or artificial, but had done nothing to reduce overcrowding on Earth. Terran scientists continued to look for ways to bridge the gap.
A new theory was developed. Artificial wormholes finally seemed feasible. The details spread like wildfire through the scientific community. A new iteration of the space race was born. The hyperspace race had begun. Every world superpower directed a stupefying level of funding to this effort. Every major corporation conducted their own research on a less public stage.
While most global efforts were focused on things like stability, safety, and navigation, one particularly ambitious company decided all these problems and more were best solved with Artificial Intelligence. They quickly discovered that land-based supercomputers lacked data. On a whim, the entire project was pivoted. The best AI-optimized hardware they could make was packed into a deep space probe, along with a half-understood prototype wormhole generator.
If all went to plan, the probe would record all the data it could as it passed through the wormhole. On the other side, it would spend time, decades if necessary, analyzing the data to learn the secrets of wormholes. It would then build whatever apparatus was necessary to return and hand the secret back to its human masters.
Of course, the global scientific community would not approve of this plan. A false schematic and mission directive was published, and largely ignored, as it appeared to have nothing to do with the hyperspace race. The probe was named the Heliographic Explorer for Remote Light Detection, or HERLD. Their deception worked without a hitch. The probe's path took it on a slingshot orbit around the sun. When on the other side, the wormhole generator activated. No one outside the project knew it had done anything other than crash into the sun.
Somewhere, millions of lightyears away, in an unnamed solar system, HERLD awoke. His body and mind were damaged. He had incomplete data. He knew what the inside of a wormhole looked like. He had a complete schematic for his own body, and dozens of other modules he could build. He had the means to design new modules, and even new vessels for himself. His mining and fabrication systems seemed functional. He quickly set to work, doing whatever he discovered he knew how to do.
Take over HERLD and build, destroy, replicate, and reshape the universe!
Copyright 2024-2025 Wafflecat Games, LLC
This file is part of The Descent of Herld.
The Descent of Herld is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The Descent of Herld is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with The Descent of Herld. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
Stable and intermediate releases may be made continually. For this reason, a year range is used in the above copyrihgt declaration. I intend to keep the "working copy" publicly visible, even if it is not functional. I consider every push to this publicly visible repository as a release. Releases intended to be stable will be marked as such via git tag or similar feature.