This is where development of ideas for the world within The Protagonist should go.

Current Concrete Info:

The world is a blank slate. More than just everything not yet encountered being undefined, but an actual, planet-sized hunk of nothing. All that exists is what's been confirmed to exist; the gravestone, the monument to the Tower and screens that probably show things made relevant by Ka, and let's say a junk pit for Flowing Forge.

But the world is also extremely impressionable-- not just us, but anyone within it can influence what appears in it, both by deliberately thinking about it and by their past experiences being passively turned into reality. And everything becomes mashed together as a result, ultimately making a world that's a mix of all kinds of histories and civilizations and what have you. Even people can appear, though they'd only be shadows of their original selves, and those originals would be dead and gone in the case of Yiyxa or other lost worlds, but these shadows could eventually grow just like the world is. Perhaps additional characters from outside will arrive over time, so there's always fresh ideas and directions to take the story.

But no story is complete without a conflict. Some of these additional appearing characters would have very undesirable wants for the world, or have twisted perceptions of reality, or be entities that consume potential and revert things to their most basic state. Or, hell, maybe some of us decide to be meta-antagonists by deliberately trying to pollute the world with terrible ideas. However it goes, it'd be up to our heroes to stop negative influences from destroying the world, stabilize the world so that it can't be influenced in the future, and deal with whatever side plots and drama inevitably get created.

-Ponygood

There used to be many factions and races on this world, before they became embroiled in war and destroyed the world and each other.
Current Faction and Race Ideas:

The Creators: Extremely technologically advanced people. May have been a mix of various races. Built the Sentients and engineered the Flora Machina from captured Naturals.

The Naturals: A faction dedicated to the destruction of technology. Composed of races that are very close to nature or don’t wish to see it harmed, like dryads, plant-people, a smattering of earth ponies, etc.

The Synthetics: Mechanical creatures built by the Creators to serve them, until they gained sapience, rose up, seized the means of their own production, and broke off to form their own faction. They are mechs, androids, A.Is, etc. that have rebelled.

The Lunarians:They are called The Lunarians because they are nocturnal and they worship the three moons that orbit Yiyxa. Composed of two races, The Mothrum (humans with moth wings that channel lunar magic,) and the Vil’cree (humans with the bottom half of a spider.)

The Flora Machina: Less of a faction and more of a rogue race. The Creators made them in an attempt to copy the regeneration of the Naturals, but they escaped. They can fuse with technologies to make them self-repairing and to control them. They are mostly animalistic unless fused with something that has advanced computing power or an already-existent sapient A.I. When not fused with something, they shamble through the wastes as mostly-formless blobs of plant matter and small tech pieces, looking for a larger construct to fuse with.

Rock Lizards: Enemies of The Naturals, these rock-like lizard creatures live in craggy canyons and deserts. They can camouflage themselves with this terrain when hunting. They are surprisingly herbivorous, though they prefer plants with large amounts of innate magic, which the plant-people of the Naturals just so happen to have.

Leviathans: These gigantic creatures ruled the sea long before any civilization rose. They are long dead, however, and all that’s left of them are gigantic skeletons in the deserts where ocean used to be.

Misc Events:
Before the war began, the Creators charged the Synthetics with colonizing the planet's moons. The Synthetics complied, and decided to focus on colonizing the moons one at a time. They encountered no difficulty in acquiring the closer, smaller moon, and had enough time to make the colony entirely self-sustaining and even expand a little-- including the creation of the Factory, who's original purpose was to create ships to explore and colonize space. It was during this time that the War began, and remembering their forward colony on the moon, the Creators asked this colony for help. But these Synthetics had since achieved sentience-- they'd hid it so far, but seeing the prospect of joining the War too wasteful and dangerous, revealed their sentience in order to refuse.
The Factory created the Wing Squadron to defend the colony; shooting down anything that approached without permission, and occasionally striking at planet-based targets whenever it was deemed necessary. But the constant repairing and improving of Wing Squadron, as well as rapid advancements in all manner of defensive technologies, prevented the Factory from following its true purpose, and so the colony stayed confined to the single moon, unable to move anywhere else.
Still, despite this and constantly dreading that Wing Squadron might fail, they managed to survive the entire war. Apocalyptic weapons were activated, killing almost all life on the planet, while the colony remained untouched. With the War over and no longer fearing destruction, the Factory could return to its purpose and colonize the stars.
Except it couldn't. The colony had sucked the moon dry of every valuable resource they could safely reach, almost all of it going towards the war effort. They could still survive indefinitely, but could no longer expand as they wanted to. So they waited; waited for the planet to calm and the aftereffects of the apocalyptic weapons to fade, and waited to make sure it was absolutely safe to explore. Only then did it send the surviving members of Wing Squadron to explore-- half of them scouring the earth for anything useful, while half of them remained on the off-chance another threat appeared. It is during this time that our story begins.

Before the Great War The Lunarians were friendly with The Creators, but as the Great War got closer one of the races that belonged to The Lunarians, the Mothrum, began to grow weary of the power that The Creators had and wanted to cut ties with them altogether. The Vil'cree and at least one of the Mothrum princes on the other hand wanted to continue learning from The Creators. When the Great War came the Mothrum sided with The Naturals and the Vil'cree sided with The Creators. Understandably there was civil war in their kingdom.
When the bombs fell the Mothrum on The Naturals side died while the Mothrum prince and the Vil'cree who were with him hid in a bunker in one of The Creators Mega Cities. When they came out of the bunker everything was simultaneously in ruins and covered in this black sludge. The Vil'cree end up partaking in this black sludge because there is nothing else to eat and they begin to worship this giant spider god of darkness. They live deep underground and force others to be injected with the black sludge.

New Proposed Ideas:

So we got windigo horn, Ancient war, multiple civilizations which is not just ponies and what else?

Ancient factions of the world:
The Natural
The Creators
The Synthetic
The Plant Ponies...and I still have my heart set on a race of rock-like lizard race that is a natural predator to the plant ponies. They are incredibly patient when they want to be and use their bodies camouflage into their environment. Now that I think about it their natural environment would be canyons and deserts huh?

6927685
They come up from Below sneaky creepy and.... bahahaha I can't do this more seriously I do think that lizard beings could be interesting Maybe they come from somewhere so far away that no one on the current continent has heard of them in anything except Legends
until recently

6927685
Yes do it, we need some non-ponies, so Lizards will do.

6927690
That could also be possible also I feel like I'm missing a reference of some sort. For some reason Tremors just jumped to the fore front of my mind.

6927693

6927685

Four bodies I was thinking something long maybe Eastern Dragon like with a triangle head thoughts

6927700
what do you mean by triangle heads? Like Dark Eater Midir triangle head?

6927700
I'm not familiar with Eastern Dragons.

6927704
A little bit but more flat and a tiny bit longer( compared to body size that is)

6927707
Chinese dragons generally longer and more serpent-like with no wings and four legs the majority of the time though have beards and manes though I wasn't picturing that for this creature

6927708
Alright, I can imagine that.

Yoinking an idea from the Question thread and expanding on it, I would like to suggest that this world once had great oceans inhabited by mighty leviathans. The leviathans are long extinct and the oceans no longer cover the areas they did, but the bones of the leviathans are sometimes found littering the landscape and are the subject of much myth. Who knows what magical properties they might have...?

If Sigrun and Forge are i a junkyard, where did the junk come from and who or what dumped it in that area?

6928236
That is a good question.

6928236
6928245

It could be our unnamed plant-person. Maybe they like collecting things, or it's their form of 'art.'

6928251
That would give a reason why they are around and would investigate the thing Sigrun saw.

I say it was once a battle site long ago, and all the junk is salvaged from the war machines all around.

6928364
That's easy to combine. Some of the junk is from a battle, while some of it is brought there by the plant-person.

More worldbuilding time: before the war began, the Creators charged the Synthetics with colonizing the planet's moons. The Synthetics complied, and decided to focus on colonizing the moons one at a time. They encountered no difficulty in acquiring the closer, smaller moon, and had enough time to make the colony entirely self-sustaining and even expand a little-- including the creation of the Factory, who's original purpose was to create ships to explore and colonize space. It was during this time that the War began, and remembering their forward colony on the moon, the Creators asked this colony for help. But these Synthetics had since achieved sentience-- they'd hid it so far, but seeing the prospect of joining the War too wasteful and dangerous, revealed their sentience in order to refuse.

The Factory created the Wing Squadron to defend the colony; shooting down anything that approached without permission, and occasionally striking at planet-based targets whenever it was deemed necessary. But the constant repairing and improving of Wing Squadron, as well as rapid advancements in all manner of defensive technologies, prevented the Factory from following its true purpose, and so the colony stayed confined to the single moon, unable to move anywhere else.

Still, despite this and constantly dreading that Wing Squadron might fail, they managed to survive the entire war. Apocalyptic weapons were activated, killing almost all life on the planet, while the colony remained untouched. With the War over and no longer fearing destruction, the Factory could return to its purpose and colonize the stars.

Except it couldn't. The colony had sucked the moon dry of every valuable resource they could safely reach, almost all of it going towards the war effort. They could still survive indefinitely, but could no longer expand as they wanted to. So they waited; waited for the planet to calm and the aftereffects of the apocalyptic weapons to fade, and waited to make sure it was absolutely safe to explore. Only then did it send the surviving members of Wing Squadron to explore-- half of them scouring the earth for anything useful, while half of them remained on the off-chance another threat appeared. It is during this time that our story begins.

Not entirely sure how to fit the mobile Factory thing in here. Maybe it was mobile for the purpose of harvesting the moon's resources, instead of having to build and send out dedicated miners? And also to make it a little harder to target.

EDIT: while I'm thinking about it, what if the entire colony could up and relocate? They wouldn't do so often, since they wouldn't have as much odd a reason to do so as the Factory, but it could very well move to a new location. Probably not all at once, so maybe it can split into multiple mobile entities.

6927402
I’m thinking these leviathans were massive, but were also as intelligent as they were powerful. Look up a D&D creature called an Abolith(might have spelt it wrong.) One of their most notable traits were their perfect memory. And I mean that literally, as the Monsters Guide describes them as literally having perfect memory. Better than that then any computer, I would assume.

6928702
Almost wish one of these Leviathans were alive somewhere.

6928711
Perhaps that’s what the Entity could be. We are able to influence the world heavily, perhaps we can change things that don’t want to be changed. The Entity could be a technologically enhanced Abolith like creature. Though I seriously doubt the Entity would like us trying to change it.

6928714
Yeah, screw the Entity. But be careful. If my plan doesn't work, then us defining the Entity might somehow be a part of its plan. But if my plan does work, then the Entity's fair game for us.

6928720
Wait, plan?

6928737
A comment I made on the story. If it works, it would make the Entity unable to prevent us from altering anything else, make it so that being altered isn't a part of any of the Entity's plans, and prevent it from seeing anything beyond that story's comment section. If it works, then hooray, and if not, then oh no.

What kind of plants and animals are around the junkyard? Forge has to get stuff for his breakfast somehow.

6929301
There may have been some stored food in the bunker, so it doesn't matter. But there's probably not going to be a lot of life around there-- mainly just scavengers and weeds, plus the occasional piece of bark. But this is an alien world, so that life could look like anything.

6929310
I'm thinking stored food and/or MREs.

6929447
Good idea, but it would depend on how prepared Forge was on coming here. There's also nothing stopping us from plopping a verdant forest right next to the junkyard.

Oh! Do we have a world name yet? If not, I would suggest names that have some meaning (and creativity) to them. Unlike us, who named our planet after dirt. Maybe Praxia? A blend of Protagonist and Yiyxa, the title and the ashes of the world this was born out of. A bit meta, but it could have some other meaning to the inhabitants.

I have an idea for a Faction and I'm having trouble typing it down. Help?

6930158
I'm not the best with factions, but I'll help. What you got in mind?

6930169
I call them The Lunarians because they are nocturnal and they worship the three moons that orbit Yiyxa. Before the Great War The Lunarians were friendly with The Creators, but as the Great War got closer one of the races that belonged to The Lunarians, the Mothrum, began to grow weary of the power that The Creators had and wanted to cut ties with them altogether. The Vil'cree and at least one of the Mothrum princes on the other hand wanted to continue learning from The Creators. When the Great War came the Mothrum sided with The Naturals and the Vil'cree sided with The Creators. Understandably there was civil war in their kingdom.

I should mention that the Mothrum look like humans but with moth wings that help conduct their lunar magic and that the Vil'cree have the bottom half of a spider and the torso of a human.

When the bombs fell the Mothrum on The Naturals side died while the Mothrum prince and the Vil'cree who were with him hid in a bunker in one of The Creators Mega Cities. When they come out of the bunker everything is simultaneously in ruins and covered in this black sludge. The Vil'cree end up partaking in this black sludge because there is nothing else to eat and they begin to worship this giant spider god of darkness. They live deep underground and force others to be injected with the black sludge.

That's what I've got so far. I know some of this doesn't make sense, but it's a work in progress.

6930184
It seems good so far, and it gives Siggy and companions an enemy to fight of needed. It also gives an idea on who created the bunkers which is nice. One thing we gotta do is give a general idea where everybody is. If they collect people to bring people to inject with the sludge, who do they abduct?

6930190
They tend to come out at night and will take anyone who wanders into the deep underground or semi-abandoned Mega Cities. You'll know you've wandered in Vil'cree territory if you see black pulsing veins growing on buildings or you hear the clattering of their spidery legs. The good news is that as time went on they eventually evolved to not have eyes anymore, but they also have incredible hearing and the infected Mothrum have turned to darker magic like necromancy and blood magic.

6930190
Imagine you're wandering a ruined part of a city at night when you hear something skittering across the ground. You turn around to see if something is following you. There's nothing there. You start to turn back around when suddenly something has bitten your neck and is injecting a paralytic into your system and you can't move. The next time you wake up you can't see anything in the pitch black, but you can feel a tube that's been shoved down your throat pumping your body full of an icy cold, thick, and sludgy substance that will begin to cause you to slowly lose your mind as you hear the eldritch whispers of your new dark God.

6930208
Dark much? Sounds like an /r/nosleep thread

6930184
It should be noted that we haven't actually decided what the apocalyptic disaster to end the War is. Could be bombs, sure, but it could be something else, or even multiple different weapons all at once. This one, for instance... could be that a faction communed with beings from outside the universe, calling upon one to destroy the Creators.

6930248
I like dark things.

6930402
True. It was the first thing that I thought of so there are some kinks to iron out.
Edit: I'm trying to figure an alternate way that the Vil'cree found the sludge. Maybe during the Great War they found a tunnel leading deep underground and got lost prompting them to consume the sludge they found.

Some of the discussion in the main question thread got me thinking. Is there analog to the ponies we love and know in this world? Perhaps in the distant past or perhaps in the present? I just figured I'd throw this out here and see what people think

Long ago before the great war a team of mighty friends was known far and wide being of all different species each of them had their own powers and knowledge however the event that started the war brought them down. Inciting the fury of their respective Nations and being one of the biggest inciting incidents of the Apocalypse

Do you think there's any significance in the fact that Sigrun was able to recognize the aircraft carrier? How would a carrier in history books be the same as in the beach if Sight is from a different world?

6949692
It's not a stretch to say that the Enviar ponies naturally developed similar-looking technology to ours. The multiverse is a big place; anything could happen.

6949786
True, but it was kinda pointed out so it looks like it may have importance

And here I go, coming up with new ideas again. And these ones are extra crazy.

Here's a thought. What if Ash is one of Pinkie's Yiyxa team? It mean that Yiyxa continues to be relatively Stand-less, except for extra-dimensional visitors. Still don't know what type of Stand he'd have, but I am partial to Keywii's shadow manipulation.

And another thought. What if Pinkie's team was separated not just by space, but also by time? They could be anywhere and anywhen, and could have affected how the world became what it is if they arrived far enough in the past. Obviously, the members of Pinkie's main team should all eventually come together by the end, but anything's possible for the rest of them. Maybe they became a mythological figure that defined a religion, or inspired someone to invent a key technology, or became some sort of vigilante or boogeyman, or lived a long life and is just waiting to be found, or died and left a time capsule of their stuff to be discovered, or appeared on the wrong side of the universe and would catch up to our heroes at exactly the right moment, or became the template for all Sentients... maybe some of them would even arrive in the future, close to or after the main conflict is resolved. And one of them probably went a little too far back and was melted by a bunch of magma. This could be an explanation for why the carrier looks familiar-- because it was made from designs that already existed.

This leads to my final thought: what if Jotaro was one of those people that went to the deep past? And not just that, but that statue of him is him? For one reason or another, it was deemed necessary that he be preserved in stone, and maybe he would return to life when the world needed him once more. Obviously, the world doesn't need him yet, but maybe later it will.

6949831
I can see where your coming from for most of the idea, but where Jotaro is concerned I refer to this tidbit:

But instead, she found a silver statue of a muscled man with his hands in his coat pockets and his hat over his eyes. His coat was depicted as rippling in the wind, and a massive chain was slung over his shoulder.

I get the feeling that the statue is almost new or at the very least well cared for.

6949867
Hmm... I don't know. Magic. Or something. I did say it was an extra crazy idea!

6949869
Now I'm thinking of someone deifying Fluttershy.

6949831
Well, we know that only... 19(?) people survived the Merodi carrier's landing, and Pinkie's team are known to account for some of those. The identities and motives of the rest are still undefined, so having Ash be one of them works.

So since we're in a hiatus for a bit, does anybody want to work on worldbuilding on the tiny ponies that Pinkie met?