Revision 2

Planet Tian is the setting of Exterminauts. It is described in first-party copy as a lush world scarred by corporate greed, where nature, machinery and alien life collide. Everything the crew does happens on its surface, in industrial worksites carved into an environment that has not stopped being alive.

How Tian Went Wrong

Beneath Tian's crust lies a rare resource called Polymorphic Plasma. Humanity came to extract it, built large facilities and laid infrastructure across the planet. As mining intensified, the native creatures turned aggressive and began attacking those installations. People evacuated off-world, but the corporations were not prepared to give up a resource that valuable, so they send crews back down to repair what has been broken and keep extraction running.

That is the whole setup for the job. The player characters are not there to save the planet or defeat an enemy. They are there because the machinery keeps breaking and someone has to fix it while it is being torn apart. Developers have been explicit that the ecosystem attacking the operation is a consequence of the operation, which puts the corporate and worker relationship at the centre of the fiction rather than at its edges.

The Environment

Environments blend extraterrestrial and industrial elements. Official descriptions name alien plants, mushrooms and celestial surroundings sitting alongside industrial landscapes and architecture, in a colourful science-fiction palette rather than a grim one. The overall tone is comic as much as it is hostile, with the developers noting a comedic undertone always ready to surface.

A Living Ecosystem

Tian is marketed as a living world that fights back. The stated design goal is that a crew is not shooting into an unchanging arena but invading a functioning ecosystem: creatures hunt, feed and adapt, and the alien threat is described as adjusting to the squad's tactics, forcing the team to reposition, communicate and change approach mid-job.

The creatures themselves are referred to in-fiction as Pests, which is consistent with the game's framing of the whole conflict as pest control. Official material states that they have distinct abilities, mechanics and weaknesses, and that different contracts field different creatures against which different damage types are more or less effective. One demonstrated enemy created duplicates of itself, forcing the crew to decide between targeting the original and clearing the copies. Larger creatures appear as jobs escalate.

The Corporations

Four corporations operating on Tian have been named, each with a distinct remit.

Developers have said the intent is not a simple conflict of good against evil but a set of companies with genuinely different agendas, with the workers caught between them. Crews are described as trusting each other but not the companies handing them contracts, while still needing those companies to sign the cheque. See Contracts for how work orders are issued.

Known Locations

No region, biome or named worksite has been made public. The only in-world proper noun beyond the planet itself to surface so far is a large piece of stationary machinery called Grab Jack, shown in a gamescom demonstration as the target of a restart objective.

Not Yet Confirmed

• No alien species has been named. No bestiary, no creature roster, no enemy family names.

• No named regions, biomes, maps or worksites.

• No population, settlement or non-player character has been described.

• No timeline, dates or history beyond the sequence of discovery, extraction, alien aggression and evacuation.

• No detail on the corporations beyond their one-line remits, and no confirmation that they function as a mechanical faction system.

• No confirmation that the planet's surface is a persistent world rather than discrete mission sites.

• No day-night, weather or dynamic environment systems have been announced.