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Yilun Star and the Silent Giants
September 12, 2026 at 11:01 PM
Initial version: the cooling planet, the Endi, the three silent giants, the turning over and the previous civilisation (2026-09-12)
Ylem's Cat is set on 伊伦星, a planet its inhabitants do not think of as a world at all. To the 恩地人, the people Molly belongs to, it is 地母, an Earth Mother, and she is growing old. Neither name has an official English form; Yilun Star and the Endi are working renderings only.
The planet's body temperature is falling. Winters run longer each year and summers grow shorter, and the ecology that once covered the surface in abundance is thinning out. This is not treated as background colour: the withering of the world is what sent Molly's mother away, and finding its cause is the errand Molly inherits.
The English store text describes the same idea as the pulse of Ylem, a phrase that has no single Chinese equivalent. The Chinese text says 地母 for the pulsing thing and uses 伊始, meaning the beginning, in the title. The two languages are best read as parallel namings rather than translations.
Three enormous bodies lie across the cooling land. They are remains rather than sleepers, and the Endi once worshipped them as gods. They have been silent for a very long time. What they were, and why they stopped, is one of the questions the store text poses and leaves open.
The giants are also how the game is built. The team fixed the three giant regions before anything else, giving each its own mechanic, its own ecology and its own visual spectacle, and then derived the civilisation, the story and the enemy roster from them. Each is to carry an observation mechanic of its own in the finished game. See Knowledge-Driven Exploration for how that structure works in play.
The story opens with a violent heave of the planet, called a turning over (翻身) in the Chinese text. The ground splits, and a new giant is born from below it, an infant where the other three are corpses. At the same moment a pitch-black animal that no Endi had ever seen appears. That animal is Mio, and it saves Molly from the collapse.
What the newborn giant is, and whether its arrival and the cat's are the same event, is unanswered in everything published so far.
An earlier civilisation (前文明) left machines behind on the planet. The Endi had coexisted with them peacefully until the day the new giant rose, at which point the Sentinels began hunting the cat and the girl. Nothing else about that civilisation has been published: no name, no history, and no account of what became of it.
The Endi are the people Molly belongs to. Her mother was the tribe's seer, the one who read the world and who left to find out why it was failing. Official screenshots show the Endi as pointed-eared and human in build, living among stone halls hung with cloth banners and among ruins older than themselves. The village Molly is returning to at the start of the game has no published name.
The team has said it plans ten to fifteen story characters built at the same level of detail as the protagonist, each with dedicated story content. None has been named or shown.
The three giants are unnamed, individually and collectively beyond the silent giants.
No region, biome, settlement or ruin on the planet has an official name.
Nothing has been published about the Endi beyond the fragments above: no population, no history, no account of their customs beyond the fact that the in-game journal records them.
The previous civilisation is unnamed and undated.
No official English rendering exists for 伊伦星, 恩地人 or 地母.
