Mass Extinction Through the Ages is one of those event chains you can easily miss. Early in the game your survey ships run into planets that clearly used to host life and now very much do not, and every one of them comes with a special project asking what happened there. The answers range from bad luck to a species blowing up its own homeworld.
Beware that this guide spoils the ending of every one of those stories.
How it works
Mass Extinction is one of four story event chains that can happen early in a game (it has a 10% chance). Unlike the other three, it is purely about exploration. When one of your ships enters a system with one of the five points of interest, you will get an Analysis special project for that planet. Each project needs a science ship and takes 60 days.
The five planets are:
| Point of interest | What you find | Grand Archive specimen |
|---|---|---|
| Broken Planet (asteroid belt) | A homeworld that was demolished on purpose | Fractured Planet |
| Burned Planet (molten world) | A planet pushed too close to its sun | Molten Planetary Slag |
| Desolate Planet | A species that used up its own soil | Fossilized Endoskeletons |
| Noxious Planet | Plants that grew out of control | none |
| Chilly Planet (frozen world) | An ice age with an unknown cause | none |
Broken Planet
This one is probably the most unsettling. The asteroid belt used to be a habitable planet, and the fracture patterns are regular and controlled (if “somewhat rushed”). All signs point to it being the homeworld of the species that destroyed it. Why they decided that blowing up their own planet was the lesser evil, you will never find out.
Burned Planet
Pure bad luck. A gravitational disturbance (your scientists blame a transient space-time anomaly) knocked the planet out of its orbit and much too close to its sun. It is slowly drifting back out, but it has been cooking ever since.
Desolate Planet
The native species barely had time to become sapient and invent agriculture before their world turned against them. The minerals the soil needed to recover ended up in their bones through their diet, and those bones fossilized instead of decaying. In other words, they slowly drained their own ecosystem just by existing.
Noxious Planet
At first it looks like the planet’s life choked on its own poisonous gases. The real answer is plants. A mutation (possibly caused on purpose by someone who did not see the consequences coming) made the local plant life grow out of control. Their pollen filled the lower atmosphere and killed every animal on the planet within months.
Chilly Planet
A shift in the atmosphere started an ice age that will likely outlast your own empire. Your scientists float failed terraforming or even terrorism as causes, and a “fringe” group suggests industrial emissions. The event then dismisses that idea, because surely nobody smart enough to industrialize would be foolish enough to do that.
If your empire has the Relentless Industrialists or Shareholder Values civic, you will get a different text where your scientists recognize the pattern immediately, because they have seen it on your own planets.
Is it worth the science ship time?
The rewards are mostly lore. Mind that the projects cost you 60 days of a science ship each, which early on is time that ship is not surveying. If you have the Grand Archive, three of the five planets give you a specimen, which makes them a little bit more worthwhile. Otherwise I would just pick them up whenever a science ship happens to be idle nearby, and enjoy the stories.
Precursor chains put a lot more on the line, and our precursor tier list ranks all nine by what each one is worth.
