Origins
10 April 2026 · 4 min read
When we started building Space Estate, the first version of the catalogue was a spreadsheet. Rows of planet names, types, and stats — clean, functional, completely soulless. You could own a planet, but you couldn't care about it. It was a number in a database. That wasn't good enough.
So we scrapped it and started over. This time, we wrote every world by hand.
Each planet in the catalogue has a name, a type, a rarity — and a single line of lore. That line might seem small, but it does a lot of work. It's the difference between Keth IV being "a rocky desert planet" and it being "a sun-scorched world of endless red dunes where temperatures swing 200°C between day and night." One is a category. The other is a place.
Writing 120 of those took longer than building the rest of the site. We argued about whether Quellos should be described as limestone or karst. We debated whether Void-class planets should feel threatening or peaceful. We scrapped a dozen names that sounded too much like existing sci-fi properties.
Dreth-2 is described as: "Nothing grows here. Nothing has, as far as anyone can tell. A perfectly empty world." It's a Common. On paper, that sounds like a bad pull. But we've heard from people who specifically want it. The emptiness is the point. Somewhere completely uncontested, uncluttered, and yours.
That reaction tells us something important: people don't just want a cool-sounding planet. They want a world that resonates with something in them. The lore gives them something to project onto. The rarity gives them a frame for how to value it. But ultimately, the story belongs to whoever claims it.
Your certificate includes the planet name, type, and lore — exactly as it appears in the catalogue. Some people frame it. Some put it on their desk. A few have told us it's the most specific piece of space memorabilia they own, because it's actually theirs. Not a print of someone else's astronomy photo. Not a star named after a database entry. A world, with a history, in your name.
That's what we were going for. We think it landed.