Ruined World

Massive, dilapidated structures cover the entire surface of this world. At one time, this city-planet must have been home to billions - but now it is empty. Whoever lived here must have left clues about what happened to them, but finding them will require a detailed examination of the surface.

After much fruitless sifting through the ruins, a number of clues directed our search towards remains of a kind of planetary data processing- and storage center. If we can find a way to gain access to whatever records remain, they will be invaluable for unraveling this planet's mysterious past.

Once we found an entrance to the data center and forced passage through the wreckage, it was a surprisingly easy task to reactivate- and interface with the computer systems. Self-repairing circuits and learning algorithms quickly came online to restore limited functionality, and communicate with our own computers.

The cause for this burst of activity quickly became clear: … was once the capital of a machine empire known as "The Omnicodex." Named for their driving purpose, the Omni were a hybrid of robots and cyborgs who had attempted to assimilate samples of all biological life in the galaxy, in order to prevent their extinction in the face of unknown galactic calamity.

From the records which survive, we gather that this course of action was not popular amongst the other galactic powers of their era; the Omni were eventually defeated in a joint campaign conducted by several of these empires.

Before their downfall, the Omni managed to sample a great deal of races, and much work was put into developing a device capable of re-creating them if the need should ever arise. This device - The Omnicodex proper - is apparently stored somewhere nearby.

The Omnicodex has been unearthed. This unique device contains the genetic sequence of every race that the Omni were able to sample, and can re-create them using only basic elements as raw materials. Unfortunately, it seems the Omni did not have time to perfect it before meeting their annihilation, so there is no means of selecting which of the many sampled races would be created in any given activation of the device.