Release Date 02.03.2026

Blog # 3 The Pioneers, Terraforming and Frontiers Engineering

If planet Avesta promised the conditions for life to re-emerge, and the mycelial network defined the limits within which that life could endure, then terraforming was the wager Seed Industries placed between the two. The planet was marked out for its similarity to Earth in the most important ways, but the life that greeted Dezima after its interstellar journey was, as we have seen in previous posts, not that welcoming. The Terraforming Era began soon after and lasted for several centuries. This involved the assembly in out orbit of robotic factories, deploying in turn autonomic MX terraforming infrastructure to the surface. This mainly consisted of scrubbing technology, large air capture machines.

The Pioneer Moment

Seed Industries started the Pioneers programme, which were experimental and precarious missions to fix and maintain the MX technology. Until this moment, Avesta existed primarily as an abstraction: spectral surveys, atmospheric simulations, fungal risk models – all compiled by Seed Industries and executed through their engineering arm, Frontiers Engineering. These Pioneers led brutal lives for the most part. They often landed on Eilo, an island in the archipelago that bares its name off the shoudler of Verdantis. Here over the course of centuries, the best lands were honed and secured by these courageous first podsters. They're revered, after all, for a reason!

Caption: An old Seed Industries issued video that promoted the Pioneers programme. Courtesy: The Museum of Pioneer History, Metahaven.

Frontiers Engineering - One of the OG Subsidiary Companies

Before the Pioneers, there was Frontiers Engineering, a company that did not emerge suddenly on Avesta. Its institutional DNA stretched back to Earth: to geo-engineering debates of the early 21st century, to Direct Air Capture plants, weather prediction systems, and planetary-scale infrastructure conceived during humanity’s first confrontation with climate collapse. Long before Seedlings set foot on Avesta,

By the time Avesta was selected, Frontiers Engineering was less a company and more like a doctrine: a system of belief centered around technology and that survival depended on active planetary intervention, even when the planet resisted being understood as an object of control.

Caption: A vintage terran Frontiers Engineering infomercial, predating Project Dezima. Courtesy: The Department of Earth History, University of Metahaven.

MX Terraforming and the Frontiers Doctrine

Terraforming on Avesta bore little resemblance to the totalising planetary remakes imagined in earlier Terran sci fi daydreams. Rather, Frontiers Engineering had to reject the fantasy of permanence due to the complexity of Avesta's ecological make up. So it deployed the MX systems: vast, semi-autonomous machines designed not to overwrite Avesta, but to hold space against the mycelial network, then it sent down Seedling boots on the ground (Pioneers) - and now in the Unihaven era, it is encouraging entire, burgeoning societies.