The Machine-Purists

The flesh is a glitch to be patched.

Core Concept

The Mechanists faction represents the orthodox, dominant power within their species’ society. They are the guardians of the core faith: a zealous, unwavering belief in the absolute necessity of purging all organic weakness in the pursuit of a perfect, mechanical, and eternal existence. They are the architects of their people’s salvation, and they will not suffer a heretic to undo their great work.

Species

• Primary: Unbroken
• Adherent: Any being from any species who accepts the “Cybernetic Imperative” and commits to the purging of their own flesh is welcome. Their society is an ideological melting pot, not a racial one.

Ideology (Faith / Fiction)

• Core Faith: “Purity Through Design.” Their worldview is absolute. The organic is chaos, decay, and death. The machine is order, permanence, and life. There is no middle ground. Emotions are inefficient subroutines. Pain is a faulty sensor reading. Their path is one of relentless self-improvement through the cold, clean logic of engineering.
• Core Fiction: “The Sanitized Prophet.” They worship a heavily edited version of their history. Their mythology tells of a savior who gifted them the path to escape their biological prison. They have conveniently forgotten the desperation that drove him and are completely unaware of his more “sentimental” creations, like the Artisans. To them, he is a god of pure, unadulterated logic.

Goals & Motivations

• To guide all members of their society along the path of full cybernetic conversion.
• To continue the “Great Work” of perfecting their mechanical forms.
• To seek out and suppress the “Flesh-Scribe Heresy,” which they see as a dangerous, contagious mental illness that threatens to reverse millennia of progress and re-introduce the plague of mortality.
• To eventually achieve the “Great Upload,” transcending physical form entirely.

Relations with Other Factions

• Flesh-Scribe: Anathema. A disease to be cured or cauterized. They are the Mechanists’ greatest and most personal enemy, a civil war of the soul.
• Arborians: Repulsion. They see the Arborians’ symbiosis with “the Rot” as a primitive and horrifying fetishization of the very decay they fought so hard to escape.
• Thanatech: Cautious respect. They view the Thanatechs as fellow materialists who correctly see the universe as a system of quantifiable data, even if their methods are crude and their focus on “dead” matter is somewhat morbid.
• Loam-Kindred: Incomprehension. They see the Loam-Kindred as superstitious primitives, wasting their time with “inefficient cultivation protocols” for no logical reason.

Player Interaction

• Joining The Mechanists is to embrace a path of cold logic and technological power. Your quests will involve acquiring rare schematics, upgrading your vessel, and hunting down Flesh-Scribe heretics. Your social interactions will be pragmatic and transactional.
• As an Enemy, they are a formidable and relentless foe, a technologically advanced power that sees you not as a rival, but as a system error to be debugged.