This game covers many of the major accomplishments/milestones of the Xel’naga long before the events of StarCraft.
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- Xel’naga icons-area color-scheme we made for StarCraft XXX
- –explains why Blizzard developers hinted at reptilians (Naga) being the progenitors of most/all
- –usu. just 1 to a few Xel’naga, unable to make more units of their race/civilization, instead focused entirely on mind-controlling / inserting / ‘steering’ members of the races/species they control/seed/’uplift’
- –spans entire galaxy (Milky Way), not just Koprulu sector
- –gathering resources: always seeing through fog-of-war to all resource-spots on every map started
- –units: energy/mana/psi never goes down, no matter how often you use their abilities
peaceful; no way to attack, only defend - —only 6 buildings you make incl. the Xel’naga temple (featured in that StarCraft1 cinematic), which is required for non-Xel’naga units to learn what you are teaching; you make this temple, they are drawn to it anytime you click in the temple Teach-menu something for them to learn, then the type of unit being taught… leaves and returns to its normal NPCed tasking after learning that new ability
no way to make new Xel’naga, except in the roundabout way of having a “middleman species” or two; only ancient dragons could make Xel’naga, and Xel’naga were lesser than those dragons, thus had to uplift at least 2 species, each of those 2 uplifted to evolve in a different way, until both were masters of / stable in that way (Protoss in essence, Zerg in form), the hybrid offspring of those 2 then - able to be body-hopped into by the Xel’naga whose long-lived bodies would eventually otherwise perish
Some Xel’naga things are immune to conventional/Terran/Protoss/Zerg weaponry, but other Xel’naga things can interfere with them, thus opening up ways to get in and control/damage them. - –abilities: always appear neutral to everything on the map; nothing ever attacks them (except, much later/recently, the fewest of the Terran military –as even they are often deceived into thinking Xel’naga are friendly humans on their side)
- no researching new abilities for Your units/side; born with all of your own, and whatever you “research” is actually Taught to the neutral/uplifted base/units (Protoss or Zerg, etc.)
- –briefing area: all snake-scales looking/theme
- –campaign: roaming at first, planet to planet, until suitable host-bodies are found; sapient beings who have bodyparts perfect for helping spread Xel’naga thoughts/wills, which is how they caused rapid/excessive flora and fauna growth/spread even on worlds barren before their arrivals
- missions are not all within one year of a big war, but spread out millennia, giving time for noticeable evolutions
- eventually shows how some Xel’naga did not like the infinite cycle, thus split from the majority of their kind, trying to create a universe without that cycle/strife
- one sequence of missions is to detect “The Voice in the Darkness” (Void-based entity which consumed entire civilizations), then imprison it with an Argus crystal beneath a barren world at KL-2 (a dead star).
- then create the powerful relic called “the Argus Stone”, leaving it on world Aridas –and why Zerg believe it was used to create entire races
- link to starcr wiki pg about this species for all details
- engineered worlds, not just races; ideal environments which would help steer/maintain uplifted races during the long slumbers/hibernations of the Xel’naga between evolutionary milestones
- making presence known to uplifted Protoss, then integrating into Protoss society; mostly a click-through linear dialogue cinematic
dig vast subterranean tunnels and cities in them, helping them experiment on the uplifted Protoss - Protoss were modified to reproduce more quickly, and this may have led to the Protoss tribes diverging, which displeased the Xel’naga who wanted the races they made to stay unified, evolving the same way, thus easier to manage/steer (and not wiping themselves out)
Amons attacked by a group of Protoss, escaping in worldships, leaving one such ship and khaydarin crystals - next, having written off the Protoss as failed due to conflicted essence, they focused on zerg on planet Zerus
once Zerg could survive Space (not needing spaceships), the Amon/s decided they had succeeded in uplifting the zerg
Protoss made the Khala, which disturbed the slumber of the majority of the Xel’naga, who woke and noticed the rebel Xel’naga uplifting the zerg, so those rebel Xel’naga deployed the zerg against those awoken Xel’naga, overwhelming even their worldships with wave after wave of attacks, until that majority of the ancient species was killed. - As the Overmind processed information from the killed Xel’naga its deployed individuals had started assimilating, it learned of the Protoss, and decided that the fellow-uplifted race needed to be targeted/killed next.
- As shown in a StarCraft cinematic, proactive Protoss defending their kind/civilization and the Xel’naga artifacts/crystals… knew how to use a Xel’naga temple to create a selective-nuke that wiped out only the attacking Zerg. (Protoss had been studying and back-engineering the ruins/tech’ Xel’naga left behind… for generations longer than the first pre-uplift zerg had even existed.)
- –cinematics: show/hint that their genetics “contained a depth of molecular and quantum complexity not understood by the Terrans or Protoss
- culture: Xel’naga cherished all life, refusing to kill anything –until rebel Xel’naga turned zerg on their own kind in order to protect an uplifted group of lifeforms
- Xel’naga thought of energy, essence, and information as one and the same, and easily converted between the three,
but they didn’t seem to understand that when they tinkered with preexisting lifeforms, slumbering for millennia between their developmental stages, all they were doing was adding complexity/chaos/strife, not stabilizing what would have stabilized differently if left alone - Had Xel’naga focused on themselves instead, they eventually wouldn’t have needed to uplift species to bodyhop into, but they had been made with the nature to uplift things, thus that is how they kept using their knowledge and tech’.
- Sarah Kerrigan eventually ascended into Xel’naga form.
but that is getting into Broodwar and SC2, thus not part of this prequel-game. - cinematics: shows them being manifested by the imaginations of ancient giant dragons on Earth, then rapidly spreading, gaining
- Space travel, being born with the knowledge of the ancients, not having to figure it out via trial and error, shows them teaching primitive humans and humanoids various things that were foreseen to regulate which technological development trajectories those species would then be ‘spellbound’/limited by
- eventually explains how the Xel’naga were made in multiple dimensions/universes, always naturally doing this same thing; uplifting species until their future-hybrids were strong/stable enough for the Xel’naga to bodyhop into
- eventually explains how even time itself ended up being affected by all that demigods-level tinkering/uplifting
explains that Xel’naga in the Milky Way almost always felt disappointed, those they uplifted almost always falling short of their expectations, the long-lived Xel’naga apparently somehow not realizing that they were evolving bodies, not essences/minds, thus their creations kept straying from what the Xel’naga had in mind, resulting in all the strife/warring - –in a dropship/overlord/shuttle, a Xel’naga-occupied ground-unit takes up either 1 or 2 slots
- –Alien/Predator lore says Yautja evolution unknown, but thought to be from Therapsids, a species taken from Earth long ago, by some higher intelligence, to Yatra Prime to fulfil its evolutionary potential.
Maybe this was another uplifted species abandoned by the Xel’naga. - –They were not the oldest or most advanced, but made so long ago that they saw some Maiar, and giant prehumans, etc., but had to influence newer lesser humans and humanoids, not their wise progenitors who were immune to such influencing/subtlety.
- –shows only Protoss Zealots and Zerg Drones at first; you being next to them diring mission1 will influence them to become a bit more (adding a few first abilities, and their first building),
then you notionally hibernate after that mission, returning to repeat the process to unlock another ability and building for them, etc., until they have all abilities and blds shown in StarCraft1
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staying near wild animal NPCs will uplift them into humanoid form, but not add more than the most basic abilities and a few blds max. - –The Xel’naga don’t die in this game (other than NPCs during their civil war cinematic), as there is no way for them (the units of them you get to play as) to be replaced, nor to bodyhop until they uplift a species successfully, which takes this entire game
- you can go in the blue-world cliff-bunker bc it looks xel’naga/ancient, and you can build these things, using them like reinforced supplies/factories/R+D
- As Xel’naga, you can repair any Xel’naga structure, incl. terrain-addons (which are not yet ruins like in starc1or2)
- you can build the xel’naga temple/s (and all xel’naga blds)
- –new map/terrain/world type: like Installation, but in a Xel’Naga mega-temple / megastructure
(Since ash/Char is red&dark-gray, badlands is tan/wheats w lighter/normal water, desert is orange&black, ice/snow is dark-blue&light-gray&wht w dark-brown mud, jungle is brown&green w darker water, Space is med-grays, twilight is indigo&purple, …this terrain color-scheme is predominantly the unused colors; magenta (water over pink ground), pink (dirt/ground/sand), yellow (metallic/walls, distinct from the pale/white exteriors of Xel’Naga abandoned-structure terrain-addons shown on twilight-terrain).
To make it further-distinct from the Outlands’ StarCraft maps, it also has permanent fires/flames, flickering and no-lighting (pitch-black) sections (since Xel’Naga have temperature-sense, not just vision), and unique fauna (reptiles and snakes of distinct types, such as cobras, geckos, and komodos) and flora (big bioluminescent mushrooms and (also biolume) Venus Flytraps, and meadows/patches of different-colored flowers which bloom and close up based on the artificial day-night cycle in some sections of these installations/megastructures).)
There are also temple-stone doors, moving out of the way by rolling like vertical thick discs, unlike the slide-down Installation doors of the original game/s. - _
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