they be doing a little kissing

While this particular sheet isn't fully finished & public yet, I did wanna post these publicly while I was thinking about it - My headcanon calendar, approximate dates for when IWATEX takes place, and characters indivudual birthdays on both the Vertumnan Calendar and the traditional Gregorian Calendar! I get a bit rambly with this so the explaination behind my reasonings for things is below the cut:

The Vertumnan calendar is simple: 12 months of 30 days between the four normal seasons (Quiet, Pollen, Dust, and Wet), followed by a slightly shorter 28 day month for the already uniquely short Glow season, for a total of 388 days on an average year. Leap years with a single extra day would still occur just much less often than on Earth, only needed once every 17 years (aka 16 average years followed by 1 leap year), with that final extra day being added onto the end of Glow. This also matches with the years on Earth "laping" the years on Vertumna every 16/17 years; A character's 16th birthday on Vertumna would've been their 17th on Earth, their 32nd Vertumnan birthday would've been their 34th Earthern one, ect ect.

This also goes by several key things that aren't against canon information but contridictory to what was in early forms of the design document; the first is that days on Vertumna are nearly identical in length to days on Earth, still following a day divided into 24 hours of 60 minutes with each minute being composed of 60 seconds; the second is that weeks are assembled into batches of 7 days and (currently) follow the modern naming scheme for Sunday through Saturday.

The reason for keeping the day such a near identical length is that in practice it is actually incredibly hard to permanantly readjust the average humans sleep cycle to something longer (or shorter!) than their natural circadian rhythm. Even just an hour longer would have a cumulative effect on people's sleep cycles, getting more and more tired an hour "earlier" than the day before. This only stop becoming a problem if the days were almost perfectly twice as long as one on Earth, but having days that long - especially on a planet with two suns - would likely cook the planet to deadly temperatures during the day, while leaving the far side to drop insanely low each night. And yeah, sure, this one could be waved away by having each of the characters genetically modified to have a circadian rhythem that matches the length of their new day, but that requires both reader/writer and all characters to start adapting to a whole new lingustic system for describing units of time, which is also my entire reasoning for keeping the modern week setup. In theory, building up a whole new system of hours and names for week days is a lot of fun! And it can be, I've done it before, I'm halfway doing it again!

Which is how I learned that actually using said system casually and naturally is a WHOLE different beast, and not one I particularly want to explore in this fandom worldbuilding exercise. I think that in-universe the days of the week would be renamed over time, the same way that I think each given month would eventually have a more unique (and easier to use/identify) name than "Early Pollen" or "Mid Wet". Another headcanon of mine is that the founders actually did attempt to rename them before launch Onesday Twosday Threesday ect ect... But that between the adults deeply ingrained existing habit of calling things by their current names & the younger Earthborn colonists + spaceborn kids having secondhand exposure to the concept through media brought from Earth, it never actually caught on (except for Twosday taking over Tuesday, despite it being the third day of the week).

On another point entirely; The Gregorian calendar dates seen here are all founded on the age 11/year 2 Valentines day event. I ended up settling on that day being February 14th, 2204. Theres a few reasons for picking that year in particular; when I first started toying with the idea, it would've put their landing date during 2203, and I thought that it was a nice pun on the then-current-year 2023 (and, now having hammered it out further, having the landing year be 2202 is a nice nod to the game being released in 2022); One of the early humanties class events has a reference to space travel being "a passtime of billionaires in a previous century", and the standard english usage where I'm from would have this imply that more than a century had passed since that point, but it doesn't automatically mean it that either (think about using that phrasing to talk about something today; if you were talking about things that happend between 1900 and 1999, would you say that they happened in the previous century or a previous century?); the third reason is that its a shout out to one of my other favorite games, Stellaris (a space exploration/empire management sim), which always has the starting year of 2200.

Again, a lot of this is conjecture & opinions, just headcanoning pure and simple, but I've put a lot of thought into this over the past year. I'll eventually have a public copy of a calendar covering all 10 years of the canon game & update the npc sheet to have their local and Earth birthdays (as yes, I have gone and given them all specific birthdates, though I haven't finished calculating the Gregorian dates for the unimportant characters yet), but I'm in the middle of a frustrating medication adjustment & dealing with other personal issues that make it fall lower on my priority list rn.

If you have any questions or thoughts on any of this I absolutely wanna hear them, and as always all of this stuff is free for people to use-as-is or remix or takes part of to incorperate into their own headcanon system freely, and if you ever make anything based on or inspired by or referencing any of this stuff I very much would like to see it.

besties!!! I feel like they would have gotten along if they met when they were kids ❤️

(I also made this a while ago sorry if it looks rushed lol)

dys giving a whole dramatic monologue and packing his bag to leave the colony and giving you a tearful goodbye and then immediately getting caught and just texting you a knife emoji. he's so cringefail I"m in love with him.

Marzipan <3

I was immediately drawn to Marz I’m my first exocolonist playthrough mostly cause of her being the biggest kid and I loved that she was still considered pretty. Her whole thing with her augment kind of explaining some of why how she was how she was is so interesting to me.

(she also was kind of the worst as a child but what I adore about her is how much she can grow, also she actually likes it when you aren’t a yes man.)

I have an urge to do fun typography with exocolonist illustrations but my Adobe fonts weren’t loading on procreate and it’d probably be better just to use illustrator instead but I just kinda fave up for now.

hiiii i'm back with more

wanted to show off my own design for teen femsol since i love her a lot and think she looks pretty!! Plus i wish there was more character customization in the game for the early and mid teens :,]

also implied SolTam cause yes

Two Tammys from a while ago!!! Her dress is so much fun to draw <3

I do appreciate with Dys that the writers provided genuine reasons why he's not popular with the other kids. Yes, some of it is kids avoiding or teasing a kid they perceive as "weird" but Dys can also be a very difficult person to be around: He constantly avoids spending time with anyone, he disbelieves you when you try to support him, he snaps at you for trying to include him in things or trying to talk to him, he can be deeply misanthropic, he's pessimistic, his sense of morality is very black and white. It would have been easy for them to want to make Dys more likable and therefore fail to provide any actual or believable reasons why he doesn't get along well with his peers, and I think a lot of "bad boy"/loner characters fall prey to that. The writers are scared of making the character too hard to like so the character ends up not making much sense. But with Dys--as with ALL the main IWTEX characters I think--he has traits that are both endearing, and ones that make you want to tear your hair out a little.

These two had my brain in a chokehold for like 3 months last year and this is how I decided to cope. take it. hold it in your hands if you dare

A large apology to those who only follow me for exocolonist tarot. I have been tired

another reminder to stop buying/watching/reading anything JK Rowling associated

Instance as an alchemist/wizard/whatever but still in a very science-y methodical way, like the townsfolk all call her “doctor” rather than “the wizard” or “the alchemist, but everybody knows that she’s still the best magic user for hours in any direction.

Besk on the other hand is a stranger who simply showed up at the local inn one night with a heavily bandaged arm (Did not show up just at Instance’s door bc I don’t think she’d just casually let Besk in lmao). Probly says she’s like, a young widow who lost her husband to a recent war or plague or whatever, that she’s looking for help with her arm because she heard there was a talented healer there. And everyone that initially sees her assumes that she has some horribly injured or infected arm that the good doctor is gonna have to chop off (good ol fashioned entertainment), Instance takes the bandage off and immediately recognizes that she’s been afflicted by some sort of curse, one she doesn’t recognize but can tell it’s smth serious and gonna casual to dispel.

Tbh I’m not exactly sure what would go down between them, except that Instance initially flat out tells Besk there’s nothing she can do for her, that she doesn’t know the exact curse and the general way to remove a common one still requires some sort of steep sacrifice and probably a ton of magical energy or whatever from the wizard trying to break it, but like an idiot Instance sarcastically promises to cure her in exchange for her first born child as a direct reference to the old stereotype/myth that magic users do that, because Besk seems to be taking the news well and making light of the situation herself, and, besides, it’s not like they’ve actually entered into any sort of contract, they didn’t do [insert traditional way to agree to a magical deal here].

(spoiler alert: lmao!!!! lmao!!!!!!)

Me: Ok today I’m gonna work on one of my 3995210 pre-existing wips and-

My brain, entirely unprompted: “Women who promised her first born child to a magical user but accidentally had twins and the midwife didn’t keep track of which one came out first”/“Magic user who didn’t realize that deal actually was binding and seriously doesn’t want to deal with a newborn baby let alone two so she makes the mom stay with her while she ‘waits to see which one will make a better apprentice’ aka looks for some way to get out of this nightmare” Besk/Instance au

Me:

Brain:

Me:

Me: …. Dear god, and they were roommates…

Me: Ok today I’m gonna work on one of my 3995210 pre-existing wips and-

My brain, entirely unprompted: “Women who promised her first born child to a magical user but accidentally had twins and the midwife didn’t keep track of which one came out first”/“Magic user who didn’t realize that deal actually was binding and seriously doesn’t want to deal with a newborn baby let alone two so she makes the mom stay with her while she ‘waits to see which one will make a better apprentice’ aka looks for some way to get out of this nightmare” Besk/Instance au

Me:

Brain:

Me:

Me: …. Dear god, and they were roommates…

Symol Ship ♥ ( Sol x Sym )

I'll believe it all There's nothing I won't understand I'll believe (I'll believe) it all I won't let go of your hand.

Dys and masc Sol leaving the colony in style