“The dust may try to choke you, but it’s the plains that teach you to live.”

– Mara Quill, caravan master

Between the Equatorial Belt’s scorching chaos and the frozen silence of the poles lies the heartland of Perseverance: the Temperate Bands. These two circumplanetary zones – one in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern – hold most of the planet’s arable land, functional infrastructure, and permanent settlements.

Together, they form what locals call the Settled Lands – a belt of river-fed plains, fractured steppes, fertile valleys, and long-haul trade routes. While life here is less extreme than in the deserts or ice fields, that doesn’t mean it’s safe. Drought, predators, land disputes, and old grudges make these lands just as dangerous in their own way.

Where the Equatorial Belt breaks people, the Temperate Bands bind them – into families, into ranching crews, into outlaw posses, into freight companies and self-governed townships. It’s a land of open skies and quiet ambition, where danger still lurks, but hope grows wild in the dirt.

Major Biomes of the Temperate Bands

The Temperate Bands wrap around Perseverance like twin green-brown belts of uneasy stability – one in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern. While not free of danger, they offer the closest thing the planet has to sustainable life. The land here holds water, roots, and memories. Crops can grow. Towns can endure. But comfort is never guaranteed.

From wind-carved plateaus to flood-fed lowlands, from the roaming grasslands to fractured river deltas, these biomes shape the people who live in them – not just how they build or eat, but how they think, remember, and fight.

“You hear a low hum on the plains, best check the clouds. Could be a song. Could be the storm.”

– Ilenya Holt, rancher-poet

The Thundergrass Expanse

A sea of golden and slate-blue grass stretching as far as the eye can see, the Thundergrass Expanse dominates large sections of both hemispheres. In dry seasons, the plains roll with gentle waves beneath the wind. In storm season, they become deathtraps of static charge and flash ignition. The tall grass crackles with stored tension, and lightning arcs from blade to blade, creating roaming firefronts and heat mirages that confuse even the most experienced guides.

Ironhorn herds migrate through these lands, drawn by ancient instincts and mineral-rich watering grounds. Ranchers follow, driving their stock or defending their claims with shock-fencing and skiff outriders. The Expanse is lawless in the truest sense – not because there’s no law, but because no one enforces it for long.

“There’s a hundred kilometers between here and the next map pin, and none of it gives a damn who your boss is.”

– Hollis Kreel, freelance grazer

The High River Network

“If it floats, someone will tax it. If it sinks, someone will blame you.” – Mara Quill, caravan master turned riverhand

The High River is not a single continuous river — it’s a planet-spanning hydrological system, made up of multiple river basins, ancient watercourses, and geothermal-fed tributaries that snake through both the Northern and Southern Temperate Bands. Though the river does not physically cross the Equatorial Belt, its name lives on in both hemispheres, a relic of Commonwealth mapping conventions and early settler myth.

In the north, it meanders through carved lowlands and marsh-fed deltas. In the south, it roars through redrock canyons and seasonal flood plains. Each band treats its stretch of the High River as the original — and rival barge guilds, smuggling routes, and regional governments compete over naming rights, toll enforcement, and cultural ownership of the “true” High River.

What connects them is not the flow, but the infrastructure: long-haul water haulers, modular bridge templates, and encrypted logistics protocols inherited from orbital colony plans. The High River isn’t just a place — it’s a network of trade, memory, and power, shaped by terrain but bigger than any one branch.

The Broken Steppes

The Broken Steppes are a crumpled band of uplands and eroded plateaus that lie near the inner edge of the Temperate Bands, where grassland gives way to badland. Carved by ancient wind and tectonics, this fractured terrain is a patchwork of shallow canyons, jutting outcrops, and echoing hollows.

It’s poor soil for farming, but rich in salvage and cover. Exiles, renegades, and off-grid communities set up hidden compounds in the folds of the steppes, often using geothermal vents or repurposed tech to survive. Dustborn clans once traveled this land in caravans – and some still do, following old routes and avoiding detection.

Military convoys avoid the Steppes when they can. Too easy to vanish out here. Too easy to be watched.

“You think you’re alone in the Steppes? Then you’ve already been seen.”

– Cal Seret, Dustborn pathfinder

Lowland Basins

At the foot of the plateaus and valley ridges lie the lowland basins – wide, bowl-shaped depressions that collect runoff, silt, and seasonal flooding. Some host shallow lakes or marshes, others support fungal farms, hot spring enclaves, or water reclamation stations.

These are the lands most suited to crop-based settlements – but also the most contested. Raiders know the paths to the irrigation pumps. Mercenary crews get hired to “adjust” boundary markers. And when drought hits, the basins become bone-dry pits crawling with scavengers and desperate settlers.

Still, these are the breadbaskets of Perseverance – if anything can earn you quiet prosperity here, it’s knowing how to grow food and defend it.

“The basin feeds, but it also floods. Live here long enough and you learn: nothing stays dry forever.”

– Vesh Allarin, communal farm elder

Landmarks of the Settled Lands

Scattered across the Temperate Bands are places that refuse to be forgotten. Some are remnants of the Commonwealth’s first footprint. Others predate even the earliest terraforming records. These landmarks are neither towns nor typical regions – they are narrative flashpoints, enigmas waiting to be uncovered, reclaimed, or left well alone.

The Verdance Coil

Overgrown terraformer or dormant god-machine?

Hidden beneath an overgrown glade in the southern Temperate Band lies a spiraling structure of fused alloys and bioglass, partly sunken into a moss-choked basin. Locals call it the Verdance Coil – and treat it like a sleeping beast.

It pulses with faint heat, occasionally releasing spores that stimulate aggressive plant growth in a several-kilometer radius. Crops grown too close often mutate. Fungal blooms inside the Coil's tunnels exhibit limited neural activity – and respond to light and sound like they're listening.

No official records acknowledge the site. Riverfolk speak of a freight crew that tried to haul out part of the core. No one speaks of what happened after.

“It’s not broken. It’s waiting.”

– Erri Telos, former bioengineer

The Barrow Line

Railway turned reliquary

Running through the northern plains like a steel scar, the Barrow Line is a broken railway from the Commonwealth’s early expansion phase. It was once meant to connect major settlements, but was never completed. Today, the tracks vanish into fields, caves, and eroded hillsides.

Wrecked train segments now serve as shrines, bunkhouses, outlaw hideouts, or memory markers. Some are painted in family crests. Others are sealed shut and said to contain “ghost cargo” – failed bioexperiments, cold-coded AIs, or unspent military payloads.

Rangers avoid the Line. Freight barons swear by it. Dustborn caravans sometimes leave offerings at the first engine.

“You want the fastest route? Take the Barrow. Just don’t open the wrong car.”

– Mera Galt, skimmer runner

The Crossshadow Oak

Living archive or dangerous artifact?

At the intersection of three old land grants stands a massive, leafless tree known as the Crossshadow Oak. It does not match any known flora, and no one recalls when it first appeared. Its trunk is cold metal fused with fossilized carbon. Its bark bears names – thousands of them – etched by no hand.

People who camp beneath it report dreams of ancestors, ghost conversations, and old arguments that never happened. Some call it a memorial. Others call it a mirror that lies.

Every few years, someone cuts into it, hoping to harvest tech or rare alloys. They don’t return.

“You don’t look for answers at the Oak. You bring your question and hope it doesn’t follow you home.”

– Hallan Dee, Dustborn skald

The Nameless Spiral

Sinkhole of memory

Near a collapsed Dustborn settlement lies a natural sinkhole filled with concentric rock ridges and winding paths. Known simply as the Nameless Spiral, the site is considered taboo by most local communities.

Those who descend describe seeing their own past, projected into the swirling dust or written into the stone. Others report seeing strangers – or themselves – walking parallel paths, just out of reach.

Whatever technology or force causes this phenomenon remains unknown. Commonwealth attempts to study the Spiral ended when the last research team came back altered, speaking in mirrored cadence and refusing to explain their data.

“The Spiral doesn’t show you what happened. It shows you what will have happened – if you don’t walk away.”

– “Spinner” Roeg, unreliable witness

Conclusion

These lands hold more than just wind and water – they remember. Every bluff, every ruin, every twisted grove speaks of past choices and buried futures. But geography alone doesn’t shape fate. In the Settled Lands, it’s the towns, families, and fractured allegiances that draw the deepest lines in the dust.

In Part II, we step into the lives built atop this landscape – into settlements that hold fast or tear themselves apart, into rivalries old as riverbeds, and into the quiet revolutions that simmer beneath the surface. Because on Perseverance, the question isn’t whether you belong to a place…

It’s what that place will demand in return.