My understanding of the vault [SPOILERS!]

[dwarfaxe]

First I need to point out some translated lines from the "thick book":

people of nebula grew from seeds
robots are gardeners with sharp eyes
the robots are your friends
the vault will save us
great path begins where waters join
the seventh god drinks from the waters of nebula
people escaped? from seventh god
but the seventh god waits outside
the beginning was the vault
but ship came down in fire
the heart of the ship was broken
they wait as gods bring the heart together
the seventh god will bring the heart together
when heart is full we will sail end of our journey
to our new home
but until the heart is full we wait
we sail the rivers of the broken heart
we make our homes on the moons of the nebula
we wait and we listen for seventh god's voice
when the seventh god speaks we must listen
when the heart is full we must sail for our new home
we must wait and we must listen and we must hope

At the end of the game, one thing the robot tells you is that the ship vaulted to that location but "intersected" on arrival. The resulting detonation wound up "creating the nebula".

In other words, Heaven's Vault is a human seedship. It was supposed to either land on or orbit around a planet at this location, but a targeting error caused it to either impact the planet directly or appear inside it (probably the latter). The entire planet was pulverized, and the many "moons" and rocks we see while sailing are bits of the planet that was blasted into pieces.

The ship has been attempting ever since to repair itself and restore its energy core so it can jump again, to a new viable planet in another star system. It couldn't do this only with robotic assistance, so it terraformed the new asteroid field that it created as well as it could, created some humans, plants, and animals from some of the "seeds" it had aboard, and set them to work. On the final moon you encounter a pictogram that your robot has to interpret and one of the parts that comes to light is how the seventh god always demanded "tribute", i.e. resources needed to repair its systems. Presumably, humans gathered the raw resources for the vault and robotic labor created any necessary high-tech parts that the ship required. After a few hundred years of this, all the ship needed to gather left was all the water that it had released. Presumably, it had stored vast quantities of water either for terraforming purposes or for use as fuel (fusing the hydrogen in the water), or both.

Others have speculated that the six gods represent six AI's in the ship. It's possible, however, that the AI running the ship simply created a pantheon of gods for the humans that it "grew from seeds". None of the people it created would have known anything about the ship's purpose as it was merely a seedship, so it could have decided that a good way to motivate the people was to simply teach them that "the gods commanded them". Ultimately, though, humans rebelled as the millennia slipped by and knowledge of why they were doing what they were doing was lost.

The eagle and sun motif was likely the original logo for the ship and its mission: a seedship named Eagle was to journey to a viable planet to continue Earth life. At one point we are told the legend of the Old Sea about an island consumed by a flood: perhaps a myth told to the first humans by robots as an allusion to why they were there in the first place. Perhaps Earth (or a later descendant of Earth) was dying for some reason and necessity required sending the seedship on its journey. The sun could represent a destination system or could represent the black hole used to transport the ship over vast distances. One piece of text we translate at the final moon: "the eagle will open its wings again and fly us through the eye of the dark sun across the old sea". Later, the ship itself talks about a viable singularity for refraction being available. Perhaps it used a black hole as a hopper, with its ability to gravitationally lense to such a huge extent as the only lens able to transport something as gargantuan as the Heaven's Vault.

[zaphodikus]

Now that, is so totally deep as to be a vault of it's own.
I never managed to acquire the thick book, been contemplating a second play-through in the hope that it was possible to do so. It's so puzzling that very few have tried to interpret the story, less even, have laid eyes on it.

[NS Plover]

@dwarfaxe I've played this game more than I want to admit - lets just say over 8... Your translations look very much like what I was getting - I wonder with the seedship concept - if all it's seeds (ie humans) had left and it needed a new source of DNA to proceed...

@zaphodikus You really need to play this game more than once to appreciate it Edited to add - the book is not that hard to find - I think many people have found it - there are posts here about translations...

[zaphodikus]

Yeah, I'm not that good at languages and structure, and mostly was playing this game when I'm a bit tired and I found it very relaxing to just muddle through the puzzles without any real penalty. I was more interested in the social structure that emerges and how some moons take it upon themselves to control the resources, knowledge and narrative.

So the idea of game developers going and having a language created purely for entertainment alone is fascinating me. This is a brilliant interactive story, and a huge pity more people have not discovered it. On my second playthough, my reading of the story has already changed significantly.

[Liliel]

Good post, I agree with most of your theories here. The "people grew from seeds" I interpret as referring directly to cloning technology, and I think there's several things in the game that support this.
The big one is how genetic defects have started cropping up in the populations (people on Maersi have become incapable of having children; on Elboreth the populace is plagued by the genetic deformity "Shearlung", where the lungs are crushed against eachother). Notably, this has become a problem in recent times, which I believe is related to "robots are gardeners with sharp eyes". In old times, robots would've kept a watch on genetic diversity in the population and would've been able to detect genetic defects.

One thing I disagree with you on, is the gods. I do believe they're AI from the ship. I only think that the humanoid forms they have (in statues) are something the humans invented. I think each corresponds to a subsystem in the ship's operating system, for example the Buried/Vault God would be a subsystem in charge of navigation.
I think as the ship crashed, parts of it were fused with the surrounding matter, and that's how the "Gods" were scattered around the nebula as well. The 7th god I believe is the ship's central AI, that the overseer would interact with, that looks like an eagle. Its core I think is contained in the Elboreth citadel (Aliya tells Six that the stories say the citadel houses an Eagle, and once it is freed the nebula will be destroyed)
The mystery here is the extra god, The god of all the nebula, the only one with feet. I think this was a human, most likely the Overseer of the ship, who led the others in the project to sail the nebula and recover the missing components of the ship.

[SF]

just finished the game for the first time (but I was either thorough or lucky, because I did get the book and understood 90% of it.), and I didn't count, but when you enter the vault the outer ring has those "daleks" that talk to you in ancient, just like the central one, so I think those are the other gods, but I'd have to count to be sure. if there are 6 in the outer ring, I'd say that confirms it.

Some other things I noticed: The sun of the "eagle and sun" looked remarkably like the hopper jewels, or the "eyes" on top of the daleks.

The ancient wreckage outside Heaven's Vault greatly reminded me of booster rockets in shape.

The one thing I really have to mull over is the nature of the loop itself. *if* the loop is true, then perhaps we're to blame for the entire thing. perhaps our vaulting at the end of the game, (which it sounds like it's using black holes as hoppers, and time gets funny around black holes) is what caused the ship to crash in the first place and created the nebula to begin with.

[Sun_S]

Thank you for these theories, very interesting!

[Arma]

Just went through the end, there are definitely 6 in the outer ring. I also thought that the "Grow from seeds" meant some form of cloning or rapid production of people, which maybe means a vault is not the worst thing?