Andesite (Earth-1010)

Andesite is the home planet of the Basalt and the extinct Bysaltine in Earth-1010.

Description
Presently, Andesite is a planet of three faces:
 * The lush poles, where the ground has cooled enough to allow dense forests to take root.
 * The vast oceans, miles deep with primitive, but flourishing, life
 * The arid equator, plagued by constant earthquakes, extremely regular volcanic activity, and wide deserts.

Society
The Basalt are capable of surviving on all continents of their planet, even possessing cities far beneath the ocean waves. But they are most at home in the desert, where they first evolved and have now turned the land into high-yield farms.

History
540,000,000 Earth years ago, the planet was dominated by the ancestral race of the present Basalt, the Bysaltine. Although many races diverged from the Bysaltine, the Basalt are their only extant descendent.

Andesite is one of a few planets to possess mega-seasons. Mega-seasons are unrelated to the position of the planet in its orbit around the Desite star, but are instead massive regular shifts in the planets climate that can take place over periods of between hundreds of thousands to millions of years. Earth is an example of a planet with mega-seasons, but we usually call them Ice Ages.

The mega-seasons of Andesite are far harsher than anywhere else in the galaxy. Taking place over periods of roughly 200 million years, the oceans of Andesite regularly drain in their entirety into the porous ground creating vast, barely habitable deserts across the entire planet- interlaced with occasional islands of harsh volcanic wasteland with molten rivers and poisonous air. Over the course of the season the water in the ground will gradually filter back up through the ground, and evaporate in the unbearable heat. The clouds are then kept in a gaseous state by the constant, harsh sunlight and fall back to the ground in the night to form lakes, seas, and oceans that evaporate by day. Eventually so much water sits in the atmosphere and on the ground that the suns heat is no longer enough to evaporate it, especially in the colder north and south poles, and so starts the lush seasons.

It was during one of these harsh seasons that the Bysaltine died out, and from them rose ancestral species that bridge the gap between them and the Basalt. The technological advancements of the Basalt over their ancestors, including reaching out for aide from the galactic community, has helped them survive the change into the new lush season.

Sapient Species

 * Bysaltine
 * Lomonus (formerly)
 * Lomonus' crewmates (formerly)
 * Basalt