Daybreak Continuum

The Daybreak Continuum, Daybreak universe, informally called the Daybreakverse or simply Daybreak, is a variant of the Halo fictional universe. A semi-alternate universe created by and, the Daybreak Continuum is based fundamentally on Halo media released between 2001 and 2009. Most fiction released during 343 Industries' tenure is ignored in favor of an original take on both the post-Human-Covenant War era and parts of the Halo universe overall. This split was required in order to adequately fulfill our creative vision of building on Halo's legacy while taking the universe forward in substantial ways. One of these is Daybreak's systematic approach to worldbuilding, with the intent of presenting a setting with a deep history and definite limitations that shape the cultures inhabiting it, whether it be astrography, history, or slipspace travel times and communication delays. In imposing these limitations, we hope to create the potential of deep, meaningful stories to be told.

For a detailed breakdown of what is regarded canon in the Daybreak continuity, see the Canon Policy. For more information on Project Daybreak's goals and divergences from the mainline canon, see the Daybreak Reference Manual.

The Continuum covers the entire Halo timeline and beyond, though its narrative focus is primarily pointed forward, in the post-Covenant War decades and centuries. Daybreak's post-war galaxy is one rife with conflict, intrigue and opportunity, with a beaten and battered UNSC slowly rebuilding their strength, while the broken Covenant coalesces into an expansive panoply of successor states, each with their own backgrounds, goals and motivations. As the Continuum develops, it will chronicle the development of the Halo setting centuries into the future, advancing throughout the epochs as a form of future history.

Goals; or what we seek to accomplish

 * A smooth continuity into the post-war era coming from Halo 3 and Ghosts of Onyx. We're not Bungie/Microsoft Game Studios Franchise Development Group purists, and we seek to add complexity and nuance to Halo's preexisting world where needed. We are also not trying to be Bungie or Eric Nylund, because we can't be, but we are trying to follow up on their style, themes, tone and narrative in an organic way. If Halo was Combat Evolved, we seek to make Halo Reformed — something that embraces and complements the core universe.​
 * Set limits and rules for ourselves and abide by them. Work within the established rules rather than around them.​
 * Try not to go for the easiest or most obvious interpretation; reinterpret well-established elements of Halo if required even if it means more work. We can and will "retcon" some things we feel deserve be retconned or reinterpreted, but only as an informed decision and only if it makes the universe overall richer. Even then, overt retcons are the exception rather than the rule, and always apply to details like numbers or moving dates around and not character personalities, motivations or big narrative beats. Rather than "deconstructing" Halo, we are in many ways "reconstructing" it.​
 * Verisimilitude is not always about reproducing reality 1:1. Many details in Halo's depiction of technology, physics, military doctrine and hardware do not match our real-life standards of realism. Some of these seemingly-unrealistic details are simply an integral part of the universe, and we try to make sense out of them as best we can by providing in-universe context. However, we do sometimes tweak details that are particularly off or have damaging implications on the rest of the setting (e.g. by breaking travel times, or inadvertently making in-universe actors appear incompetent). In general, basic physics should work the way they do in our world, and any exceptions to this (e.g. slipspace) should be clearly defined in what they can and cannot do. But much of this works on intuition and on a case-by-case basis. Ultimately, internal consistency should be the supreme criterion for deciding what works.
 * A future history approach: the Daybreak Continuum is about how Halo's universe develops over time and how the people inhabiting it adjust to that development in any given era. It's not about the ascendancy (or lack thereof) of any particular faction, species or polity, and it's not about siding with or against anyone. Our goal is nothing less than to depict history in all its intricacies and nuances.​
 * Apply standards and rules equally to all civilizations and species. For example, if the UNSC cannot maintain cultural and political cohesion within its domain, then other civilizations (e.g. the Covenant) are going to struggle with similar issues. This also means not pigeonholing species into narrow archetypes, good/evil categories, or homogenized species-wide political affiliations. Non-humans are characters too, and have independent agency for both good and ill. Mostly, individuals are just flawed.​
 * Refrain from excess; just because we can doesn't mean we should. Try to have everything just the right amount. So we're not introducing dozens of extra Spartans, super-powerful UNSC or Covenant ships and other tech, or MJOLNIR armor sets just because we technically could do it. We play with the sandbox we have as much as we can, and only extend it with game-changers when that becomes narratively relevant. Additions should arise naturally from how the universe has developed previously and leave a lasting impact, not out of nowhere and then back into nothing.​
 * Worldbuilding that's deep and not just wide; go below the surface; play with concepts and ideas that underpin the behavior of cultures, religions and individuals filling the universe with one shallow culture after another that will never be revisited again. We try to give depth and meaning to the elements we have instead of blowing the canvas wide open right away. This is also why we've cut down the post-2009 Spartan numbers and limited the number of Forerunner installations in the post-war era, for example.​
 * A dynamic setting where the status quo and conflicts change over time; we try to consider implications and the consequences of actions, both short- and long-term.​
 * A setting that's complex, even dark, but not morally nihilistic. Individuals can make a difference with their actions and make the overarching setting brighter bit by bit.​
 * A sense of scale in both space and time; galactic distances matter, and the timescales involved with the planning are grand and space-operatic. Daybreak is not about what happens in the next five, ten or even twenty years, but we lay our plans for centuries, even millennia to come. So something that happens within 30 years of the Human-Covenant War is really just part of a much longer continuum of galactic history.​

Basic rundown of the Daybreak Continuum
The Universe is Full of Cold, Hard Facts: The UNSC is a small fish in a very large pond. The Covenant is vast and ancient, and with the end of the Human-Covenant War, the UNSC will begin to find out just how vast. Yet the galaxy as a whole is a lot bigger than the Covenant, and galactic time is deep and full of mysteries. A sense of wonder and vastness pervades the Daybreak Continuum throughout.​

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty: The Forerunners are firmly in the past, and only ruins of their greatness remain. The Mantle is nobody's to claim, and not relevant to anyone except people long dead or departed. Mankind did not become the Forerunners' inheritors as part of a grand plan, but by happenstance; for we are Forerunner by blood. The Forerunners' greatest mystery was always that of their origins, and when the Librarian came across Earth in those desperate last days of the Diluvial War, she found her kind's lost Eden; where her distant ancestors had once been spirited away by a starfaring culture even older than recorded Forerunner history. This was not unique, and humanity has come to know that galactic history is full of oddities like clearly related species and entire ecosystems being found on worlds light-years apart.​

The Path is Broad: Some of the Covenant timeline has been reinterpreted from that established in the Halo Encyclopedia, though the main beats are the same. The Unggoy were formally assimilated to the Covenant in 214 CE after a few centuries of irregular contact, and so have been part of the empire for over two millennia. The Jiralhanae have been starfaring for over a millennium, no thanks to themselves but an external species, the Gryunjalla, who once used them as labor. Though the Jiralhanae have had contact with Covenant march-worlds for most of that time, they were only incorporated to the hegemony in 2491. During their long diaspora, the Jiralhanae scattered far and wide, and many local societies diverged culturally from their old roots on Doisac. Both of these adjustments were made to better reflect those species' portrayal and roles in the Covenant; Grunts because of their ubiquity and key role in the Covenant pecking order, Brutes because their feud with the Elites was once described as "ancient", and because had they been planet-bound until half a century ago, there's little hope they could credibly rival let alone replace the Sangheili.​

So Full of Hate Were Our Eyes: High Charity has fallen and the Writ of Union split asunder, but across what was once the Covenant's Holy Ecumene, the Great Schism has only begun. Across thousands of light-years and hundreds of systems, the battle rages between the Loyalists and the Schismatics, for the future of the Covenant civilization. The wanton carnage of the Human-Covenant War drove a wedge between the Elites and the Prophets, for however he spun it, Truth's preaching was in contradiction to some of the basic tenets of the Covenant faith. Many Elites' persistent questioning of the genocide not only contributed to Truth's decision to cast their species aside, but also enabled the Sangheili-human alliance to last beyond the first days. Beyond the Schismatics and the Loyalists, species affiliations were more complex than might readily appear. The Sangheili were cast out, and so they fought the Jiralhanae, and they did so fiercely for over ten years before the large-scale fighting abates in the mid-2560s. San'Shyuum loyalties were splintered between those who aligned with Truth and those who sided with the Sangheili. Yet not even all Brutes were friends to Tartarus. The lower-ranked species just tried to survive amidst the chaos, and some even thrived.​

Things Look Different Now: The Sangheili of the Schismatic faction, under the Singular Bond pact and the leadership of the Arbiter Thel 'Vadam and Rtas 'Vadum, enter the Treaty of Arusha with the UNSC in March 2553. The Schismatics under the Arbiter go on to reconcile with the Strewn Shore, a surviving segment of High Charity's leadership not aligned with Truth, forming the Concord of Reconciliation — the largest ex-Covenant polity friendly to humanity — in 2554. But being friendly to humanity or having a healthy respect for the species does not always mean being friendly to the UNSC. And even as many ex-Covenant seek to atone for the crimes they committed in the war, others see it as folly to allow humanity to remain independent, especially with the strategic Forerunner Ark portal on their homeworld. This and many other disagreements lead to a Sangheili civil war of sorts decades later, in the 2570s-80s, which will come to decide the new status quo of the Orion Arm. There is also a Jul 'Mdama, but one should not get too caught up in thinking of Daybreak Jul as 343i Jul. But suffice it to say, he has his role to play, and it's a big one.​

Were It So Easy: Post-war UNSC is not completely toothless, but they're also not in the clear, and they're going to need all the help they can get. The UNSC's recovery period lasts over three decades, rather than 343i canon's four years, and even in that time they never become a "giant". The Phoenix Initiative, an interim oversight body, is formed to handle the reconstruction of the colonies while the UEG slowly picks its pieces. Some colonies go their own way at this stage, beginning the slow diversification of human polities - the start of a long scattering that will root humanity into the Orion Arm's meta-civilization, and make it impossible for the species to be ever hunted down again. The UNSC has no Infinity, Spartan-IVs or GEN2 armor, but it will eventually have Stridents, Autumns, lightly-augmented ODSTs called Hoplites and a SPARTAN-III Delta Company with a cut-down personnel pool. Cybernetics, power armor, bio-augmentation and various other new technologies pioneered during the war will start becoming increasingly common starting in the 2560s. A handful of UNSC ships have pilfered Covenant Borers, and starting in 2555, some UNSC ships also begin to have slightly faster native slipspace drives - though faster is not instant, and star travel still takes time, with the next major UNSC drive innovation happening in the 2570s.​

Two Sticks and a Rock: We try to do more with less, so a lot of post-war plotlines are omitted or shifted further down the timeline. We don't return to the Ark until decades later, and Onyx will keep most of its secrets for perhaps centuries to come; yet some of the survivors manage to escape the Dyson sphere and return to the UNSC in the post-war years. The only Halo rings found as of 2600 are Installations 04 and 05, because it turns out that the Forerunners made the Halos very hard to find. Guilty Spark is very much dead, and the Didact has long departed on his Great Journey. As of 2620, the Master Chief and Cortana are not back, and it'll be a while before we see them again. There is no AI takeover either, and the Domain no longer touches any part of this universe; yet "smart" AIs and their agency continues to be a running thread as we move along the timeline. For now, post-war politics, the Great Schism and the UNSC's reconstruction are Daybreak's bread and butter. When more Halos are found, or when the Ark is accessed again, it'll be a big deal. Indeed, such discoveries will punctuate the long-term future history of the Daybreak Continuum.​

Development
The project is planned to be developed in phases, with each development phase in the real world corresponding roughly to a given in-universe historical epoch.

Fiction set in the Daybreak Continuum
Works of fiction set in the Daybreak universe so far, organized by their respective authors:


 * Not All Who Wander
 * Through the Bush, Nothing But Jackal
 * Conversations From The Universe: The Turning Points
 * Parhelia: Side Jobs
 * How The Upper Third Lives
 * If Mothers Should Bury Their Sons
 * If Mothers Should Bury Their Sons


 * Itter Rock
 * Other Homeworld Theory
 * Other Homeworld Theory


 * f1onagher
 * Wake Up and Smell the Xenos
 * The More Things Change...
 * Lonely Penitence
 * Through a Demon's Eyes


 * Halo: Ten Hours
 * Halo: Ten Hours

Resources

 * Daybreak Reference Manual
 * Visual Style Guide
 * Canon Policy
 * Cartography
 * Timeline
 * Spacebattles.com forum thread