u/Zealousideal-Lab6728

The player knows a lot of things unavailable to the characters and can control their mind, making them do things impossible to normal humans, like standing still in a 500-degree-hot room. We also research things at abnormal rate, going from neolith to space age in the span of just a few years, as well as recruit prisoners in mere days after capturing.

This all made me think that the player is an Archotech - not a fully formed one with godlike power, but one in the process of self-improvement, capable only of limited mind control. At the same time, the storytellers are other, fully formed Archotechs, whose goal is to act as parents or teachers, leading us through this development process by making us gather experience, primarily about the working of human mind. Two of the game endings - Archonexus and Anomaly - result in >!us making contact with a mature Archotech!< and this might be the storytellers' another attempt to speed up our development. In Archonexus >!this attempt even succeeds!< as far as we can tell.

This theory was inspired by the Save Our Ship 2 mod, which, despite not being canon, has one interesting mechanic - after reaching a certain technology level the player can >!start developing an Archotech spore, which is capable of affecting human minds in certain ways and eventually grows into a mature Archotech, leading to a game ending.!<

The Sun is a compact source of near unlimited energy. Antimatter annihilation is the most efficient energy production method possible - 1 kg of antimatter can be turned into 9e16 J of energy. This also explains why breaking the Sun destroys the world - all stored energy getting released at once can't be handled by the simulation and causes it to crash (or alternatively it causes an explosion that destroys everything)

It's absurdly rich with resources (especially thorium), has lots of open space, is located near the NPC, has only high level of threat and is almost trivial to capture compared to most other enemy bases. This is a perfect place for a megabase or an exporting outpost with almost no downsides, especially if you don't play with enemy bases attacking your sectors