A calamity happened to this world, and everything whatsoever became potion ingredients.
In this world, the amount of magical energy is so high that people naturally polymorph, eventually becoming animal statues. Without magical tools to work with this (because of them all becoming potion ingredients), civilization collapsed.
Obviously the name is subject to change as the story/lore deepens.
The personal realm is protected from the effects here, which is why farming and automation works and the ship exists.
Three magical Pylons surround it, which preserve the magic within.
The group that lived here were able to build the Ship and with some potions it will fly again. They also had a lot of anti-polymorph magic stores for their project, but that's run dry.
One person in that group remains -- she was able to create you somehow -- you're linked to the Ship (you might even be a corporeal version of the ship) so only you can avoid polymorph effects as you wander the world.
The team sent out other people to collect potion ingredients but they all polymorphed before they could return. You can maybe find them and collect their potion ingredients.
The Calamity came about from the civilization's attempt at making anti-polymorph potion ingredients on a large scale -- the ingredients were otherwise difficult to source and couldn't be farmed effectively because any substrate they were out in would anti-polymorph to something else.
The idea had something to do with tapping into the underlying magical properties of everything in the world and getting it to lean towards anti-polymorph effects. This would make ingredients and magic close to that effect lean towards it more, so it could be sourced more easily.
Some kind of runaway aleph magic would apply this to the dimension as a whole.
In any case, what instead happened was that everything shifted towards being a potion ingredient and because it was runaway, this eventually happened 100%.
Anti-polymorph ingredients were easier to source for a while (though the civilization had largely collapsed from a lack of usable magic otherwise). However this particular type of magic effect was highly unstable and eventually collapsed entirely.
The overall game goal is crafting one of each potion type. The reasoning here is that the Ship needs sources of magical power to be able to perform its function. Personal magic (like longevity and ironically polymorph) will revive the crew when the chimera rises high enough, while resistance magic will shield the ship and other effects will give it power -- I guess the list of effects needs to change a lot to fit in better with the Lore.
The purpose of the Ship is to move it and the crew to another dimension entirely to ask the people there for aid -- the particular dimension there is on the cadaceal thread for magic and is kind of a hub for it.
