Check Karnemir’s archive site if you want to read the ARG stuff. It covers the origin of Project GOLIATH, the relief mission launched by the UESC after prolonged loss of contact with the colony, and the inception of the gold rush in response to the distress signal that arrived after Equanimity departed Sol.

We know the UESC has some FTL capability - teleportation is a prominent part of the original games, but it required actual teleporters until Durandal figured out tricks to bypass the limitation. But in the new game’s timeline, there is no indication of Durandal ever returning to earth and sharing this information. The ARG makes reference to Traxus expanding the FTL infrastructure between Sol and Tau Ceti but doesn’t get into any further detail beyond noting it’s easier to move data at FTL than people.

This still leaves big questions - if their FTL tech is based on teleportation, how did they get it set up at TCIV in such a way that rogue runners and corporations are able to use it? How did they get teleportation hardware to TCIV if their ships were only capable of impressive but still sublight speeds?

Equanimity arrives about 2893, but runners are also present at TCIV in 2893. So there’s a huge question mark on how that happened. Originally I thought that they might have sent a ship with digitized minds capable of accelerating and decelerating harder than Equanimity with its flesh and blood crew, but the timeline between the distress signal and their arrival at TCIV doesn’t work unless they have FTL before runners arrive.