Xo II is the breadbasket of the Xo system. Blessed with a gentle climate, abundant water, and an industrious local government, the people of Xo II are hard-working, cheerful, and mostly content with their role as the growers and harvesters for their sister planets. Like all the planets in the system, Xo rotates on a magnetic east-west axis, meaning the large polar ice caps are located in the east and west of the planet, rather than north-south.
The people of this world live in mining and farming communes, with vast grain fields interspersed with large food processing and mineral extraction facilities that effectively gird the entire planet, with the exception of small areas where native flora and fauna have been preserved to provide recreation and vacation opportunities for the populace. In recent times, the planetary government has rehabilitated a number of old mining areas and replanted them in an effort to provide more recreational zones for a growing population. In areas where there were originally deserts, the local government has established cities with complex irrigation systems, both to supply the needs of the population as well as the huge grain fields. Resident agriculturists have even developed their own breed of dwarf nerf, which requires only a quarter of the feed of the ubiquitous species while yielding a third of the edible meat.
This agriculture industry even extends to the planet’s oceans, where large floating cities hover above huge areas of aquaculture. Netted enclosures extend dozens of meters below the surface and stretch for kilometres in every direction. The aquaculture industry produces over three hundred million tonnes of fish and seafood annually, though this is limited to approximately twenty breeds of commercially viable fish and thirty types of molluscs and crustaceans. While this industry has devastated the local indigenous sea life, there are some exceptions that have learned to thrive in an effectively artificial environment. Notable among these are several species of cephalopods, which have developed unusual levels of intelligence to escape the various anti-predator measures used by aquaculturists. The largest of these species can pose a threat to small submersibles, but can also hide in surprisingly tiny crevices in the rock of the sea floor.