Standard Template Construct

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

-Pablo Picasso

A long long time ago, the EMPRAH declared that humanity had to spread across the stars. He foresaw that humanity would need the resources of a galaxy to withstand the trials of the future: mad gods created by overindulgent jackholes, gun-toting walking foot-fungus infections, and emo robots with plasma gauss weapons.

"But your eminence," asked some foolish minister, "only a fraction of 1% of our population has the skills and knowledge to survive outside our urban hives, never mind on worlds that haven't been terraformed yet!"

"Don't worry; I have a plan. For the past century I've been seeding book publishers with the idea of writing self-help books with names like '... For Dummies' and 'An Idiot's Guide to ...', and I invested in a manufacturing company in the Ikea Norse Hive when it was called 'Sweden'. Centuries later these and many other ideas will bear fruit in a push-button, turnkey, E-Z Bake oven colony procedure tool I will call "THE STANDARD TEMPLATE CONSTRUCT" and it will enable the most humble among us to reap the benefit of the stars!"

"... E-Z Bake oven, your highness?"

"Ah, an idea before your time. Actually not one of mine; clever little thing. I liked the frosting that came with the cake mixes."

Every colony-ship of humanity carried an STC with them, with easy-to-comprehend blueprints and instructions for everything that a colony would need, from how to use local resources to harvest food or irrigate deserts, to the architecture required to build mile-high hive arcologies or tap a planet's core for the magma pumps needed on forgeworlds. This also had the intended effect of making sure that manufactured goods were compatible between colonies across the Imperium of Man, and that the cultures would stay (relatively) the same and no colony would become so different as to seem as aliens to other humans. This is the reason why everyone across the Imperium speaks the same language, among other similarities between disparate colonies.

However, the STCs were created millennia ago. And there was a Dark Age between then and now. And some smartass decided to 'port the STCs to Android to make sure it would be "more compatible with the smaller devices colony ships will be carrying." As a result, no fully intact STCs are known to have survived to the modern era. All that's left are the short passages that have been copied religiously from generation to generation in each colony, but only what that particular colony needs... if it hasn't been corrupted by thousands of years of transcription (kinda like jpeg corruption amirite). Discovery of a new outpost of humanity is a prestigious discovery, as there's a chance that there may be parts of their STC that were preserved better than others, or even whole pages that are unseen elsewhere. Hoping beyond hope of course, there is still the possibility that an entire working, uncorrupted STC machine exists, probably on one of the worlds in the Halo Zone.

The STCs are a very important thing for the tech-priests of Mars, because they are a bunch of nutters who for the past ten thousand years have done next to nothing to promote technological progress because they think their machines are alive and that modifying and developing them will hurt their precious feelings any tech more complex than a flintlock can and will be taken over by a zombie robot dragon living in Mars if used without protection. Finding an STC is thus the only possibility the Imperium has for restoring humanity to pre-technutter levels. If it manages that, it could surely wipe out all its enemies. Of course, the Mechanicus has a few good reasons for avoiding experimentation. There's more than a few planets that are now uninhabitable, or just plain gone after a magos decided to do some experimentation. See the contagion of Ganymede.

But of course, this being W40k, where status quo is god, this will never happen.