mido9

Basically, you are a new astronaut from timber hearth's outer wilds exploration division who just graduated and got the launch codes for his new ship and is tasked with finding out about the old civilization called the Nomai. On your way out, though, you get zapped by some statue from the ancient civilization that nobody's ever seen zap anyone so far, very unusual. After this you find out one unusual thing: You can't die. Every time you die, you get time warped to just a second after you graduate and have the launch codes. So you explore the world to find out why this keeps happening. Also, every 20 minutes each timeloop the sun explodes, and according to the scientists, it's not due to explode for millenia, so you explore to find out what's happening.

As you explore, you find more and more stuff about the Nomai's technology.

The Nomai came here because they heard a signal from something called the "eye of the universe", which supposedly predates all universes they know, and because their home solar system had a supernova. They started setting up to explore the solar system and find out the best way to find the eye of the universe.

They find a discovery in that black holes teleport to corresponding white holes, but also that all their timers and estimates show that things that go into a black hole end up coming out of a white hole BEFORE they entered the black hole, as if it went back in time for a second, then the one further in time got erased. The more energy used, the further in time things can go. Using this, they devise a big plan to study things and find the eye of the universe quickly.

They create a probe launching platform to try to find the eye of the universe, but there's no way to get enough power to launch it fast, unless... they were to create a supernova and transfer it back in time along with themselves, so they don't get fried in the nova. There's also only enough supernova insulation for the probe launch platform, so they can't use black holes to go back. So that's what they do, they create memory statues to send their memories back in time and one last thing... the sun station which fires nukes to cause the supernova. So after you get this revelation, you have a final goal, to stop the sun station, break the memory statues, and end the timelooping.

Except... and here's the kicker:

The sun station doesn't work. The Nomai abandoned the project at the last step, after setting up the statues, probe launcher, everything, the sun station didn't have the firepower to cause the sun to explode. and all this was set up hundreds of thousands of years ago and this series of events just automatically went into play because of a natural supernova, not planned for this time, and the supernova in the Nomai star system was not a recent unnatural occurence happening across the world, it's just delay because the Nomai travelled much faster than light. The Nomai all left to explore a comet at the edge of the star system instead of continuing the sun station and all died in a brutal accident in the comet. The sun is exploding because the sun just reached its natural conclusion. So the only thing left to do is to turn off the timeloop, gather all the earth citizens to the eye of the universe, use its power to create a new universe, and set up one last camp for a day before the supernova wipes the world out, in a "life goes on" melancholy ending. Thousands of years later, it's shown there's a new species of spacefarers ready to explore the world.