SC2020 - The Mothership

Most settlers arrived on Standard Galactic Eternal Transport Ships (S-GETS), these ships are designed to house and maintain as many people as possible on as little space as possible. Due to their capacity to harvest He3 from the atmosphere of gas giants, they can replenish their fuel and power source. All water and oxygen is recycled and food is grown on board. However, that is about what they can do. GETS are meant to take people from one inhabited world to the next, they are not meant to help make that world habitable. For that you need a mothership. Motherships have room for very little crew compared to transport ships, but they come fully equipped with everything one might need for terraforming:

• Bacterial cultures that can be altered to live of whatever is available in the native soil and through a food chain end up producing nitrogen, oxygen, and CO2, for a breathable atmosphere.
• Plants that are ready to take this to the next step.

A mothership can either land or it can docs to a planet. Once a mothership docs to a planet, it is not taking of again. The idea is for the mothersip to doc and for the onboard crew to start the microbiotic transformation of the planet and set up living quarters. The mothership will send out cross star beacons with location information and progress infomation for GETS to follow, so that they may start a colonization of the planet.
There are generally two variations of the story:

Mothership fleet

One variation goes that there was a mothership amongst the fleet of the initial settlers but it was lost during the chaotic decent to Garuda.

Followed the beacon

Another variation goes that a mothership had already landed on Garuda long before the first settlers arrived, and that is the reason that Garuda is habitable. Unfortnately, the mothership was not located by the settlers, so they work was never continued, and therefore Garuda has been stuck in the early stages of terraforming. How to locate According to this version, the easiest way to locate the mothership would be to build a receiver that could pick up the communication beam. Some say that in order to do this they would either need to build it atop a tall tower or even build aircrafts or space ships, since the communication signal is sent out into space. Others say that a signal that can be seen many light years away must also make it around the world, and that it is [insert favorite conspiracy theory e.g. the Mountain Men] who refuses to build a receiver/are blocking the signal/has turned the signal off in order to stay in power.

Why locate the ship?

Not only does the mothership come with all the terraforming and colonization tools that one could dream of providing both immediate benefits, but especially long term improvements for all humans across Garuda. The mothership also has a far more powerful and adaptable Fusion Reaction Core than the S-GETS. Meaning that it would inherently become the center of the most powerful city on Garuda. Some conspiracy theories state that The Mothership is controlled by The Mountain Men.