More world-building/lore stuff...

Forever ago, I adopted a strange centaur-like canine creature design, which went on to be Birger... but his design has always been quite out-of-place in my universe. I've thought of various reasons for that over the years, ranging from his race being extremely reclusive creatures native to the snowy mountains, to him being some sort of supernatural entity or cryptid, but knowing how I roll nowadays... I decided to make him an alien. This, however, requires him to have a homeworld for his species to come from.

For this one, I decided to design a second creature of the same race as Birger, a resident of the homeworld I may develop sometime in the future.

Ventranna is a cold, rocky, icy and mountainous planet, only relatively recently discovered and contacted by the Lightbearer Dominion. What passes for "plant life" on Ventranna are mostly mosses, lichen, and fungi, and only the planet's tropical regions experience significant thawing and snow melt at all--the temperate regions exist in a state of near-perpetual winter, while the polar regions are frozen solid and are too cold to sustain any form of life at all.
As a result, they don't really have access to wood, but they can layer and press some of the lichen or moss into something akin to plywood, and make use of robust fungal stalks in place of sticks and logs, and they derive the fiber they use to make clothing from the mosses as well. Their ability to contact/be contacted by offworld civilizations is extremely limited both due to their primitive technological level and the fact that much of the planet is subjected to strong snowstorms that hinder most transmissions and visual observation from outer space. The planet does have vast reserves of mineral wealth hidden beneath the ice and snow, however, and could make the Ventrannans a major player in the interstellar resource trade.

The Ventrannans number around 500,000 in total, and are not particularly advanced technologically, with their culture resembling 18th-century Europe in regards to technology and science. However, they are a friendly and curious race, with offworlders describing them as "a race with warm hearts from a very cold planet". Their race produces excellent craftsmen, scouts, and explorers, and they are adept at operating in rugged terrain and severe weather conditions, and the various fungi of their world are useful for creating a variety of medicines that could be of benefit to the galaxy as a whole.