A cultura não tem um único planeta-lar. Foi originalmente composto de várias dezenas de mundos que formaram uma aliança frouxa e, depois, próxima.
Aprendemos o nome de pelo menos um desses mundos em Excession .
For what it was worth after so much time, a drone team had visited the preserved battle site itself and conducted their own deep-scan of the ground. The fact that Xlephier Prime was one of the twenty or so planets that could fairly claim to have been one of the home worlds of the Culture - not that it really admitted to having such things - made the task easier.
Em Estado da Arte , aprendemos que a Terra existe no verso da Cultura, mas não foi contatada até os anos 70
At five minutes and three seconds past three AM, GMT, on the morning of January the second, 1978, the General Contact Unit Arbitrary broke orbit above the planet Earth. It left behind an octet of Main Observation Satellites - six of them in near-GS orbits - a scattering of drones and minor missiles, and a small plantation of young oaks on a bluff near Elk Creek, California.
Em excesso, (tomando a data do estado da arte), aprendemos que a cultura tem estado "em jogo" dentro da Via Láctea desde pelo menos 2000BC.
Dreve would be an ideal system to do this in; it had been a Culture system for four thousand years, comprising nine more or less wilderness worlds and three Orbitals - hoops, giant bracelets of living-space only a few thousand kilometres across but ten million kilometres in diameter
E de A Sonata de Hidrogênio que existe como entidade há mais de dez mil anos.
The Gzilt were a sort of cousin species/civilisation to the Culture. Nearly founders, though not quite, they had been influential in the setting up and design of the Culture almost ten thousand years earlier, when a disparate group of humanoid species at roughly the same stage of technological and societal development had been thinking about banding together.