To a large degree in partnership with Lee armcontrolnerve! <3
The original map was for Punk As Hell, an overambitious and rambling large-cast fanfiction starring Rewind and Orion Pax. I've been updating it for the as-yet-unnamed Soundwave fanfiction I'm working on with Lee. It's a double polar projection, which is pretty handy for a world where all the oceans are equatorial and the political capitals are at the poles! Open image in new tab for 'staggeringly large.' Note that Cybertron has about the same density as Earth and is just a little bit larger with a MUCH higher percentage of land area, so most of these states are about the size of one of our continents.
All the text marks the names of cities. The basic geopolitical unit on Cybertron is the state, but cities often have more political independence than you might expect, particularly in the Neutral Territories where every city is a city-state. In some regions of the world there's a lot of unsettled land, especially those places like Stanix and Polyhex that have a lot of rough terrain. You'll also note that quite a few cities/regions have 'Ferrex' in them; that indicates that they're close to a large body of rust, the black on the map. As far as I know it's sort of like quicksand made of iron filings? Don't ask me if there's liquid in there because I don't know.
Each state (barring the Neutral Territories, which really isn't one) was founded around a hot spot; thus there are 21 hot spots on Cybertron. Each of these historically supported a large community directly around the forge and some number of satellite communities as the population grew larger, until they started running into other cultural groups and fighting over energy resources. This, give or take a few hundred millennia of on-and-off wars, is where the borders got drawn. Straight borders here generally represent 'artificial' divisions, and wiggly ones represent 'natural' divisions like rivers, mountains, et c.
Relevant to the geopolitics part is the fact that Cybertronians only live about 5000-7000 years; during periods of war, new forgings at hot spots (which are of course controlled by the will of Primus) don't quite keep up with deaths, and the population starts to shrink. During periods of peace, such as when the planet was more or less united under a single Prime Regnant, the population slowly grows. Leave peace long enough, and the energy resources on the planet start to look a little thin; this is how you get the Age of Colonization, when hundreds of colony ships were sent out to distant worlds to gather energy there.
History is measured in Primal reigns, which gets EXTREMELY MESSY when multiple people claim to be Prime Regnant at once! It's broadly divided into ages but that's not exact. So you might say something was "during the Age of Colonization, Galvanus 722" indicating that it happened during the 722nd year of Galvanus Prime's reign (and other historians might argue that year was still part of the Bright Age). During the Modern Age--anything after Nova Prime's reign--it's even more complicated because two adjacent regions might have been ruled by the same empire ten millennia ago but different empires fifteen millennia ago, and you are OF COURSE required to acknowledge your local warlord as The True Prime. We mostly get around this by using a single official historical timescale chosen by your warlord; so although Tyrest was actively at war with the forces of Legion Prime and did not acknowledge her, they'll still refer to events in the year Legion 1300 because that's what they're doing in Kaon these days.
What's the deal with Nova Prime? They were the last definitively confirmed holder of the Matrix of Leadership, and the last Prime Regnant to rule the entire planet. They were assassinated and the Matrix disappeared. Just a few years later someone claimed to have found it, and was gearing up to unite Cybertron, when surprise! Someone ELSE found the true Matrix too! Since then lots of empires have tried and failed to reunite the planet. Currently we have the Decepticon Empire in the south, ruled by Centuro Prime, and the Autobot Empire in the north, ruled by Sentinel Prime. The previous empires were more divided east-west. The fact that each successive empire ruling any given region includes a different set of linguistic influences makes the language situation on Cybertron REAL interesting.
The official "trade language" of Cybertron is Neocybex, but there are quite a few distinct dialects of it. Broadly, there are Northern, Southern, and Equatorial Neocybex, which are actually spoken by people alongside other local languages--in the Modern Age imperial projects tend to use one version or another as their administrative language, because it has a history of being official and is associated with a religious stamp of approval.
This is because it's descended from Old Cronian, the (ancestor of the) majority language of Nova Cronum. This equatorial state is where the Vector Sigma interface is located, so it has a unique position of religious authority and an association with divinity. Speakers of modern Cronian sometimes come off as olde timey, like someone speaking Latin conversationally.
Oh, did you think that was enough dialects derived from Old Cronian?? Syke! There's also International Neocybex, which is nobody's native language but is used for negotiations between polities that speak otherwise dissimilar dialects of Neocybex as their official language. They are mutually intelligible, but it resulted in enough misunderstandings that it was safer to create a diplomatic language for everyone to use. International Neocybex is also used for anything larger than a one-city news broadcast. Consequently nearly everyone on the planet understands it but maybe 0.1% of people actually speak it.
As a little sidetrack here, it's extremely easy for Cybertronians to pick up a language in listening mode; they just need to download a dictionary and syntax guide from somewhere and they'll be able to hack together meaning from context. It's essentially machine translation, except you also get prosody and body language, which helps. Speaking a language is a different story. Cybertronians learn very fast, so if you give someone a dictionary and a couple months they'll be fluent if not native-level--but between now and then they'll sound a little awkward, and may choose to speak in the local Neocybex variant if they need to not sound dumb. As of now, minority languages are mostly spoken in rural areas and smaller cities, because large urban areas are more likely to have populations from many different states and conduct all their business in Neocybex. This is not to say that there aren't communities within large cities speaking minority languages, because there definitely are! But smaller cities are more likely to be officially multilingual.
Languages generally developed around hot spots as well, which is why broadly speaking there's one language per state. There are, however, language families, which means there are geographic similarities. The languages may have originally developed in isolation, but they've had millions of years to influence each other. Here's what we know about the language families:
Northern Torus Languages (SOV)
Crono-Taganian Languages (SOV)
Tetronic Languages (VOS)
Southern Polar Languages (SOV)
Equatorial Languages (SVO)
Hel-Ib Languages (VSO)
Tyrene Languages (SVO)
Okay I know way more about religion than I do about general culture. Except for telecommunications. I know a lot about telecommunications. It's a Soundwave fic, you get me? So entertainment media consist of audio and video broadcasts, nothing fancy. One of the big 'high culture' things is opera, by which I mean gladiatorial opera. You really have to be able to sing and fight, unless it's wimpy rich people opera where nobody gets injured. I think probably films are slightly more musical and slightly more violent than your standard American oeuvre. People can do almost all their own stunts!
There's actually kind of limited communication between cities/states aside from broadcast media, though. Cybertron definitely has the technology to make cell phones real, and the military basically makes use of it, but the governments aren't so happy to make it available to every Skip, Skram, and Scrounge. If you want to talk to your friend in another city, you have to write a letter and post it electronically. There's thriving intra-city forum culture, though.
As for religion, it's fairly unified because there was such a long stretch of time when the whole planet was under a single government. For the most part if you want to be a weird tiny religion you can do it by picking a really obscure mythological figure to revere and model your culture on (or even, like the Heralds of Unicron, devote yourselves to a specific Trionic prophecy!). The Thirteen Primes--of which, over the millions of years the concept has existed, there have been about 30--have the largest number of devoted followers, although for most people devotion means very occasionally making an official offering and sometimes doing little luck rituals. More details on the Primes here.
To the extent that there's For Real Official Canonical Religion it's maintained by imperial governments and, separately, Nova Cronum. There's kind of an expectation that having Nova Cronum on your side would prove once and for all that you're the true Prime, which means that it's a tasty target for conquest... or it would be if it didn't use all that old money to maintain extremely scary defenses and a standing army. Anyway, Nova Cronum maintains things like the Trionic Archive, a collection of all the prophecies ever recorded by the Oracle of Vector Sigma; the Solar Armory, a collection of weapons and relics purported to have divine power; and the Book of Primus, which seems to automatically record every spark that comes into being.
I haven't done that much thinking about how forging works, aside from the fact that there are hotspots and the spark shapes the protometal... There are also usually mineral supplements required, maybe because the hot spots have been going for so long in one place that the ground is nutritionally depleted there? Protometal is not super duper special, I think it's kind of like stem cells in that it can speciate into armor--my word for the bits that form the structure of your alt mode--plus internal circuitry and, idk, "flesh." Don't ask me what "flesh" is because I don't know, but it definitely has nerve sensors embedded in it, which is part of what distinguishes it from armor.
Circulatory system! Energon, cydraulic fluid (since I don't think there's a huge amount of available water on Cybertron), coolant, and lubricant probably all have separate circulatory systems, but energon is the only one that gets 'depleted.' Probably it all goes to gases and particles as exhaust? Does this mean Cybertronians' "blood" is bubbly? Much to think about.
The nervous system! Basically everyone has haptic, thermal, gyroscopic, visual, and audio sensors. And taste I guess? I do have people drinking energon and going "mm yummy" so sure. More specialized senses that some but not all people are forged with include smell, magnetic field sensing, and like, Outlier senses? Probably there's people who can sense things like spark energy and fine gradations of gravity and stuff. I don't know that much detail about the nervous system, but the parts are basically all replaceable for a skilled medic.
Broadly almost everything in a Cybertronian is replaceable, and organs can be built or grown from scratch (one demands more skill, one demands expensive starting materials). I'm not doing chromophores, so they don't fade to gray when they die; it's just paint. "Flesh" is also replaceable, but I think it has a specific structure that means you have to let self-repair build or integrate it. Something something nanites. What do I know about nanites? I know cat-bots make em in their mouths and lick things to spread them around ::) Even brains can be swapped, although weird stuff will happen if you don't wipe them first. I'm imagining that the brain for Cybertronians is kinda similar to the brainstem for humans, in that it handles autonomic functions and stuff that you will die if it stops working. The processors do "higher brain function," aka thinking. Aside from circulatory and nervous functions the brain also contains speech generation and motor code, which means that each person has a unique way of moving and talking (although this code is then implemented using the processors). If you implant someone's brain in another person, they will act like them to a certain extent, but most memories are stored in the processors, so they won't have the same life experiences, and the spark also determines some things about how people act.
What is a spark? Why, it's a little piece of Primus! It consists of a type of energy-matter that has not been observed anywhere else in the universe so far, and has somewhat limited interactions with most other kinds of matter and energy. For instance, coronal energy doesn't interfere with electrical systems unless there is a HUGE amount of it. Like neutrinos or something. Efficient coronal-electrical conversion is a REALLY exciting prospect, mostly for military creep scientists, because sparks are extremely energy-dense. The few Cybertronians who can physiologically make this conversion are Titans--and Titans are also the only ones who have so much spark energy that it can interfere with electrical systems.
Titans are a special class of Cybertronian distinguished by their powerful sparks, which can support a much larger frame, more simultaneous cognitive processes, and keep going for a much longer time. Until normal Cybertronians, Titans don't seem to die of old age, or at least nobody's seen it happen yet. Trypticon, who comprises the capital of Kaon State at the south pole, is thought to be the oldest Titan at several million years old. Other Cybertronians die of old age when their sparks begin to lose power. This causes confusion, forgetfulness, fatigue, and eventually shutdown of organ systems. When a Cybertronian dies of old age their spark exhausts itself and disappears; if they die traumatically their spark vanishes suddenly, which I'm postulating right now involves some kind of higher spatial dimension shortcut back to the Well of All Sparks, the theoretical spark of Primus in the center of the planet.
Known Titans: Trypticon (south pole, Kaon); Chrysallus (central Tetrahex); Baird (eastern Kalis); Calabi (eastern Uraya); Auron (northern Tarn); Talos (shores of Stanix); Metroplex (north pole, Iacon); and the Lodestars of Vos (named for the stars Iridia, Caminus, and Scintillax, themselves named after mythical apprentices of Solus Prime).