The Alkanite Republic never got around to revisiting the system before it fell to hostile action. For the next 900 years or so, the planet was left alone, and many of the species introduced by the scout managed to survive and slowly begin the process of turning the planet into a lifebearing one. When it was rediscovered by one of the five states then known to claim the name of the One True Empire, its seas were relatively well-stocked with organic chemistry and a flourishing microbial ecosystem, and its atmosphere already contained several percent oxygen. The One True Empire decided to take the terraforming project from there, renaming the world Aathalan. A base was established, biologists were dispatched, and a large number of species were tailored to fit the planet's environment. However, after only about 150 years, the base was evacuated due to a political emergency, and it was never reoccupied by the One True Empire, which itself did not last much more than a century after that.
Now, the system was left alone for nearly a thousand years. It had never been equipped with a jumpgate, and it had faded into obscurity after the fall of the One True Empire, its existence only recorded in a few historical archives. A halfway implemented ecosystem lurched along, several species beginning to occupy niches they hadn't been planned for, some other species going extinct.
797 years ago, however, the ancestors of the present-day citizens of Daufesk entered the system in a fleet of 23 jump-capable ships. These were religiopolitical exiles from the world New Scandinavia (which itself was an experiment in nostalgic recreation of Old Earth cultures, and hadn't turned out exactly as planned), some four thousand in number. Having finally found life on New Scandinavia intolerable for a variety of reasons, these people had set out in search of a new place to live, where they'd be fairly isolated from mainstream civilization and wouldn't be bothered; they had a fair idea of the location of a possibly habitable world (which they'd found in some old archives), and were fairly pleased with what they saw when they arrived. The planet by now had a fairly hospitable environment -- breathable atmosphere, tolerable temperatures, largely a T-shirt place. It was, and still is, a world of rather violent weather, and dead fish washing ashore stinking up the beaches was not infrequent.
Unfortunately, the Founders had been subjected to datasabotage before leaving their old home, and large parts of their archives were lost before they could establish their colony. Finding themselves unable to maintain a high-tech civilization, they were quickly reduced to struggling for survival -- much of their high-tech gear, in particular the automatic manufacturing systems, had had its control software irredeemably corrupted along with all "safety copies". What was still working eventually wore out, and with no way of making spare parts or new units, the Founders were reduced to a largely preindustrial society. Only a small portion of the plant and animal species they had brought along in storage survived the rigors of the trip (and the databank collapse, and the first generations of trying to get a foothold on the planet). The planet held no fossil fuels, and there were few edible land plants or animals. Fortunately, there were by this time a lot of edible fishes, and the land vegetation included an adequate amount of trees suitable for construction materials.
For the next several generations, the Founders and their descendants had to rely on fishing to even feed themselves. Fishing from small wooden boats, with no functional communications more advanced than semaphore, no propulsion except oars and sail, and no meteorology to warn against the frequent and violent storms. Life was hard. The survival of each community depended on everyone doing his or her share of work; this laid the foundations for the work ethic which still prevails among citizens of Daufesk. However, they squeezed through the initial bottleneck, and were soon growing in numbers, and spreading across the shorelines in small towns. After a couple of centuries, they were established enough to begin the long climb back to an industrialized high-tech society, which was helped somewhat by the remaining data salvaged from the Founders' archives, but which still took a lot of work and time. Internal-combustion engines fueled by alcohol derived from fast-growing vegetation came into use about four centuries ago; fission, solar, and wind power have been used for about three to four centuries. The first modern space launch is now 262 years in the past; manned space travel has been routine for about two centuries.
At present, the P.S.T.R. of Daufesk numbers about three and a half billion citizens. Of these, approximately three billion live on Daufesk itself, while some five hundred million inhabit various space installations and a handful of newly established colony worlds. Daufesk has been interstellar for about fifty years, and contact with several other inhabited worlds has been established. In the interstellar region surrounding Daufesk, there is a large number of abandoned worlds in various stages of an unfinished terraforming process, as well as several which have been settled and civilized but suffered ruinous planetary bombardment at some point in the past.