Better Names

Future Game
1

I’m absolutely sick of the current name-generation system. I can tolerate it with the patches, but the species have absolutely ridiculous names.

I don’t have a good source for prefixes and suffixes in regular binomial nomenclature, and I’ve pretty sure I haven’t covered all of the characteristics well enough, so I’ll only call this a partial list. Some of the affix components might not be useful (mostly suspicious of the multi-food-eating ones, those could maybe just be special, full components - ie Multiphage and Amphiphage instead of just throwing in the prefixes and letting their suffix be random). I’m pretty sure I’m also not conjugating the affixes correctly.

This is essentially just showcasing my concept of how better species names would work; it produces more memorable and comprehensible names, at the cost of requiring much more work and vastly narrowing the field of possible names. I don’t even remember where I got all of these or what they all mean. They probably all fit Greek/Latin based nomenclature, but I can imagine more languages being used as sources.

Overall, if implemented, this system would need a sizeable amount of testing to ensure it didn’t generate bizarre names.

General

Prefixes

  • Primo-/Primum (would sometimes appear with cells which had evolved a new food source or with the first species in a new genus)
  • Xeno-
  • Exo-
  • Proto- (affixed to an existing cell’s species name if they haven’t changed much and/or their genus has grown to some number of species)
  • Cyto- (means a cell could be called Cytoplasm if it rolled General as its affix source for both affixes; this is confusing and might require a system to block using the same source for both affixes in genus or species name)

Suffixes

  • -plasm
  • -form
  • -cyte
Based on food

General

  • -phage
  • -vore
  • -troph

Raw glucose
I got nothing. I guess hetero-?

Iron

  • Ferro-
  • Rusti-
  • Metallo-
  • Geo-
  • Litho-

Heat
I think heat-eaters would have the same associated prefixes as volcanic-vent dwellers, as you can only use thermosynthase effectively in a volcanic vent.

Sulfur

  • Chemo- (could also apply to iron since they’re also technically chemotrophs I think?)
  • Cini- (i forgot where i got this from)
  • Sulfuro-
  • Sulfo-

Light

  • Photo-
  • Luco-
  • Lumino-
  • Phyto-
  • Antho- (means flower, I think? Could be used in Late Multicellular for radially-symmetric animals, so that you could theoretically encounter an anthostome)
  • -phyte (Since something that rolls Light for both prefix and suffix could be called a Phytophyte, there could be a system to prevent using the same affix source for both ends, as well as singular variants of the affix if the organism can only use one since it lacks other affix sources. Alternatively, leave it in.)
  • -flora (Is this plural?)

Hunting

  • Carno-
  • Cyto-
  • -venator

Multiple energy sources

  • Amphi-, di-, bi- (for two sources)
  • Multi-, omni-, poly- (for more than two sources)
Respiration

Aerobic

  • Aero-
  • Oxy-

Anaerobic

  • Anaero-
  • Anoxy-
Based on patch

General

  • -phile

Volcanic vent

  • Pyro-
  • Thermo-
  • Volcano-
  • Extremo-

Open sea

  • Pelago-
  • Bathy-, Abysso-, etc. for those specific layers of the ocean

Surface sea/Shoreline
I have nothing for this.

Underwater cave

  • Nocto-
  • Umbra-
  • Caverno-
  • -cavernus

Sea ice

  • Cryo-
  • Arcto-
Based on misc. parts and traits

Pili

  • Acantho-, -acanth
  • -dent/-dont (if you consider a pilus to be a tooth)

Speed

  • Fast creatures might be veloci- and slow creatures moro-. Some more interpretive affixes might be used, like ‘clumsy’ or ‘bulky’ for slow creatures, and ‘agile’ or ‘wind’ for fast creatures.

Toxins

  • Toxo-
  • Veno-
  • Sagitt-, -ttarius (I think I put ‘archer’ into Google Translate and got Sagittarius out?)

[u]Membrane[u]

  • -derm
  • -coel
    Malaco- could work for fluid membranes. I don’t have anything for rigid membranes.
    Litho- could work for mineralised membranes, and -straca, meaning shell, fits for any of the advanced ones.

Vacuole

  • Coelo-, -coel (idk if this one’s good, means ‘hollow’)

Missing a part (the species removed all parts of a type that its ancestor had possessed)

  • A-, an-
Based on size

Small

  • Pico-
  • Nano-
  • Micro-
  • Milli-
  • Mini-

Medium-sized cells can’t access this list.

Large

  • Mega-, Megalo-
  • Giganto-
  • Titano-

I’d also add in a list of color-based prefixes, to pull from in emergencies. They just name the cell after whatever color it is. This may require additional code to ensure that the cell doesn’t have a weird name after it changes its color randomly (such as the species Xenocytus cyanus turning green from being previously blue).

Some strong examples:

  • Some early volcanic dwellers might be the thermophages, the amphitrophs, or the primovenators.
  • Thylakoids floating on the sea might be the protoflora, the photophages, or the cyanoformes.
  • A species which relies on hydrogenase and lives in a deoxygenated environment, without tolerance for oxygen, might be the anoxyphile.

Some weak examples:

  • A species which eats iron, glucose, and sulfur in a volcanic vent could be the omniphile, which seems to describe a species suitable for any environment.
  • A spike-bearing species on an ice sheet could be an arctacanth, which appears to imply its spike is made of ice.
  • A random species could be called the exophile, which implies it likes alien or out-there environments.
  • A random species adapted to oxygen might be called the oxyphage, which implies it eats air. (This might mean that the food-sources list needs to pull twice to construct a viable name, but then we start getting phytophytes and polyflora.)
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A part of the name system is the inclusion of Thrive’s supporters into the name generator. Could this be still adapted into this system?

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Yeah. I mean, Alien Biospheres did it, and that’s where I’m pulling half these prefixes from. You’d just need to throw in the Patreon names to the affix generator and have them show up randomly (probably in the species name rather than genus).

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Some other greco-latin suffixes and prefixes were proposed in the developer forums a few years ago.[1]

  1. belgium, do I already have to refer to 2022 as “a few years ago?” Time flies as it defecates on our heads like a pidgeon. ↩︎

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5

This is great stuff, and it’s very doable. If you guys need help compiling a list of specific suffixes and possibly sorting them based on greek / latinness so we could avoid mixing those, I could help out.

I think it makes the most sense. Historically species named after people tend to go that way.

That footnote (DeepSix) is a brilliant metaphor. Shame I couldn’t quote it specifically.

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I know this may not be feasible now, or ever, but it might be important to include parenthesis for trinomial names. If I recall correctly, parenthesis are used when it is unclear if the species in question is a species or subspecies. Also, from my brief search on this matter, it appears that parenthesis are used when a species was previously described in a different genera, or for species synonyms.

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7

It’s basically for disambiguation or for sub species specificity. As the omniscient player of a video game we don’t need the former. Subspecies sound really hard to implement, and I think’d it’d be easier to do something half-functional like coloring species based on where they’re from (like for example increasing brightness on north south or complexity of patterns on east west, or on two sides of a river. Just make it so all primary coating (fur skin etc) shaders accept two variation parameters and just choose two that split the species up in sane chunks). Especially because the main reason to focus on subspecies to to see the granularity of speciation and regional differences and uhh, that sounds REALLY belgium either an evolutionary time scale or a normal person’s machine.

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It should also be remember that within a subspecies there should too be variations, not like that every individual looks the same.

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Mhmm I mean we’re doing great already with the variations in number of organelles and cells in single and multi-cell. Variation in size and pattern or fur length or whatever could go a very long way. If you vary the reletive size of body parts and stuff like the distance between bilaterally symmetric features (on humans that’s just the eye spacing, how big your mouth is, and if you have a unibrow) will totally cover the rest of it

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I guess something similar can be done for radial creatures too.

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Oh, sweet, they’ve already made a list. Could update mine to add these in, but I don’t think I have the time.

Looks like it has more depth in how the mechanics would work but less in terms of how many prefixes/suffixes are provided. Do you think it would be helpful to have a Google Sheet (for collaboration) to use to collect prefixes, suffixes, and their meanings and usage?

Color will presumably be made non-cosmetic at some point, most likely in the Late Multicellular, since camouflage is a thing and there’s biological causes of color. At that point I’d expect to see color restrictions backported to Microbe.

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To be fair, regular microbes can’t really see. This only impacts player’s perception…

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They can’t see, but you still need to have some pigment for photosynthesis, presumably. And I’m sure there’s other non-visual uses for pigmentation that I don’t have enough biology knowledge to know. Perhaps UV tolerance?

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I guess so, but it surely wouldn’t have much to do with perception at single-celled level.

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From what I remember in my Histology class, each Melanocyte in the Dermis layer of the skin has a thick layer of Melanin granules around their respective nucleus; this is to protect it from incoming UV radiation.

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Yeah, and we should get a system of UV toleration someday… if the developers deem it important enough.

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17

Maybe as a part of or an extension of Environmental Tolerance.

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Could be, but it’ll only come to play once the player has moved to the land…

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19

Wouldn’t a creature floating on the waters surface possibly need this?

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Perhaps, but it’d only impact tidepool critters, as any other surface water patch extends too deep for UV to fully cover the patch.

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