Could the player affect biomes? I don’t know how the player could affect biomes in microbial and multicellular. If your species were to eat all the plants next to a desert is it planned to expand or stay arid grassland/savannah/whatever else? Or would we have to wait until industrial and up to affect the biomes?
I think it’s definitely planned that the biomes are determined by the species. So there will only be a certain geography related properties defining the basics of some area and then the actual biome is made up of the species there. Because otherwise it would be very repetitive and kinda silly if in every game you played the biomes would be predetermined.
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Also in the microbe stage the plan is for microbes to produce gasses which will change the atmosphere of the planet and therefore all biomes.
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I wander how biomes will work for walking plants
I don’t think they’re particularly different from anything else. In terms of the microbe stage any cell can have chloroplasts, that’s no problem.
I guess moving plantscapes change faster than forests, but not as fast as herds of animals.
So the biomes will be determined by atmospheric composition and temperature? Or did I get that wrong?
Not exactly. Here’s a definition of biome:
"a complex biotic community characterized by distinctive plant and animal species and maintained under the climatic conditions of the region, especially such a community that has developed to climax. "
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/biome
So by definition a biome is also determined by the animals living there. So on each playthrough the biomes are completely different as the species will be different. So only geographic areas and their properties like amount of rain will be similarly generated on each different planet and those can be named before hand based on their properties. But different biome types will be completely dynamic.
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Actually it has been our philosophy for awhile to avoid biology in our biome definitions and stick to geographical features , grasslands and such will come about naturally as certain species do well in a certain region but the biome itself will be more like “warm plain” which is why we removed algae bloom as a biome type…
The reason being that “grassland” is too earth centric because grass is an earth plant just like mangrove swamp is determined by an earth. Plant , mangrove. So we need to stay general.
The biological features can influence the inorganic features tho. A forest can block winds and capture moisture, which is what creates the difference between a desert and a rain forest.
I suppose there are a whole lot of different possible words for biomes relating to plants…
Grassland: flat lands, plains, plateau
Mangrove swamp: Coastal forest, nursery, forested swamp
Redwood forest: Tall plant place?
And so on.