Could bone also be the material of potential exoskeletons if they play a large enough role?
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I named hard shells/plating separately because I don’t think they would realistically be used the same, but I also don’t know if there is any gameplay value in separating them.
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They would likely be greatly different in structure to regular bones so ig it makes sense to keep them separate
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There are over a dozen types of Volcanic Glass, and half of them are “Basaltic”. There are essentially 3 things that distinguish Obsidian from Basalt:
- It fractures relatively easily, and essentially is the sharpest natural material when it does, and as such its main value is as a Scalpel
- It sometime form in fist sized chunks, and sometimes as “Black Sand”, which has really similar properties to regular Sand, though Silica Sand is Mohs Hardness 6 and Black Sand is Mohs Hardness 7
- It is often Reflective, which has nothing whatsoever to do with why it is calls Glass
Volcanic Glasses can actually have some diverse properties, for example, Pele’s Hair, which looks like a pile of hair but is actually delicate glass that will shatter when touched. Actually, that is considered a type of Basalt.
Alcohols also has several chemical uses, as well as being a disinfectant. Those are arguably more important than its use as a Fuel. This is before you consider how many people pay obscene amounts of currency to poison themselves with large amounts of it.
Food: I think having categories like: Hunted (Meat/Poultry), Livestock (Meat/Poultry), Seafood, Shellfish, Gathered (Fruit/Vegetables/Grains), Crop (Fruits/Vegetables/Grains), and Dairy would be simpler than Pigs, Cows, Apples, Carrots, etc.
I also think Ivory should be a subtype/category of Bone.
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Then there’s microorganisms which we use to make all sorts of fermented foods.
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By poultry do you mean whole carcasses?
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Poultry = Bird Meat as opposed to other meat types. Homo Sapiens use Poultry to mean Fowl meat (Duck, Goose, Swan, Chicken, Turkey, Pheasant, Quail, etc.), distinct from Seafood (Fish and/or Shellfish) and Red Meat (Mammalian Muscle meat (but not organs)). Interestingly, there does not seem to be a name that covers Reptile meat, at least that I can find, other than “Exotic”, which includes Mammals and Birds not commonly eaten. 
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How would we find the poultry equivalent for alien species? Would this be the name given to the meat of the (ex-)airborne species?
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More or less. I guess maybe there could be Class Divisions for meat? Or course, that does mean having a way to determine Classes (Mammal, Reptile, Bird, Amphibian, Fish, etc.). Although, Shellfish is multiple classes, so maybe the player could further combine or divide groups based on their planets evolutionary tree? Something similar might work for plants.
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I presume we’d also have whale meat separate from other sorts of seafood?
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This is part of why I wanted to fold it in with flint, since they were used for similar things.
While I think it’d be for the best for all kinds of sand to be differentiated only visually in the terrain and all provide the same ‘sand’ resource, you Could theoretically just have a bunch of sand varieties that (mostly) only vary visually, since a player would probably be unlikely to have multiple colors in one area, and thus wouldn’t have all of them crowding the mineral resource tab.
On one hand you’re right that having more general categories like this is probably better since they’re more familiar rather than a bunch of names for alien creature meats that the player will probably need to keep checking. Though I don’t see much of a point in differentiating gathered/hunted food from livestock and crops.
We both forgot to account for some types of food in my original outline. How would you classify honey, for example? Or fungus? Or silicon-membrane based creature meat?
I would propose food groups as better subcategories, but those could be pretty hard to fit alien lifeforms and products produced by them into, even if you invent a few to account for things well outside the human diet (iron, hydrogen sulfide, silica…)
If they were to be separate they would both just be categories of organic materials.
Yeah I already had problems trying to make good categories for just raw foods, once you insert potential for modified foods (like fermentation) it gets even worse.
I think it’s best not to try and shunt alien creatures into categories based around and named after Earth animals.
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I am rather sure the meat/flesh of those secondarily aquatic creatures is significantly different to the one of the primordially aquatic ones, no?
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Call it “crunchy meat”.
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I’m pretty sure such creatures wouldn’t be able to have meat because of no(t enough) flexibility needed for the myofibrils to function properly
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On Earth, yes. Not necessarily on an alien planet.
The name was just something that sounds vaguely funny. The point was that it’s something that needs to be included Somehow.
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I am not sure it can be included if it’s supposed to be impossible
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I meant that calling it meat wasn’t literal, the silicon membrane celled tissue can be called whatever.
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Oh so like the bodymatter of whatever has this sort of membrane for cells
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Honey and Milk could be grouped together as something like Secretions. I am open to an alternative name for that group.
Also, when I listed Earth Classes, that was just an example of Classes. If alien classes are things like Fsubdrib, Kso, Hajajaj, and THIJHTYH, as long as Thrive can distinguish groups by how they evolved in that game files Evolutionary Tree, then Kingdoms like Fungi, Phylums like Mollusca (minus Cephalopods) and Crustacea, Classes like Aves, and Orders like Artiodactyla (whales and dolphins) could be separated and named however the player wished (I assume they will come up with more legible names than the random letter combinations I listed). They don’t have to be “Earth Based”, Thrive just need to be able distinguish groups of similar organisms. Perhaps a planet will have Thermotrophic Amphibious Squid/Wolf hybrids and call food made from them Qoqo’Pah, to distinguish it from food made from the Flying Iron-Eating Spider/Pterosaur hybrids, which they call Vraxbu.
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Maybe autoevo and naming algorithms themselves will generate names for those classes?
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