That’s because “Grass” is an Angiosperm, which dominated in the wake of the meteor, but you are forgetting Grass-like Lycopods, Ferns, and Fern Allies, such as Horsetail, that may have filled a similar niche before being replaced by Angiosperms later. Horsetails date back to the early Jurassic (though to be fair, I believe at that time they were Tree-like and evolved to be Grass-like later). Also, the bigger point was “Herbaceous vs Wood-y”, with Grass being the modern Earth dominant Herbaceous plant. But even before Grass, there were many other Herbaceous plants. In fact, there were even herbaceous Gymnosperms at one point (though they did poorly compared to Herbaceous Ferns (able to obtain moisture and nutrient through there skin and thus able to survive in conditions where other Vascular plants can’t) and Angiosperms (better at reproducing)).
Also, will Bamboo (tree-like/wood-y grass) biomes be included in this new biome succession? I know Bamboo is in the compiled list Poodelicus has been making.
I suppose it would be some kind of a “grassland turned into forest”?
You’re right about there being unrelated plants in similar niches before, but I do also remember reading papers stating the modern grassland biomes are a relatively new thing, suggesting those phenotypically similar species were not able establish such a “carpet of herbaceous plants” biome. I think this warrants further investigation into the literature.
To me this sounds very much like a forest biome that just has slightly different looking species from what people would normally expect when they hear “forest”.
Would there be any difference between a regular forest and a pando-like forest when it comes to biome classification?
Grass occupies both herbacious and non-herbacious niches (assuming I am using the terms correctly)?
Bamboo subset specifically occupies the non-herba niches but in general it does occupy both.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0037073804000077
“Grass” is several families of plants, of which MOST are Herbaceous, but a few are Wood-y. This leads to a Bamboo Forest being classified differently than a Grassland, despite it being a type of grass.
Would there always be plant types around the player could domesticate/eat assuming they aren’t a foliage-eater?
Much like Cows and Dogs are a bit different from their Aurochs and Wolf ancestors, modern fruits and vegetables changed due to being domesticated. If there is something tasty/useful, it can be prevented from running/flying/swimming/burrowing away (should be easy in the case of plants), and it can survive in the area the creature lives in, then it can/will be domesticated. A pure carnivore may have less uses for domesticated plants (though it would need to feed it’s livestock, make wooden objects/beams/planks, and possibly could like drinking coffee and tea or alcohol).
I suppose if they made the food for livestock mostly they’d care the most about the quantity and nutritional value of the said food over pretty much anything right?
When the game reaches a certain milestone (perhaps multi or macro gets past their initial prototyping) adjust the game to $10 and transition the free item into a demo that is either a sampler of the overall game or of beginning section of the game. You could directly apply it to the steam page so the overly price conscious gamers are less likely to immediately dismiss the game. I believe people that source code the game will be an increasing shrinking problem because if the game is mostly drawing from steam players, the people that still choose to seek out the source code are people that under no circumstance were going to support the game. I honestly feel like the introduction of “creatures” will be the catalyst for the snowballing of gathering the wider audience’s attention. I’m not sure if you spoken of this, but it should be brought under consideration what a final price for the game will look like.
So we want to sort of trick the steam people into thinking there is no “official full free” version of the game?
No. What I suggested would better segregate people who will and will not pay. If you are on steam and are provided a demo that properly exposes you to the content of the game, For someone to still describe $10 as a bad price makes it clear they aren’t going to bite. Obviously it would be still displayed on steam the existence of the source code, It just be now more redundant for people that plan to pay.
I see, I thought there was something malicious going on here. Also welcome back to the forum!
I honestly hope the free version will always be updated and available. It is getting harder as time goes on to justify spending money on “non-productive” things in my family. I do eventually want to donate money to the game, but future life circumstances may or may not allow that.
Are games in general on that “unproductive” list?
Unfortunately, that is the case.
Well that would certainly make funding especially Thrive considering the amount of harmful claims about it online…
But what would be the point in spending time to make sure we make an inferior demo? Like we would need to spend dev time to select a set of features that are locked off in the demo and spend testing time to ensure there’s no way to unlock the full game in the demo. That just doesn’t seem worth it to me, because all it takes is someone going to our Github with minimal coding experience to whip up a custom build of the game they can then just post anywhere they like. So us not making an official free version is basically just asking for someone else to do that. That’s why I’m against making a demo as it makes like 0 sense for us to spend effort to do that. And also why we need to consider extremely carefully the price on Steam, because if it is too high people will just spend the effort to get the free version and not bother with the kind of “donation” that the Steam purchase is.