How should we decide how many alien species exist? A number similar to real life would be quite boring as we’ve only found one alien species;(outside of possible conspiracy theories) humans
I thought of solving this through a setting where you decide how common life is in your galaxy, however this has the issue of the universe in thrive being substantially different from real life.
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Maybe the density of life in space would depend on the player’s preferences when either creating a new save file or entering the space stage?
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and humans being aliens is only true by a technicality, which is that we visited the moon and are not from it
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Should we make a distinction if, for instance, there is a great filter for nucleous obtainment, meaning there may be lots of microbial life out there but none more complex than the most complex bacteria?
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the most complex bacteria are still pretty complex
and bacteria aren’t exactly excluded from multicellularity(with deinococcus radiodurans, bacterial mats, and several anaerobic ecosystems that function almost as individual organisms[ex: most ecosystems that lead to inter-organism electron transfer, which is the whole point of nanowires on cells] as examples, even though those features are rarely, if ever, talked about)
and that’s just with lawk bacteria
bacteria that are hand crafted by intelligent minds (what all player made bacteria in thrive are) could be far more complex than modern eukaryotes are
especially if you still consider something that’s just a large bacterium, with copies of all its dna stored in a smaller bacterium that’s extremely good at keeping dna, but that still keeps its active dna inside the region of the colony which it belongs to, to be prokaryotic(i wouldn’t, but some people would because it’s an endosymbiont storing copies, not a nucleus storing all the dna except what’s in the endosymbionts)
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Well such a possibilty won’t be true for all the worlds.
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it will be, you don’t even need any gasses except to keep the ocean liquid for it to be possible
and also eukaryote genetics are pure spaghetti code due to over 1,000,000,000 years of no pressure to Keep our genes and proteins Stupid Simple, while bacteria are so locked in to R-type selection that they have to, lest they be outcompeted
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I meant not all inhabited words will be filled with artificially crafted bacteria and stuff…
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Maybe you could have a setting which determines what levels of species there are in the galaxy. So there could be tons of microbes but only like, 5 interstellar empires. If you want to go full rng, you could have the amount be completely random. Although it would be quite boring to find yourself the only interstellar empire and everyone else are still jellyfish or dinosaurs.
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I think we need to first consider how big a Thrive galaxy is. I didn’t find the one discussion I think there was on this, but I found an old comment of mine:
So with a small galaxy, it needs to be pretty packed in terms of how often you find other life to be interesting.
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So for instance one-in-ten star systems would possess some kind of life?
How big would that small galaxy default size be? Would it be similar in size to either of the magellanic clouds?
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That’s still way too low rate if we have galaxies with 150-300 solar systems.
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I think that’s more of a star cluster than a galaxy with this sort of star count…
I suppose then it could range from 1-in-3 to 1-in-5?
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After years of people talking about the galaxy size and me constantly having to remind everyone to keep the extremely limited scope of other space games in mind when thinking about potential galaxy sizes (due to processing power limitations of computers), how is that still a thing people don’t remember?
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I didn’t really state that the said size was unacceptable, just that it could perhaps enable star cluster settings to exist.
By the way, would we be locked to spiral galaxies for space stage or would other galaxy types be available to play, like eliptical or irregular?
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Also, would the density of life depend on where the planets located in a galaxy? For example, Earth is located about 2/3rd distance from the galactic center. Would players find less life closer to the galactic center, or more life farther away from the galactic center than where Earth would be located? And we need to consider the possibilities of life away from a galaxy, like in rogue planets or in star systems of galaxy-associated nebula/gas clouds… (which would a cool start for a playthrough).
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I don’t think it would be too hard to make the distribution of life in a galaxy follow the “galactic habitable zone”, though the question is if that would be necessary.
Not sure the developers would see this as worth adding, considering the base galaxy itself could already have enough stars on it’s own.
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there are quite a few things that could be done to increase the scale of the galaxy, like having everything outside your star system just be rendered as glowing dots that have intervals at which they dim by a certain amount, that are calculated from the planets(and the stuff to generate all those dots and the general layout for the star system could be run during all the stages, so the galaxy is at least mostly done baking by the space stage) and the galaxy could just be rendered as a static object for the most part as well, since stars dont exactly move that fast relative to their scale(outside of very specific cases)
then there’s also only having the systems around the stars even be in memory when you visit their star system, and not even be generated unless you either make a REALLY big telescope to look at them, or visit the star system they’re in
floating origins also help with any floating point errors the player might see
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Not simulating the other stars would mean that there’s no possibility for space empires that actively do stuff or species spreading to multiple planets. I think that would make the world feel a lot more dead than a smaller galaxy with other species also being actively able to do stuff besides the player.
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Would a theoretical non-scifi mode impact the density of aliens?
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