What is the most insane type of exotic life you heard of?
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the craziest type of exotic life would be those based on different fundamental forces: we are based on the electromagnetic force, with our chemistry being all about the electron shells of different atoms, but some stories have dabbled in using nuclear forces (in or on neutron stars) or gravity (space clouds of ionized gas)
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Maybe even crazier ones would emerge on spaces with different physics’ laws…
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This thread will get a lock soon if people don’t cite actual scientist opinions on what might actually be viable in terms of the laws of physics…
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Apparently, blue plants aren’t supposed to be an usual sight in alien light-based autothrophs. I wonder if at some point in the future, playing as one of such organisms will require you to have a specific color viable for your planet…
from what we can see In-game in the planet editor (or rather its preview), stars will be customizable, so I think it’s possible that color could become another statistic like compounds or conditions, and affect the efficiency of thylakoids and chloroplasts (which won’t be “chloro-”)
right now they work like:
L light → G glucose at concentrations: C% carbon dioxide and L% brightness
but with different wavelengths being their own statistic, it could be something like
R red light + G green light + B blue light → G glucose at concentrations: C% carbon dioxide, R% red pigment, G% green pigment, B% blue pigment and L% brightness
we could also replace RGB with arbitrary divisions of infrared, visible and ultraviolet in particularily exotic star systems
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I think the main stars to be chosen will be orange and yellow dwarfs alongside white stars, since those could correspond to various time limits on different difficulties (and red dwarfs to my knowledge are being increasingly viewed as suboptimal for life emergence and support).
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it would be cool to see different stars represent the different difficulties
M, red dwarf: custom (they’re quite unstable, so there’s wiggle room to create the conditions you want)
K, orange dwarf: easy (like the sun, but with a much longer lifespan, more chances of a habitable world forming)
G, yellow dwarf: normal (just the sun, we know for a fact that there’s life around one, so we can take that as a measuring unit)
F, yellow-white dwarf: hard (opposite of the K-class, like the sun but with shorter lifespan)
A, white star: very hard (low chances of habitable worlds forming in time, but still somewhat probable)
B, white-blue star: speedruner mode (the high luminosity is going to help any photosynthetizers that don’t get burnt, but it will only last a short time)
O, blue giant: madman mode (someone will do this, I don’t know how, but someone will survive this)
Stellar remnants: post-endgame (all stars eventually become these, they pose the ultimate challenge for life, again, someone will somehow survive this)
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by this you mean objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes?
yep, possibly a rogue planet mode would also fall under this category, since it’s possible outer planets might be ejected as their star sheds mass or goes supernova
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Wouldn’t you need to be a subglacial organism on such exiled planets?
either that, or your planet somehow conserving a thick atmosphere to retain heat. from that point on, your new timer will depend on how many moons you have, how large they are, how eccentric their orbit, and remaining internal heat
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I think that’d only work if you were exiled when already in awakening stage. Be in aware and next editor cycle you’ll just freeze to death.
I’m not sure about how much heat would be needed to maintain an atmosphere thick enough to keep the surface habitable, so I think the biggest factor would be the size of your planet, since it affects how long it’ll remain geologically active. If your planet isn’t too small, we could keep it going for a few thousand million years, with one or more large moons in non-perfect-circle orbit providing some additional heat
and besides, the habitable surface isn’t mutually exclusive with the subglacial life, so even as the surface becomes uninhabitable, a new chapter for life might begin as it retreats to subglacial oceans, which will likely last quite a bit longer
overall, I think that the more developed you are before your planet becomes a rogue, the easier time you’ll have, but the game should be completable, if much harder, from any point of exile
the subglacial ocean civilization will probably be the greatest progress bottleneck, but if a player is intending to play the civilization stages, they’ll probably try to complete the previous, longer ones at a decent pace to avoid making the game harder for themselves, if they just want to see how long they can survive as simple creatures, then building a civilization won’t matter to them
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Pretty sure autoevo species are supposed to be capable of advancing into the strategy stages if you “wait” for too long, which might be a gameover scenario.
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I think that was another ongoing discussion, about the AI overtaking the player, so It’s possible such a scenario might depend on a toggleable option selected at the start of the game
but again, if the player doesn’t care about progressing to the “civilized stages”, then they won’t care about ascension or others reaching it, so they could just keep playing as long as there’s a drop of liquid solvent on their planet yet to freeze if we implement some sort of check so that the AI doesn’t use it’s god powers to delete or alter the starter planet
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Tbf I don’t think we should have the player get randomly their planet exiled if they didn’t want that to happen, otherwise it could make Thrive a “RNG Death” game
yeah, I think the whole “star based difficulties” and “star aging” features should be toggleable as well
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Now going back to the stars:
Impossible, they only live for some 10 million years, which isn’t even a single microbe generation.
They only live for ~100 million years at maximum, which is just 1 microbe generation
They live for no more than 1 billion years, which probably is only enough to get a nucleus.
Probably the actual hardest doable star type, since they could allow life to evolve on a habitable planet for like ~2.5 Billion years at most, which should be enough for the player to put together a sapient creature.
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I mostly expected these to only be their starting conditions, as you said, their lifespans are too short, so most of the game will be in the “post-engame” mode previously discussed, unless the player specifically disables star aging
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