The current prototypes of the society stage don’t make sense for aliens. It has wood and the buildings are all like human’s, which doesn’t make sense because 1) tree-like organisms might not evolve on the world you play on and 2) you aren’t playing as a human, so why do the buildings look like they’re for humans? What if the species you play as is arboreal, digs burrows, semiaquatic, or something else, and wouldn’t live in homes like that?
It just doesn’t take into account for the fact that the ecosystem is going to be different from Earth’s.
I get that the prototypes are just that, prototypes, but it still urks me. It’s going to be different later on, right?
This is the answer to almost all the questions for why something is like it is in the prototype. Despite what some people might say, I don’t have magical powers. So to have any chance to have some kind of prototype done quickly for each stage requires me to cut out any non-essential features.
My solutions to this are that either:
The game has to create tree equivalents always
Or we’ll add some way to always make wood equivalent material from biomass somehow
Yes, but with the caveat that if we require the player to literally design everything it’s going to make the game so much longer and might get really repetitive and boring for a lot of players. So I think we need by default to generate some good buildings and technological items that would be optional for the player to customize.
How about making it so you could make parts of your tool out of anything? Inorganic materials could have prebuilt values for durability, and organic materials could have durability based on the strength of their cells, so sure, you could make your handle out of something like a fish, but it’d fall apart, unless you use the bones, or it has a hard shell. I think having procedurally generated durabilty (and visuals) for parts of your tool, purely based on what it’s made out of, would work very well, and be pretty easy to code.
Tools are not the problem for now as the only added tool is entirely inorganic material.
I guess theoretically alternative buildings could be made from stone but that requires vastly different tools and technologies to work.
i hope you are aware the last person who replied before you is the lead developer, but yeah, alien building materials should be defined based on tissue structure for organic building materials to avoid building materials being extremely rare due to too much specification
How does alternate materials require alternate tech trees exactly? When building houses for example, stacking rocks on top of each other vs stacking mudbricks on top of each other doesn’t lead to different technological progressions in the future. Everything humans did to get into space should be in the game. Using a different material doesn’t make it different. I guess a weird or non lawk technology can solve problems in a different way.
Ideally, everything we can come up with should be added later on, if they are scientificly possible.
By the way
Can someone explain how would a dwarf fortress inspired tech system work? I don’t know the game and I don’t get how technologies can emerge[1] instead of there being a tech tree. The other people in that thread seemed to get what he means.
i imagine this: in minecraft you build a furnace based on a fixed recipe, and you can smelt iron with it. this is like a tech tree. but if, instead, you could only place blocks on the world, and the game asked you to get an iron block above a certain temperature some way and you built the shape of furnace, planned where the air would come flowing, etc, and then poured the molten iron into a mold like in the tinkers construct mod, but it was you who designed the shapes, if the game engine calculated the damage a sword would make based on its shape, weight, etc, and nothing in the game explicity said you couldn’t use an axe to plow a field, then this would be an emergent tech system. is this it? ↩︎
People were arguing that there wouldn’t be equivalent enough materials available on all plausible planets to make my idea of a single tech web work. I’m entirely in favour of having general enough material types used in all core technologies to ensure they are always available. If that wasn’t the case, then there would need to be multiple alternative ways to progress through the tech web with alternative technologies to the default ones.