As far as I have seen (partly from the wiki page about the Organism Editor, though I don’t know how valid that is) the game is planned to be able to express a wide range of different Planetary conditions, while giving the player the ability to set quite a few of them to his liking. My question would be, could for example low gravity and high air density be pushed to their limits far enough to allow the existence of creatures like a sky whale, which is, while undoubtedly awesome, painfully impossible in any reasonable atmosphere. Does Thrive strive to allow such extreme conditions leading to the emergence of an ecosystem mostly located in the skies, or is a scenario such as this considered to strange and scientifically unreasonable to be included in the game?
Sky whales aren’t impossible, look up “Aurelia and Blue Moon”
They have some very realistic depictions of animals in thick atmospheres and such. And they were created by very competent scientists.
Also I’ve always wanted to do a atmospheric version of the microbe stage. (Eg you float in the atmosphere) This stuff won’t make it In initially but we may add that possibility later.
We do however have plans for extreme planets/moons like Europa and titan and such.
You just may not be able to finish the game as aquatic civs won’t be getting to the space stage.
Yeah, from what I have seen, you guys seem to be quite adamant about this. Admittedly, rightfully so, since lack of metallurgy is a pretty crippling flaw. Although this makes one think … what about a species akin to eusocial eurypterids, with castes (let’s call them scouts) specifically designed to also roam the land for expended periods of time, let’s say to to scavenge there, while most of the normal labourers, soldiers and the queen remain on the sea floor. Admittedly, this would make the species itself technically amphibian, but since the only means of reproduction would be located in the ocean, it couldn’t just migrate on land and be done with it. Could the scouts by themselves now figure out metallurgy, share the knowledge with the rest of the hive, build up the necessary structures for refining iron on land and transporting the final products back to their kin below the sea? Or is this a stupid idea and I shall be banned for the crime of speaking about the dreaded Underwater civilization? ^^
That’s seems perfectly legitimate, it’s not that we “just hate underwater civs” if they have a way of getting around it that is grounded in possibility, your caste example, being amphibious etc. it’s perfectly fine. But yes that counts an amphibious. (Assuming that metallurgy in that extreme case wouldn’t just straight up instantly dry out the scouts and kill them)
There is a difference between “fully aquatic” and “some can get on land”.
I didn’t want to imply that you are biased against uncerwater civs, I just had the impression that the constant discussions about them and the annoyance about that have become a running gag around here. Although you mentioning the possibility of heat death from furnaces begs another question: How exactly will be decided if a technology is locked for a species or not? A set of specific requirements for each and every technology, for example “medium or high heat-resistence”, “no cutaneous respiration”, “reasonyble dextrous gripping limb(s)” and “organism is not currently located underwater” for metallurgy or some other mechanism? Since the amount of different technologies should not be too unbelievably expensive (relatively speaking), I could actually see this manual approach working out quite well.
(Sorry for the necropost ig)
This is something that interests me a lot, since the more alien the environment the stranger and more alien the lifeforms that evolve within it will be.
I’m mainly interested in what the lower bound for temperature would be. Ammonia acts as a natural anti-freeze, meaning ammonia-water oceans would remain liquid at far lower temperatures, allowing for “standard” carbon based life on a planet always below freezing.
Extremely high temperatures are also interesting but I don’t know how practical that would be, earth hyperthermophiles are exclusively unicellular as far as i know.
This could also result in the oceans boiling away, making the planet a venus (hell)
Wouldn’t there be problems with moving to land, since it’d not be quite so packed with ammonia?
I was assuming that the planet has some mechanism (probably just pre-existing extreme pressure) raising water’s boiling point.
Not really I think. Just because the water around an organism can remain liquid doesn’t mean the water inside the organism* can, and thus it would also need some kind of anti-freeze mechanism within it to prevent it from freezing and dying. This should just carry over onto land.
Doesn’t higher atmospheric pressure make it much harder to leave the planet in space stage later on?
Iirc isn’t excessive ammonia toxic to most life we know? Would such ammonia rich worlds be for nonlawk life only?
Fine by me, “harder” isn’t impossible and even if it was I’m fine with certain nontraditional environments causing ‘softlocks’ later on.
Well sure, that’s why the game has that setting.
The problems is that then adding the possibility of high pressure worlds could be seen by the devs as a waste of time…
That just depends on how much extra work they would require to accommodate. High pressure is something that I assume will already be in the game (because deep oceans) so really it would just be another use case for an existing mechanic plus just letting a single value (in this case atmospheric pressure) go higher on nlawk than on lawk when creating the starting planet.
Likewise with extreme temperatures, to use the ammonia-water planet as an example: A LUCA that emerges in such an environment would already be adapted to the environment, so the only difference would be a starting temperature tolerance range far lower than standard, just a simple value change.
The absolute most would be starting off with a cytoplasm “upgraded” with some kind of natural antifreeze (either proteins to stop ice crystals from growing or something to directly lower the freezing point of water inside the cell, whichever the devs would feel is more appropriate) to justify that tolerance change, which I assume wouldn’t be much work either and would be useful in sub 0C environments on ‘standard’ worlds as well.
I feel like it should be remembered that the dev team appears to want to focus on the lawk and more real-life-like side of things first before doing anything non-lawk and too alien and such, so at least I’d except ammonia rich worlds to be something added in later in the development while the high pressure worlds could depend on the devs’ goodwill.
I know that that’s what they’re mostly doing. Discussing potential features isn’t compelling devs to prioritize them, it’s just discussion for fun.
I presume high pressure worlds would need to have some kind of a cap at a certain point as to not became straight up gas giants (that are NOT going to be a supported environment)
Definitely, life would probably became unfeasible long before that boundary I would think, Though maybe microbial life within gas giants can just be featured as a little possible tidbit in the Space Stage. A unique attribute/resource a gas giant may very rarely have that might or might not have use, depending on implementation. This way it can be entertained as a concept without the pain of actually implementing it in the earlier stages to be playable. Other ideas too “conceptual” to implement like this could be represented similarly in the Space Stage I think.
Yea I think a life toggle for gas giants could work.
I presume the ice giants would be the exact same case?
I suppose so. Both gas and ice giants would have a zone where the temperature would be liveable.
Since we are dealing with aliens this would
From a gameplay standpoint, if you wanted it to be more than just a bit of rare flavor text, perhaps billions of years of microscopic activity would leave large amounts of natural gas (or equivalents) in the deeper layers of the planets atmosphere, giving you a massive source of a resource that is hard to get to and needs specialized technology to harvest.
Also exclusively airborne microorganisms would be a prime opportunity to study airborne pathogens (or if you’re desperate for funding, airborne bioweapons) so they could provide whatever the equivalent of stellaris’ science resource would be.
Don’t these already exist on planets such as our own?