Point of time when the game starts and conditions of the planet during said time

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(Disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure where to put this as I’m new to the forums but I did not put this in Science as I only have rough knowledge about the topic. Should I have put this elsewhere?)

When you start the game you start as LUCA but the game does not tell the player how long the planet has been around for or the stage of development it is in. The temperature of most of the planet’s patches is far lower than than the estimated temperatures of the earth when LUCA was around. The hydrothermal vents are of similar temperature to what LUCA may have lived in but the sea floor would be significantly hotter than it is in game with the estimates for Later Hadean (4.2 bya) ranging from 0 degrees centigrade to 50 degrees and estimates for Paleoarchean (3.2-3.6 bya) being around 40 degrees centigrade. For surface water the much higher pressure of the atmosphere during the Hadean (100-250 times higher than today) would allow water to remain liquid at temperatures above 100 degrees centigrade during the Hadean with 55-85 degrees centigrade being the temperature many agree upon for the Paleoarchean (3.2-3.6 bya) . The in game temperatures more closely resemble modern ocean temperature than the estimates for the time LUCA is said to be around (In between 4.2 and 3.5 bya)

This problem may already be known by the development team and feel free to correct me if my figures in incorrect

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Welcome to the forum @Ruster !

I think the reason the environments resemble modern ones over the accurate ones could be that the way they are handled, they cannot have dynamic temperature and pressure changes over time, beyond events at least. So basically they would be stuck on one temperature/pressure value.

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Could this change with future updates like the planet generator

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Perhaps, but there are no promises at the present if I remember correctly.

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While not the primary reason why I made this post higher temperatures in other patches early game would make leaving the hydrothermal vents less punishing to the tolerances ( first gen leaving the hydrothermal vents basically has to use all mutation points on adapting to new environment, not adding any parts for said gen) allowing the spread of more organisms early game, which allows for more evolution.

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Is it really worth it for such a relatively small change in the grand scheme of things?

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I wouldn’t think of this as being high priority but something that may come with planet generation

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Perhaps. Full planet generation is still planned for the multicellular releases I think, or at least that’s what they used to say.

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I think planet generation will be expanded several times as new game features like macroscopic biomes, social resources (like wood), and the ability to look up at the sky and see your moon(s) are added.

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If we’re talking about realistic comparisons to Earth, Thrive LUCA is also not really equivalent to Earth LUCA in metabolism, but that’s a bit besides the point.

I am guessing the water temperatures were just set before we had more dynamic environments, I don’t remember seeing it mentioned before. I would have to try to be sure, but I am guessing setting it to start at a higher temperature and gradually decline should be quite possible. I do actually quite like the idea of moving out of the hydrothermal vents being less of a jump near the start.

It’s not a high priority though, since the current mechanics work well enough and main-line development has moved to the next Stage.

A bigger problem to handle would probably be that a starting high-temperature planet also means ice sheet patches should not exist, and our patch map system is not made to handle turning a patch into a different type later on, only changing the parameters.

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Would “full” planet generation solve the patch unchangeability problem?

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I have a feeling this is going to be huge problem sooner rather than later. It may not be an immediate priority, but it will likely be needed to fix that eventually. Biomes change over time IRL.

Assuming this problem does get tackled some day, I rather like the idea of starting off hotter and more easily leaving Vents. It would probably delay Snowball Earth though.

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This is a limitation in the implementation of our microbe patch map system, but as far as I am aware, HyperbolicHadron’s planet generation does not have this problem.

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I assume no matter that global glaciation would still need to be tackled and shifted around when the new patch system comes.

Speaking of, shouldn’t we eventually support partial glaciations (like the one we are living through currently) alongside global ones?

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I was hoping to make clear that the planet simulation system for macroscopic and beyond is essentially entirely independent from the patch map system. You shouldn’t make any assumptions on the later “patches” based on the current patch map. They’re two different systems.

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So seems like we wouldn’t be able to make these accurate early life simulations unless the microscopic patch system got improved to be capable of things similar as the macroscopic+ patch system?

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I think one of the problems is the lack of green house effect, early earth’s atmosphere contained much more green house gases (like methane, carbon dioxide, ect.) allowing for high temperatures at the surface despite the fact that the sun was much less warm. Presumably the deep oceans were heated by the heat of the young planet and would be cooling since, hydrothermal vents were kept warm by magma but the rest of the ocean floor would not stay warm.

The first snowball earth like event happened during the Rhyacian (2.3 - 2.05 bya) as the great oxidization event took place shortly before in the Siderian (2.5 -2.3 bya) as the oxygen produced by cyanobacteria reacted with methane which created water and carbon dioxide which is not as effective of a greenhouse gas as methane so the temperature dropped.

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As already explained it doesn’t look the the microbe patch map would be able to support greenhouse effect and other temperature changes dynamically like that

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It’s not that it doesn’t support temperature change, it’s that Ice Sheets can’t be prevented from appearing in a hot environment only to appear more when it is cold. It would be strange to have a warm Ice Sheet, but coding a warm Ice Sheet that is to hot to actually have ice but cools down later would probably not be to difficult, if bizarre to the point of being called a glitch.

The Microbe and Multicellular worlds, as they are currently written, need to have the same amount of Ice regardless of how much hotter or colder the world becomes. I do hope someday someone fixes that, but I understand that being both very difficult and very low priority.

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Considering the troubles with the global glaciation implementation I wouldn’t be so sure it’s that simple

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