I find it quite suprising how the underwater civilization debate has resurfaced recently. but even more suprised that it hasn’t been a toxic argument.
Yeah I hated the old culture around underwater civs.
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yeh me and deathwake almost have a patch free essay done.
We just need to finish it (Cough, cough, @Deathwake)
You are formulating a scientific essay just to go for underwater civs even though they won’t be added in the game at any chance? 
Its worth a shot, even if they will only be to medieval age.
Interesting aquatic civ idea in the thrive subreddit:
I brought that up in this forum, people didnt take kindly to it tho.
I think right now underwater civilizations is DLC or major update level, someone has to make a compelling argument as to how they should be added without an entirely different tech tree and blended in the normal tech tree at least relatively easily.
Right now we’re working on an essay that by this point might just devolve into a research paper if I have my way and the other two don’t reign me in lol.
A bit of a spoiler, but right now we have three sections - hurdles that an aquatic civ would need to face, their general direction of technological development, and what size/type of world would actually be required. I’m hoping to prove in the last one we are, by limiting ourselves to primarily terrestrial planets, are missing out on a pretty decent subset of habitable worlds. Granted, that needs actual proof, so research papers ho, but I digress.
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That’s right B) we are going to make an essay that doesn’t make hhyyrylainen 's brain leak out of his ears
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To a person who is new and is trying to get started on this topic.
" Hmm, underwater civ interesting …, ok let`s read this and get up to date 482 replies! "
Wait there’s only 400-something? I would have thought 14 hundred or more. Huh.
@muppi Oh, you poor, poor soul.
As someone who went dredging through for collate info for the essay, I have this to say:
Good news, there is a lot of repetition.
Bad news, there is an excessive amount of repetition.
I would make a master list, but to be honest… I skimmed a lot of the threads.
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To those who say you cant make fire underwater…
Summary
Tell that to spongebob.
2 posts were merged into an existing topic: THE NEW Miscellaneous Talk That Doesn’t Deserve A New Thread Thread Thread
So, disclaimer first, I still highly doubt that aquatic industrial/spacefaring civs are possible, and, even then, I’d still rank them pretty low on our priority list for Thrive.
However, I just got word from a vegetalist (scientist specialized in plant study) that cellulose was known to be as hard and light (if not more) than steel, and could especially potentially be manipulated without the development of metal forging.
This was a quick exchange at a conference, so I can not further develop about it, but I thought this lead would perhaps be of interest to people thinking about aquatic civs (because, again, my opposition to them is based on our current scientific knowledge --and programming constraints, and is not ideological).
Now, of course, one would still need to find a way to develop mesoscopic pure cellulose structures underwater without metal working…
nothing stops limbs from being above water while the main part of the creature is underwater
what i mean is:
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Those sticks/stones/whatever would be wet anyways, so no sparks, let alone flames, would arise from this.
Moreover, say a fire was made. Then what? Will the fish just hold it above the water indefinitely? Building a floating platform smithy that would stay afloat with all the heavy stones AND fuel necessary to stoke a fire long enough to smelt metal would be inconveniently large, and not something a species trying to survive would waste a tonne of resources building with no obvious logical recompense.
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You might as well suggest amphibians, which has never been the point of debate. You can perfectly fine go on land for a bit to smelt the metals but live underwater the rest of the time. This thread is purely about entirely aquatic species.
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