Underwater Civilizations Take 3

You’re kinda missing the point. The point isn’t that electricity is hard to generate underwater, it’s that electricity and water… doesn’t mix well. It’s only now that we are starting to get water-resistant (resistant, not even proof) computers, and those things only work because they’re created in a water-less environment were you can just put it in a waterproof casing.

Also, again, why would they do that? Remember that they don’t know about smelting metal yet. They’d need to create multiple watermills (using pretty godawful magnets, since they have no way of refining them), wire them together using graphite (since that’s basically the only non-metal conductor, and remember: they can’t smelt metal yet), which have to be isolated too, (and again, how would they do that? They can’t smelt plastic or something, so they’d need to surround it in a waterproof casing using materials they have to scavenge together), and then direct the electricity to a bit of metal. (You’d need a really high voltage too, since the metal is in ore form, which means a lot of it doesn’t even touch each other and you’d need to supply it with enough power to penetrate the stone inbetween) And why? They don’t know that smelting metal is something good yet. They have literally no reason to do any of those things.

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To answer the question of why would they,
within the context of Thrive, it’s still a video game. Which means the ridiculously specific circumstances with no use prior can still be achieved by crafty players. So, IMO, the question is not “could an underwater civilization do this” but “could a player achieve this”.

That still means that if it is extremely, extremely specific circumstances that only a player could achieve, it is a very low priority for including in the game.
I won’t specifically prevent anyone from working on it, but it won’t be added to any milestone. So it won’t be in the game with any high probability anytime soon.

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Just wait until people find glitches that lets them smeltle the meltle.

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Don’t worry, folks, we’ll have mods to add magic to the game.

(I’d like one that makes magic fade as technology advances, so it would be absent by the industrial stage.)

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To solve all the unrealistic stuff people want in the game there should be a mode where unrealistic stuff can be done like underwater civilisations

Even with LAWK off I haven’t seen any developers being interested in making underwater civs. And that’s reserved for physically still somewhat plausible things, so magical underwater civs are still of the table.

Any arguments for underwater civs will be ignored if they don’t get a large part of the dev team behind them. That’s why I dislike this discussion quite a bit as I have yet to see more than a tiny hint of plausibility in any explanations.

This isn’t an official decision but I’ll think we’ll officially only go as far as amphibian civilizations and some modder can do the rest.

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Is… is there some reason that an entirely aquatic species can’t simply do their metalworking above the surface? I mean, sea creatures interact with the surface world all the time. An intelligent race would be curious about the environment and would learn to exploit it to some degree. Not so unreasonable that they would learn about fire.

They could just set up an operation on a beach and smelt to their heart’s content. It would be a hostile environment, sure, but not so different from pearl-diving, which has taken place for thousands of years.

(Ooh! Maybe they could even dig out artificial lakes on land, with some kind of overland transport, so that enemies would not be able to cross the ‘moat’. I would love to have a secret smelting operation there!)

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How would they reach land tho? Almost all equipment we use to dive requires fire in some way. If you were to have an amphibian creature, then sure, but why wouldn’t it just emigrate to land entirely?

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They wouldn’t use equipment, at first. I can imagine them going out of the water for a minute or two to grab some wood, or setting traps for game. As I mentioned, humans exploited the ocean long before the invention of scuba gear.

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alien murloks in lame mens terns

Why would they tho?

  1. Some steps in the making of fire take more than a minute or two. Try making a fire with primitive tools (E.G. fire sticks and the like) but while holding your breath.
  2. In our world, the idea of making fire took very long too. We had a long period where we would just keep the fire burning, because if it dies out you’re out of fire and need to find it naturally, which doesn’t happen a lot. There would not really be a reason for the species to test the utilities of fire out if they can’t even bring it home either.
  3. Remember that every step needs a why. The creature would need to gather firewood, kindling and light it. And for what reason? They would have literally no idea of the utilities of fire, so why take all those steps? Also, unless they go out of the water to cook their food each time, the biggest use of fire would be for forging metal and the like, which is even more steps.
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I think an amphibious species is an interesting idea. It seems there have been really big ones and they might be able to do a lot underwater and on land.

  1. Some steps in the making of fire take more than a minute or two. Try making a fire with primitive tools (E.G. fire sticks and the like) but while holding your breath.
  2. In our world, the idea of making fire took very long too. We had a long period where we would just keep the fire burning, because if it dies out you’re out of fire and need to find it naturally, which doesn’t happen a lot. There would not really be a reason for the species to test the utilities of fire out if they can’t even bring it home either.
  3. Remember that every step needs a why. The creature would need to gather firewood, kindling and light it. And for what reason? They would have literally no idea of the utilities of fire, so why take all those steps? Also, unless they go out of the water to cook their food each time, the biggest use of fire would be for forging metal and the like, which is even more steps.

Points 2 and 3 are valid (as for 1, they could take turns or even just hold the equipment out of the water). However, we are not necessarily talking about primitive tribes! Mass food production and large-scale societies are perfectly possible without metalworking, and are probably easier to create without the need for shelter from the elements. I doubt that those societies would be organized the same way (no walls, after all), but merchants, scholars, and religions would still exist. Heck, even the scientific method could exist. Do you think that the secrets of fire are impossible to discover under those circumstances?

There’s this proof that underwater discussions don’t really go anywhere on the canadaboards forum:


Note the date “Mon Apr 25, 2011 11:11 am”

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Well, do we have the master list of already-made suggestions?

I alright, my crustacean idea is still a go I just can’t find the thermal conductivity of silicon at 10 atm. Does anyone know the correlation between pressure and thermal conductivity that could tell me if I can just divide something. Seriously I’ve gone through all the equations and I need to find joules and the speed they move and I have no damn Belgiuming idea how to find that for heat.

I found my notes I need W=VA (joules per coulomb x coulombs per second) at 11,300,000 pascals

It seems that everyone is more interested in only talking about their idea, which likely has been discussed already, instead of going through all the discussions and compiling a list.

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This feels oddly directed towards me due to me being the only other person posting something none amphibious. Oh well, the point of this is to make purely aquatic civs advance.

Unrelated, but the idea that something thats almost essentially a dinosaur starts its life cycle as a tadpole is intriguing and strange at the same time.

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