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Most Planets are Barren and have to be Terrarformed?


Kuritho

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How about most planets will be barren/toxic/uninhabitable and you'd have to place biospheres, re-stabilize its magnetic force-field, and make transfer harmful materials?

Lets say you landed on a harmful planet but full of materials. Your AI suggests that the soil is ready for growing planets and rich in nutrients. You place a biosphere and create a magnetic forcefield that blocks solarflares from damaging the plants inside. After you see that the planets are growing giantly, you call your alliance to suggest terraforming this planet. The alliance agrees and starts funding materials so the planet will be a giant "garden world". After a while, a rival alliance sees this planet and see show much you are benefitting from it, so they send a bunch of "dirty bombs" to "de-terraform" it.

 

Plez, NQ.

 

Moar Ideas:

You just found a planet FULL of life, but all the plants/creatures are harmful to humans. You'd have to "de-terraform the planet, then re-terraform the planet". After being de-terraform, the planet loses stability after a few years without life. The planet becomes to unstable the planet basically implodes (because... that'd be cool). All constructs within about 1000km are heavily damaged. The resources will then recollect later to recreate the planet, albeit different.

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I think terraforming would be an awesome mechanic in the game. It could take a long time to complete, something like several months. And it wouldn't really have to be too scientifically accurate or reasonable either, just something to add a bit of fun to the game. It would definitely make a great community project! In my opinion, I think only a select few random planets should be terraformable, to make it so that every planet in the game isn't a potential garden world. That way, diversity of planets would remain, and it would allow for people to focus more heavily on the few candidates that have potential.

 

Awesome idea! Not a coder, so I don't know how complex or difficult this would be to implement. But still, it would make a great community project.

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I think terraforming would be an awesome mechanic in the game. It could take a long time to complete, something like several months. And it wouldn't really have to be too scientifically accurate or reasonable either, just something to add a bit of fun to the game. It would definitely make a great community project! In my opinion, I think only a select few random planets should be terraformable, to make it so that every planet in the game isn't a potential garden world. That way, diversity of planets would remain, and it would allow for people to focus more heavily on the few candidates that have potential.

 

Awesome idea! Not a coder, so I don't know how complex or difficult this would be to implement. But still, it would make a great community project.

It would be semi-complex, unless they just order a massive voxel change. Like having "voxel 1" the dirt you found on the barren planet, and "voxel 2" the grass of normal planets. They could simply issue the "voxel 1, to change to voxel 2".

Or they could simply do a painstaking planet regeneration.

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It becomes more and more interesting, the more topics of this kind we have. I haven't thought about that. First we talk about breeding different kind of species, now the possibility to land onto a toxic planet (beware too have enough oxygen not to die when terraforming).

You have various ideas then but it seems complex, and could be great for specific planets (surprise mthfckr!) but not for all of their kind, otherwise there won't be any surprise at all. I kindda would like NQ to update the planets to get to find new ones like that without them telling us (and also other secret things for players to find themselves), the MMOs nowadays are too straightforward and give you all the necessary infos at the beginning, that's boring. We want freedom and all its fears and hazards.

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How about most planets will be barren/toxic/uninhabitable and you'd have to place biospheres, re-stabilize its magnetic force-field, and make transfer harmful materials?

Lets say you landed on a harmful planet but full of materials. Your AI suggests that the soil is ready for growing planets and rich in nutrients. You place a biosphere and create a magnetic forcefield that blocks solarflares from damaging the plants inside. After you see that the planets are growing giantly, you call your alliance to suggest terraforming this planet. The alliance agrees and starts funding materials so the planet will be a giant "garden world". After a while, a rival alliance sees this planet and see show much you are benefitting from it, so they send a bunch of "dirty bombs" to "de-terraform" it.

 

Plez, NQ.

 

Moar Ideas:

You just found a planet FULL of life, but all the plants/creatures are harmful to humans. You'd have to "de-terraform the planet, then re-terraform the planet". After being de-terraform, the planet loses stability after a few years without life. The planet becomes to unstable the planet basically implodes (because... that'd be cool). All constructs within about 1000km are heavily damaged. The resources will then recollect later to recreate the planet, albeit different.

 

 

I feel like with stargates already being a huge undertaking to build and activate, adding this in as another required step would be more of an annoyance than anything. I love the idea but I think it should be done more a bonus feature. Maybe 1 in every 3 planets would be like this? Those planets would have better resources and so the extra effort would be worth it.

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I feel like with stargates already being a huge undertaking to build and activate, adding this in as another required step would be more of an annoyance than anything. I love the idea but I think it should be done more a bonus feature. Maybe 1 in every 3 planets would be like this? Those planets would have better resources and so the extra effort would be worth it.

I could imagine colony ships TRYING to find inhabitable planets :D

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  • 3 months later...

It becomes more and more interesting, the more topics of this kind we have. I haven't thought about that. First we talk about breeding different kind of species, now the possibility to land onto a toxic planet (beware too have enough oxygen not to die when terraforming).

You have various ideas then but it seems complex, and could be great for specific planets (surprise mthfckr!) but not for all of their kind, otherwise there won't be any surprise at all. I kindda would like NQ to update the planets to get to find new ones like that without them telling us (and also other secret things for players to find themselves), the MMOs nowadays are too straightforward and give you all the necessary infos at the beginning, that's boring. We want freedom and all its fears and hazards.

Yes, this.  From what I gather they do plan on adding new kinds of planets/biomes and place the new ones at more distant locations so it seemed like they were there from the beginning.  When developers announce new additions to their games it kind of ruins the surprise of discovery that you would get in game.

 

As for terraforming, I love this idea.  How should it be implemented though?  I think it should feel like a strategy game where you can place various species to try to play with balancing aspects of the atmosphere/hydrosphere.  Maybe there would even be a way to jumpstart a dead planet's core and increase rotation.  These aspects would be extremely difficult to master however because there is huge delay with an input and the output.  You may accidentally create a runaway greenhouse planet or a snowball earth :)

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As far as terraforming a planet goes I see a way to simplify it down so that you can do so without massive drain, it would still require quite a bit of processing however if you had a few things listed below

- Gases

- Temperature

- Access to resources

First off terraforming a planet would be a massive undertaking one of which probably only a massive corporation could do, or a large number of people all doing it but not together. Gases would be critical if an atmosphere is mostly co2 people can't breath there. To fix that you need plants. But if just planting them were enough that would be unrealistic and boring people would just go around planting them randomly and would make it relatively easy. So what you do is have plants only able to live on planets with enough water present. This meaning forming oceans/bringing oceans to the planet. Melting icecaps of some feasible. Then when enough water is present small plants can grow. The water present means that the rain cycle with exist watering plants. Habitable worlds already have this. However to make it even more interesting plant should need a specific temperature to live. To increase a planets temperature you have to give it a thicker atmosphere. To do so you need plants, or other methods that I won't go into such as CO2 factories and such. So what you need are plants that can live in the low water/cold environment of barren worlds to improve the atmosphere so that you can bring in other normal plants. Final point is that since you are thickining the atmosphere with green house gasses, at some point it would become toxic. So you couldn't take a pluto like planet pump it full of gas and then live on it because the air would be toxic despite the temperatures being ok.

 

To pull this off you need a few things.

 - You need to keep a count of the plants on the world. This could be done by doing random sampling of the worlds surface as server processing permits to determine the percentage vegetation. CO2 factories and such would have to be factored in after if they are added. This could determine the level of gases I suggest only 2 for simplicity, Oxygen, and CO2. Then players would die if the percentage of Oxygen was too low. Maybe they suffocate slower the higher it is, with there being a level at which living without extra oxygen would be possible aka a habitable planet. CO2 would be necessary for warming the planet the higher the CO2 the warmer the planet but too much would start killing people on the planet, meaning a pluto like planet can't be terraformed. Making the gases levels instead of ratios allows players on habitable worlds to still build freely since CO2 and Oxygen are independent you can have as many plants on the surface without worrying about the planet freezing.

 

- Water would also be needed to terraform a planet, where it comes from does not matter to me but it would need to exist. For this you could also do random sampling to determined how much water was on the planet averaging multiple random samples to get the most accurate picture. Then once water exists life has to be brought to the barren planet in the form of a plant that can exist in the current conditions. This plant could then spread with the help of random placement generation starting with the original plant as the epicenter, then once enough is covered you can have a breathable atmosphere and so on.

 

You would need separate unique species of plants, the ability to transport and replant them, the above mention scripts for monitoring planets, and a unique tag for each planet that set the starting conditions for each of those values to make terraforming possible, but I think it would be amazing and a very realistic system that could be implemented similarly to how I have described.

 

Thanks for reading Jared(Yeager)

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As far as terraforming a planet goes I see a way to simplify it down so that you can do so without massive drain, it would still require quite a bit of processing however if you had a few things listed below

- Gases

- Temperature

- Access to resources

First off terraforming a planet would be a massive undertaking one of which probably only a massive corporation could do, or a large number of people all doing it but not together. Gases would be critical if an atmosphere is mostly co2 people can't breath there. To fix that you need plants. But if just planting them were enough that would be unrealistic and boring people would just go around planting them randomly and would make it relatively easy. So what you do is have plants only able to live on planets with enough water present. This meaning forming oceans/bringing oceans to the planet. Melting icecaps of some feasible. Then when enough water is present small plants can grow. The water present means that the rain cycle with exist watering plants. Habitable worlds already have this. However to make it even more interesting plant should need a specific temperature to live. To increase a planets temperature you have to give it a thicker atmosphere. To do so you need plants, or other methods that I won't go into such as CO2 factories and such. So what you need are plants that can live in the low water/cold environment of barren worlds to improve the atmosphere so that you can bring in other normal plants. Final point is that since you are thickining the atmosphere with green house gasses, at some point it would become toxic. So you couldn't take a pluto like planet pump it full of gas and then live on it because the air would be toxic despite the temperatures being ok.

 

To pull this off you need a few things.

 - You need to keep a count of the plants on the world. This could be done by doing random sampling of the worlds surface as server processing permits to determine the percentage vegetation. CO2 factories and such would have to be factored in after if they are added. This could determine the level of gases I suggest only 2 for simplicity, Oxygen, and CO2. Then players would die if the percentage of Oxygen was too low. Maybe they suffocate slower the higher it is, with there being a level at which living without extra oxygen would be possible aka a habitable planet. CO2 would be necessary for warming the planet the higher the CO2 the warmer the planet but too much would start killing people on the planet, meaning a pluto like planet can't be terraformed. Making the gases levels instead of ratios allows players on habitable worlds to still build freely since CO2 and Oxygen are independent you can have as many plants on the surface without worrying about the planet freezing.

 

- Water would also be needed to terraform a planet, where it comes from does not matter to me but it would need to exist. For this you could also do random sampling to determined how much water was on the planet averaging multiple random samples to get the most accurate picture. Then once water exists life has to be brought to the barren planet in the form of a plant that can exist in the current conditions. This plant could then spread with the help of random placement generation starting with the original plant as the epicenter, then once enough is covered you can have a breathable atmosphere and so on.

 

You would need separate unique species of plants, the ability to transport and replant them, the above mention scripts for monitoring planets, and a unique tag for each planet that set the starting conditions for each of those values to make terraforming possible, but I think it would be amazing and a very realistic system that could be implemented similarly to how I have described.

 

Thanks for reading Jared(Yeager)

 

No, just no.

There will be biomes though, which will act as different environments.

 

NQ wants to pull off one of the most incredible things ever done in a MMO. They should focus on that and not on some more server side calculations.

Water will only be in-game as a whole body. No aqueduct building, no floods, no player built canals. If you dig through a mountain it will 'float'.

TO SAVE SERVER SIDE CALCULATIONS.

 

Why on earth would you possibly introduce A TON of those calcs deliberately only because of god damn plants?

 

Perhaps we get gas giants or some more biomes in a later expansion/patch, but I doubt they will introduce such a terraforming mechanic

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I was just outlining one way they could go about adding terraforming to the game, I agree it would add quite a bit of calculations on the servers end but terraforming a planet I believe is an undertaking many would want to do, this assumes that some planets are not habitable from the beginning. I 100% agree with you that this should not be done right now or even in the near future, but if they do have inhabitable planets one day an Org will want to set up a base on one and that is when terraforming would come in to play.

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If they're serious about territories, then territories could become breathable with the right prefabs (triangulation?) and upgrades. It could be visible from a distance, as a blue dome above the territory, to indicate that it has a breathable atmosphere.

 

Then again, I'm thinking in terms of pressurization, which last time I heard they said they would stay away from because of performance issues, which is a shame.

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If they're serious about territories, then territories could become breathable with the right prefabs (triangulation?) and upgrades. It could be visible from a distance, as a blue dome above the territory, to indicate that it has a breathable atmosphere.

 

Then again, I'm thinking in terms of pressurization, which last time I heard they said they would stay away from because of performance issues, which is a shame.

Better to have a sandbox mmo with voxel building than pressure in a ship. Which is nice and dandy but in the end adds stupid and boring gameplay

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Why is this an ultimatum?

Because you can't check every second, every constructs for holes in it. Too much load. Besides the fact that I would just run around and punch holes in every ship/station I see just to annoy people. They have to search for the leak and seal it. Then I start again. Adds no interesting gameplay for the most part. Sure it would be cool and all but the drawbacks are much worse

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