I like the dichotomy of "farm native plants and hope you don't die" versus "invest time and energy into a hydroponics bay at the expense of other critical activities"...
Haha, well then, happy to be of use!
I like that idea, but I'm not sure how I'd implement it. I'm still fairly new at all this, to be honest. I'll look into it, though, as I really like the idea of having to research and develop new technology.
-The traditional/non-DFHack way would be to have 'research results' items represent tech levels - these would be preserved reagents in more advanced reactions (or possibly even materials for specialised workshops). From experience, it's not even that far off reality for painstakingly-won results to only exist in a few scattered copies, hahaha.
-Anyway, for the alien plants, you might have a reaction that consumes a harvested plant and has a maybe ~1% chance of producing a 'results' item. Might want to output something else too (even just a puff of gas), since workers earn experience by the product.
-For a multi-tiered approach, it'd make sense to have material requirements increase at each stage. To unlock stage 2 processing of the XYZ plant, you'd need to harvest one, process it, and then spend the processed result for a ~1% chance of unlocking the second refinement step. This way, each step would need a greater investment of time and materials than the last - especially if alien food processing also consumes other resources.
-Would probably be a good idea to also have a way of making copies of the 'research' items once you have them. It'd be incredibly frustrating to share one copy between multiple workshops, let alone lose it somehow and have to restart from scratch. Even a nominal cost would keep players honest - when working on a modern-day apocalyptic-y mod, I had CDs that required a unit of plastic and gold/silver/aluminium.
-There are different ways to tweak this kind of system to your liking. I think the Tool item class is traditional for this sort of thing, but I always preferred to entirely replace the Toy class. You could make heaps of different item types, or use special non-natural materials (a la earthenware), or some combination of the two.
Extreme bloat of the item, reaction, and possibly material lists is inevitable with this approach. Lots of copy-paste action. But reaction bloat isn't so much of an issue anymore thanks to menu nesting, and it's up to you whether item and material bloat is a problem or not. It's not like Vanilla doesn't have bloat already (~50 near-identical woods, ~20 flours, ~10 fibres, ~50 non-economic stones, countless leathers...)
-From what already exists, it also looks possible to make a much more elegant system in DFHack, in which incremental counters track progress and add/remove reactions as different thresholds are passed. No idea how you'd go about it, though.
Interesting. I didn't even know preserved reactants were a thing, so that had never occurred to me lol. But, you've already given me some ideas on how a research system would work. I'm thinking you have three kinds of research lab: Xenobiology, where food processing and other alien-related sciences are researched; Material Science, where new alloys and other materials are researched; and Military R&D, where new weapons, armors and ammo are researched. Each would have three tiers of research available to it, with higher tier research consuming lower tier research.
Relating specifically to plants and farming, I think most crops would just be a tier one research, mainly keep things from being to hard on early settlements. However, particularly rare/useful crops, as well as animal products, are tier two research items, and require one or more tier one Xenobiology research products in order to be discovered. Tier three Xenobiology relates to the primitive aliens, and requires access to the parts of their less-than-sentient cousins, necessitating either trade or conflict to acquire, but more on that later
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Weather modding mostly seems to be syndrome-based, and syndromes can be a bastard to balance. Once played around with adding acid rain - ended up with something that was mostly an annoyance to adult humans, but would almost instantly wipe out all pets and small livestock if it happened to hit before you could get underground.
The cool thing about alien worlds, though, is that the sky is literally the limit. Hell, our next-door neighbor has regular sulphuric acid hurricanes, so it's hard to call bullshit on anything less metal.
Hmmm...I'll look into that. I'm thinking the planet this takes place on would be fairly Earth-like, just to hand-wave away a layer of colonization blues lol. It's going to be hard enough as it is without requiring people to filter the air or something. With that in mind, sulphuric acid hurricanes are probably off the table, but I'll do some more research and see what is viable.
Fair enough! Getting munched by the wildlife is sci-fi tradition. And real nature has enough hideous examples to get any sadistic creator god started off. The insect world alone seems like a nightmare hellscape.
Very true, though I already have some ideas on the biology of the creatures on this world. I'm looking at more from a "what are the ways living creatures have to solve certain problems" prospective, not "what Earth creatures are weird/scary looking" lol. It's unlikely that anything from another world will resemble anything we're used to, but it's also very likely that they'd have to solve the same basic problems as life on Earth: how do I find food, how do I find shelter, how do I protect myself from danger, how do I make more of myself, etc. With that in mind, I've been looking at various ecological niches here on Earth and how animals fit into those niches, and designing the aliens appropriately. Starting with the basic concept that all vertebrate life on Earth has the same basic body plan (one body, one head, four limbs), and with some basic parameters for the world itself (Earth-like, slightly lower gravity, slightly thicker atmosphere, etc.), I've settled on a nine-limbed body plan for my aliens. Eight of the limbs are for mobility/manipulation, while the ninth is modified into a "mouth appendage" with a large and powerful four-part pincer used for combat. This is not the mouth, however. The mouth is located on the body, along with the sensory organs and the brain, inside a heavily armored brain-case. All of the usual organs are going to replaced with analogs that, in game terms, are functionally identical but lore-wise are completely unique structures that serve similar purposes to what we're used to (ichor pumps for hearts, digestive sacks for stomachs, etc.). I'm also thinking creatures on this world would have three biological sexes: male, "false" female and "true" female. Most creatures have much tougher skin thanks to the increased atmospheric pressure, with some requiring railguns firing tungsten or depleted uranium penetrators to significantly injure. The thicker atmosphere also contributes to a larger variety and prominence of flying creatures, with the apex predators of most environments being Arrowhawks or Floatwhales. Of course, there's plenty of land-dwelling and aquatic creatures to worry about to, including the aptly named Helleaters, that are roughly analogous to bears or tigers.
It should be fun times all the way around
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Hahaha, sounds busy! Are you thinking of the natives as hostile-only, as possible contacts, or both/neither?
The natives are going to live in Good biomes, along with their non-sentient cousins who they use as domesticated animals. They're closer to the elves or humans in Vanilla, as they usually prefer to trade but can become hostile if you provoke them. I'm going to mess with the ethics and values to see if I can give them a really alien mindset, which people will have to figure out through trial-and-error (or cheat and look at the raws lol). They have a spoken language, but it's based on binary, with each "word" being a unique sixteen-character sequence of exclamation points and asterisks. On that note, I'm probably going to change the human language to just be English, seeing as how most international and scientific communication today occurs in English.
The precursor constructs inhabit Evil biomes, and act like goblins. Really, really powerful goblins. They don't have any domestic animals, or any need for them, and don't eat, sleep, get tired or feel pain or nausea. Constructs are divided into various castes, ranging from the essentially helpless Probes which build their enigmatic monoliths to the Triskelions, human-sized tripods that are
very fast and use their bladed legs for horrific melee combat, five-legged Prophets that can indoctrinate organic creatures, and the massive Monitors, with a very,
very long range "plasma beam" attack that can melt most things into slag in very short order. There will probably be more, that's all I have in mind for now.
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In other news, I'm almost done with the metals and ores. I'll post an update on that soon, maybe even later today, then I'm going to start working on the various systems of your settlement. Custom buildings and reactions, electricity, oil production, research, etc. Once all of that works, I'll start working on the aliens
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Topic: Alien Biosphere Mod - Exploratory Thread (Read 4511 times)