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[towerator]

It might even be useful for low-scale computers wanting to save on computing time and power.

Adding in plate tectonics should not at all be a noticible factor in processing time.  Creating plates with Voronoi cells (thanks Maximum Spin) or just plain having a noisemap of vectors that the computer then draws into plates based upon regional directionality is a one-time computation.  Even if you have volcanoes that are set to blow at specific dates, that's more something to add as a scheduler event for worldgen time, not something that gets checked every tick.

Yeah, nothing we talked about seems very resource-hungry, since continental drift is so slow it may as well be ignored completely (Even an ultrafast ridge would take something like a millenium to move a continent by one tile). Plate dynamics would just be a small layer, and all volcanoes cited in the first post are either "Frequent and don't do anything on the world scale" or "Have big consequences, but very rare". If there's only a plinian+ eruption every 10 years in the world this shouldn't be too bad to calculate, and the effects would be in the kind of "Cull x% of all figures in the affected settlements due to famine", as well as simply destroy close settlements. As of new volcano formation (something we haven't discussed in this thread yet), you could say something like "every x years throw a dice, the particular arc/hotspot creates a volcano if successful".

[Nordlicht]

Non magic worlds could have an early creation simulation from cooling down, forming continents etc. calculated in thousands of years per cycle. Basically like Simearth did it.

[NW_Kohaku]

Non magic worlds could have an early creation simulation from cooling down, forming continents etc. calculated in thousands of years per cycle. Basically like Simearth did it.

The end result of having procedural magma flows and plate tectonics, and the resulting things like subduction faults creating mountain ranges (which would leave the current elevation noisemap to more fill in the blanks between major mountain ranges created by the fault lines) would be fairly similar to that, but it would be a lot faster. 

I mean, if players really were keen on it, you can start with a "Old Earth" simulation that has magma cooling for a second or so at the start of worldgen, but since 99% of worldgen time is history after sapients exist, barring the rejected worlds going on for a while, you're just putting on a flashy show, as you'll want to hyper-accelerate the few billion years of prehistory unless you want to have actual procedural evolution taking place, as there's little reason to simulate erosion in real time.

[towerator]

Non magic worlds could have an early creation simulation from cooling down, forming continents etc. calculated in thousands of years per cycle. Basically like Simearth did it.

The end result of having procedural magma flows and plate tectonics, and the resulting things like subduction faults creating mountain ranges (which would leave the current elevation noisemap to more fill in the blanks between major mountain ranges created by the fault lines) would be fairly similar to that, but it would be a lot faster. 

I mean, if players really were keen on it, you can start with a "Old Earth" simulation that has magma cooling for a second or so at the start of worldgen, but since 99% of worldgen time is history after sapients exist, barring the rejected worlds going on for a while, you're just putting on a flashy show, as you'll want to hyper-accelerate the few billion years of prehistory unless you want to have actual procedural evolution taking place, as there's little reason to simulate erosion in real time.

It's hard to deny that the prospect of seeing your world being born starting from its accretion to the settling of continents to their current spot would be somewhat hard to do, but undoubtedly very cool.

Related to world formation and tectonics: there is a theory stating that plate tectonics as we know the may have been kickstarted by the Earth's collision with Theia. It's not known what geology would have looked like without it, but this adds another processus to the "Do you wanna build a planet?" thingie.