• 2 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 12th, 2023

help-circle




  • I like the part about how it reminds me of Minecraft, but in space and with tools/weapons that never break and the ability to add more inventory slots. (There are less material options for building player housing though, but at least this limitation has led to some very creative community bases.) That, and I always find it rewarding to discover as many of a planet’s plant and animal species as possible to earn those chip things you can learn crafting recipes with, and many of the planets’ terrain looks pretty awesome since while it is all procedural copypasta, there are countless possible combinations of available ores, rock models/colors/usefulness, terrain color, animal appearances/traits, plant products, hazards, etc. You can use all of this to determine which planets near your spawnpoint are useful and which ones are useless, out of millions of possible planets. I also like how after coming back to that game after more than a year, I found that unearthing the buried tech things gives you 4 of that data thing you need to complete all the tech-trees in the early game instead of just 1. And unlike many games, they update all platforms at the same time, which is great since I find the console controls on the Switch edition easier to remember than the PC controls.

    But I do wish the planets had more than just one climate and biome so they’d be more realistic and those 2 undiscovered rare polar animals keeping you from earning lots of nanites would be less painful to track down. My current home planet is a swamp world that has Florida-like temperatures even at the poles and on mountains.







  • That number almost certainly includes my state WA, with its 8.5 months of rain, and only 3 and a half nice months in which there are just 4-7 summer days when an AC would really be needed. While we usually wear raincoats for Christmas instead of snowcoats, cold snaps are getting more and more severe and common, and on some years these days we have a difference of up to 80 degrees between the coldest day (usually in February) and the hottest (usually in July).



  • Saltwater destroys soil and vegetation instead of facilitating its existence. And you’d need to add better soil and the means to produce more fertile soil (plant species that shed leaves often and have nitrogen-fixing microbes in their roots).

    But such water would make rain in the surrounding area more likely and common, if it can be sustained. For instance, I hear there are plans to re-create an inlet in northern Libya that used to exist but dried up when it was cut off from the Mediterranean by an earthquake that pushed up a natural dam some 6000 years ago or something, so the surroundings can become greener. (But given the current flooding of roughly that same area, doing so would be a terrible idea for the people who now live in that below-sea-level area.)