Mass Extinction Events

There are many ways Mass Extinction Events may happen. Asteroids, Supervolcanos, drastic climate changes, and many others. They have happened several times in Real Life, so, therefore, they should happen in Thrive as well. However, there are several things that must be discussed about them:

1. Frequency. Normally, millions of years pass between Mass Extinction events. Since we are speeding the time up for evolution, millions of years would go by much faster. We need to decide at what intervals they could happen. I suggest having some sort of probability system, where after a certain interval of time after one event, the game "rolls virtual dice" to see if there is another event. The chance starts out incredibly low, but slowly gets higher after time.

2. Survivability. In a totally realistic game, the player's species would probably be killed in the event. Since having a message pop up in the game saying "An asteroid destroyed your species. Game over." would not make for a fun game, we need to give players a chance of surviving. There would have to be some difficulty in surviving, or else the event would be nothing more than a scenery change.

3. Recovery. After most mass extinction events, the world is barren for a short time, but then there is a massive species diversification, with a bunch of new species evolving to fill all of the newly available niches. I would suggest just speeding up the auto-evo, but since the current auto-evo concept has been ruled impossible, and we have yet to find a replacement, I don't know how this would work.

I suppose such events should only take place when there is a time skip, it would be weird to have a mass extinction event happen every few hours during play. In that case, we'd have to calculate all the geological effects and then reassign all the niches based on that. Therefore I think the answer depends on how the niche system works.

Maybe we could just let the systems already in place handle it? Like, for example, an asteroid stray to close to your planet (not because of the disaster system, but because of some other reason, like a collision), and it get's pulled in by it's gravity. It crashes, and kills off some species. Depending on the size, velocity, etc. it may or may not be a mass extinction.

Or, if there's an outbreak of disease. Just let the game run things normally, and see how many animals it kills. It doesn't really seem like there's any need for anything extra to decide things about disasters.

~sciocont wrote:

-We can simply eliminate the highest few trophic levels of each biome effected

Narrowest Niches too.

Tenebrarum wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

-We can simply eliminate the highest few trophic levels of each biome effected

Narrowest Niches too.

Yep.

What defines a narrow niche?

roadkillguy wrote:

What defines a narrow niche?

Having very few food sources.

DragonEye4 wrote:

There are many ways Mass Extinction Events may happen. Asteroids, Supervolcanos, drastic climate changes, and many others. They have happened several times in Real Life, so, therefore, they should happen in Thrive as well. However, there are several things that must be discussed about them:

1. Frequency. Normally, millions of years pass between Mass Extinction events. Since we are speeding the time up for evolution, millions of years would go by much faster. We need to decide at what intervals they could happen. I suggest having some sort of probability system, where after a certain interval of time after one event, the game "rolls virtual dice" to see if there is another event. The chance starts out incredibly low, but slowly gets higher after time.

I think it'd be intresting if it actually mattered which planet you chose. (Please note: I am not very good at astronomy, but this is a guess.) For example, if you had chosen your planet to be really close to the sun, a natural disaster would be more common. Here's the thing: Since natural disasters are more common, your creature may evolve better protection.

This thread is 2 years old don't necro post.