Autotrophes

Question on autotrophes: How will they be handled? Most of our work on biomes seems to assume we're dealing entirely with Earth-style stationaries and tiny floaters. Our work on Auto-Evo seems to include them to an extent, but not much when it comes to drastic changes like Kite Trees or grass-to-tree transformations.

I vote we make most of these assumptions official, and make changes as needed further down the line. Stationary autotrophes are familiar and easy to deal with until we have our framework functioning. Large, difficult to program differences like tree to kite-tree can be pre-programed to occur at arbitrary points, or not at all, leaving limited evolutionary paths that should be significantly less glitchy and easier to put together.

Thoughts?

I agree with all of that.

Awesome, so now all we need is a comprehensive list of all macroscopic autotrophe catagories.

For land you can pretty much whittle it down to shrubs, grass and trees. Anything beyond that would be aquatic or not present on Earth, I believe. Again we've got our infamous kite-trees for low-grav/thick atmosphere worlds. Moss and lichens can be done almost exclusively with textures and as such we probably don't need to include.

Anyone else want to contribute/compile this?

Tenebrarum wrote:

Awesome, so now all we need is a comprehensive list of all macroscopic autotrophe catagories.

For land you can pretty much whittle it down to shrubs, grass and trees. Anything beyond that would be aquatic or not present on Earth, I believe. Again we've got our infamous kite-trees for low-grav/thick atmosphere worlds. Moss and lichens can be done almost exclusively with textures and as such we probably don't need to include.

Anyone else want to contribute/compile this?

I can work on it.
It really boils down to herbaceous (monocots and dicots) vs woody (dicots) on land. These are true vascular plants. Seaweed are protists, and can be organized by color, but we needn't worry about that too much, because it just separated different groups of seaweed. True water plants could be woody, but there's really little need for them to be since water can support their weight. This is why true plants that live in water are usually herbaceous.

I'm not sure what you mean by "all categories". If you're trying to sort through plants so we can better place them in biomes, we need only sort out attributes (tags) that could apply to plants.

~sciocont wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "all categories". If you're trying to sort through plants so we can better place them in biomes, we need only sort out attributes (tags) that could apply to plants.

Yeah, that's what I meant. We still need to know what we'll have and what template organisms we'll need for these, if they can't evole from one catagory to another.

Tenebrarum wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "all categories". If you're trying to sort through plants so we can better place them in biomes, we need only sort out attributes (tags) that could apply to plants.

Yeah, that's what I meant. We still need to know what we'll have and what template organisms we'll need for these, if they can't evole from one catagory to another.

They should be able to evolve from one category to another. We just need a lot of tags.
-size tags
-vascular/nonvascular
-woody/nonwoody
-seeds/spores/budding/runners (reproduction)
--seed production (flowering/nonflowering)
---fruit producing
--seed distribution (wind/water/animal/falling)
--runners (underground/aboveground)
--(semelparous<+++>iteroparous)
-water/land/sky based
--in water (unanchored/ anchored in ground underwater)
--in water (underwater/on surface)
--in air (unanchored/ anchored in ground)

So, would this change the Biome system in any way? Because it seems like we should probably have two mutations per generation, one for autotrophs and one for heterotrophs. Because it seems like the move-and-response system doesn't include the autotrphs nearly as much as the heterotrophs, and the autotrophs drive the entire system.
Also, yay Kite Trees.

p.s. Sorry if this is already taken care of.

Pyrotin wrote:

So, would this change the Biome system in any way? Because it seems like we should probably have two mutations per generation, one for autotrophs and one for heterotrophs. Because it seems like the move-and-response system doesn't include the autotrphs nearly as much as the heterotrophs, and the autotrophs drive the entire system.
Also, yay Kite Trees.

p.s. Sorry if this is already taken care of.

It has been taken care of, actually. Autotrophs may have a much greater chance of evolving because there are more of them, and any herbivore evolving will affect at least one autotroph.

It all works out, that's the beauty of the evolution system.

Run that past me again when I've gotten up to biomes that can handle forests. I'm on Arid (only goes up to sucession stage 2) right now.