I want to play on a green planet!

[xlq0625]

Currently,there is impossible to create a planet with ocean takes more than 10% of the surface area.I understand that the developer want to make water a rare thing is most planet you would play with.(and it could save them from designing navy mechanism)Yet I believe there is many player who have the same thought as I have: play on a planet which have vast surface water like the Earth, that every inch of ground covered by green grass instead of red rock.
I sincerely waiting for the developer would change this situation in another update.

[zgrssd]

To much water would result in landmasses being isolated and unreachable. I am unsure how much air can compensate here, but I would not try to rely on it as a solution.

Note that the Navy is already planned. There was one poll and navy won slightly ahead of airforce, but vic choose to do the airforce first.

[BlueTemplar]

What about this Siwa ?

Ok, water is still probably less than 10%, but it's pretty green, isn't it ?

Anyway, I assume that worlds with a LOT more water are going to added at the same time than Navies ?

[newageofpower]

I've hit 18% water on Siwa before. Might be able to get higher on Medusas.

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: newageofpower

I've hit 18% water on Siwa before. Might be able to get higher on Medusas.

I would expect the hard cap to be around 20%.

Note however that the Geology overview does not account for lakes, wich can make up a significant part of the surface.

[GuardsmanGary]

The amount of greenery is not just dependent on what percentage of the planet is water, but on factors like temperature and rainfall. It's not difficult to generate siwa worlds with greenery from pole to pole, and even on worlds with large bodies of water is it possible to still only have a thin green belt around the equator, or great deserts.

[Maerchen]

Pff green world.

I played on an overgrown blue planet. Everything on the map was blue: grass, savannah, forests.

You can have worlds of every color, it seems.

[Mina]

ORIGINAL: xlq0625
play on a planet which have vast surface water like the Earth, that every inch of ground covered by green grass instead of red rock.

Turn on detailed planet generation if you haven't already, and reroll some of the steps a bit more. I fairly easily generated a Siwa planet with 100% vegetation coverage and a fair amount of ocean, the important factors are:
- Selecting "Alien Life" in the history class step: Otherwise you're unlikely to get any life at all, I don't think terraforming (Insofar as introducing terran flora+fauna) is currently modeled in the colonization step.
- Planet age: Older planets will have more time to develop life, so there's a greater chance of life existing and it has the potential to be more complex when it does form. The earth is 4.543 billion years old, as a reference point.
- Mountain/plain/ocean percentages: The geology step will generate the planet's oceans and mountains, as well as rainfall patterns and windspeed. Close to 15% ocean coverage is as high as you're likely to get currently.

Then, in the "Biosphere" step, you should start getting life showing up on your planet. Hit reroll if you aren't, or if you're not happy with the type of life you're getting. Pay attention to the following fields:
- Vegetation level: The highest level of plant life that your planet has. Your options are grass and moss (green but no trees), shrubs and bushes (light forests), forests (Heavy forests+jungles), and Cloud Forests (Extremely dense forests with massive trees).
- Types of species: Have a glance here to check what kind of lifeforms you've got showing up. Life can be found in increasing levels of complexity, starting from cellular life like bacteria and algae, to see sealife and small plants, followed by larger plants and land-dwelling invertebrates, and finally trees and proper vertebrates. Bear in mind that the game will likely generate hostile packs of wild lifeforms, and the more advanced the alien life on the planet is the more of a threat it is likely to be. Trees are called "Vascular plants" in this field, and "Atlantean Plants" means that you'll be getting hundred meter or taller trees (and therefore cloud forests will be showing up).

Atmos. Farming Hazard and Alien Tissue nutrition both affect farming as well. The higher the farming hazard, the lower the output of your open-air farms (Farming domes and hydroponics are unaffected). If you've got an Alien tissue nutrition value above "Zero value", then you can try building Xeno-Agricultural facilities, which plant native life instead of terran ones, which can potentially allow you to access the power of open-air farming on a planet with an otherwise hostile biosphere.


As far as the low % of max oceans coverage, that will be because there's no support for anything naval-related currently. Ocean tiles are just impassable terrain for ground forces and sources of water currently, so higher levels of ocean coverage would just shrink the gameplay area and confuse people. I'm 200% sure that Vic's planning on naval vessels, ports and sea trade, cities built on floating platforms or on the ocean floor, giant squid monsters, and all sorts of other cool stuff. Once it's done it'll be integrated as a separate gameplay module like how Air forces is, along with planet types that have greater proportions of water coverage, or are entirely covered in water.

[BlueTemplar]

- Selecting "Alien Life" in the history class step: Otherwise you're unlikely to get any life at all, I don't think terraforming (Insofar as introducing terran flora+fauna) is currently modeled in the colonization step.

I'm pretty sure it is, how else would you get green(ish) planets without any xenolife ?

Atmos. Farming Hazard and Alien Tissue nutrition both affect farming as well

From what I've seen Biohazard also applies to (open) both farming and xenofarming ? So the biosphere can't be too hostile.

[Mina]

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar
I'm pretty sure it is, how else would you get green(ish) planets without any xenolife ?

My mistake, I was going from what I saw from playing around with the planet generator and I got stuck in an edge case
- planets that were compatible with earth life but had no xenolife of their own just came up as barren at the biosphere stage and I never proceeded to the colonization stage
- planets that I did generate to the colonization stage generally had advanced well-entrenched life but minimal or no nutrition value, and I never saw any mention of introducing terran plant/animal life or of atmospheric engineering.

so my assumption was that Vic hadn't gone with standard scifi easy terraforming process (because why spend so much time accurately modelling everything else and then throw that in), and the galactic republic wasn't old enough for any planets to have completed the multi-millennia long process of terraforming, assuming that they bothered at all.
Actually wondering how long it'd take for terraforming assuming that all the tricky stuff like earthlike atmosphere+geological composition are already done. How many centuries/millennia of introducing microbial life does it take for an abiotic environment to support growing stuff as simple as grass and trees?

[zgrssd]

ORIGINAL: Mina

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar
I'm pretty sure it is, how else would you get green(ish) planets without any xenolife ?

My mistake, I was going from what I saw from playing around with the planet generator and I got stuck in an edge case
- planets that were compatible with earth life but had no xenolife of their own just came up as barren at the biosphere stage and I never proceeded to the colonization stage
- planets that I did generate to the colonization stage generally had advanced well-entrenched life but minimal or no nutrition value, and I never saw any mention of introducing terran plant/animal life or of atmospheric engineering.

The formula for a oxygen atmosphere during colonisation is:
- CO2 atmosphere
- liquid surface water/rain
- soil and air that is otherwise not toxic for earth plants

Note that technically there should be a massive cooling impact on climate, given the sheer amount of greenhouse gasses removed - but that is not modelled in the game for now.

[Vic]

Try out the new Hydra Class Planets

They can be very very green.