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[SCC]

This probably going to be another one of these "would be nice to do, but there are more important things to do first"...

• Red dwarfs, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs and neutron stars should be able to spawn really, really small. Especially neutron stars are smaller than most planets (well, with some luck they can be smaller than your city, but that's not exactly on the visible scale in the game).
• Black holes, on the other hand, could gain some size. They are bigger than most stars. In addition to that, the bigger once have actually a gentler pull, which could be a trade-off for the increased size. If the AI fleets could handle that.
• Some neutron stars could be magnetars and instead of having two giant cones of destruction, have a really, really big and stormy magnetic field.
• Considering that all the habitable worlds of category 3 and up weren't always there and it was the drone sporeships that terraformed them, there shouldn't be a bias against them spawning in systems with giants.
• Red dwarfs, brown dwarfs and white dwarfs should be unable to give their planets a "very hot" condition. They just don't emit that much light.
• Meteor Impacts is the only condition in its group (no "meteor no pick"). It also gives a penalty to planets that already have thin/no atmosphere, increasing their hazard rating even more.

[CrashToDesktop]

Most black holes are not bigger than most stars.  What we see is the Event Horizon being the "size" of the star - and on most stellar-mass black holes, I think the event horizon is significantly smaller than the radius of that previous star (granted, it had to be a blue giant or more to get there in the first place).  Now, supermassive black holes found at the center of galaxies are something different, truly huge - but in the Persian-Orion sector of space Starsector takes place in, there are pretty much no black holes of that size.  There are intermediate-size black holes, but those are rare due to the fact they need to gobble up more mass around them.

Don't agree too much with removing Meteor Impacts.  Adds some spice to the worlds.

Everything else sounds good.

[Alex]

Considering that all the habitable worlds of category 3 and up weren't always there and it was the drone sporeships that terraformed them

(Hmm, where are you getting this?)

[SCC]

Don't agree too much with removing Meteor Impacts.  Adds some spice to the worlds.

Pure gameplay reasons - they kick planets that are already down.

(Hmm, where are you getting this?)

One, there are several mentions of sporeships here and there. Two, Kumari Aru description mentions xenolife as being unusual. I put two and two and thought that habitable worlds in Starsector universe don't just lie everywhere.

[Goumindong]

Don't agree too much with removing Meteor Impacts.  Adds some spice to the worlds.

Pure gameplay reasons - they kick planets that are already down.

Planets aren’t “already down”. The proportion of good or bad planets matters for gameplay but fewer is generally better for gameplay reasons.

Also the larger black holes don’t have a “more gentle” pull. They have a smaller difference in pull between any two places. But for any given distance (from the center or the event horizon) they have a stronger pull

Tidal forces and gravity differentials aren’t modeled in starsector afaik so this would have no effect.

Plus starsector isn’t that realistic. Especially on distances where, iirc, the persean sector is much too clustered to actually survive. As an example the “death zone” for a pulsar seems to be estimated from around 12 to 50 Light year’s. (Closest pulsar to earth is at least 700 ly away) there are a lot of pulsars in the persean sector and a few of them are likely pointed at other systems. Which means that a majority of those systems are dead and uninhabitable.

Another example is black holes. Multiple black holes so close together would have to be orbiting each other and getting ready to collide. This would make he entire region of space a massive collider and accretion area where no planets would be habitable. The velocities of planets and systems (to maintain stable orbits) would be be pushing up on relativistic values.

[CrashToDesktop]

Plus starsector isn’t that realistic. Especially on distances where, iirc, the persean sector is much too clustered to actually survive. As an example the “death zone” for a pulsar seems to be estimated from around 12 to 50 Light year’s. (Closest pulsar to earth is at least 700 ly away) there are a lot of pulsars in the persean sector and a few of them are likely pointed at other systems. Which means that a majority of those systems are dead and uninhabitable.

At least to me, I don't believe these changes are being made to make Starsector more "realistic", rather to make the game more visually appealing.  Making Brown Dwarfs (Dwarves?) and Neutron Stars smaller just looks better, at least in my mind.

[Serenitis]

One of the things that has always bugged me about the worldgen, is that it can create moons that have opposed condidtions to the planets they orbit.

For instance, you can have a planet in the outskirts of a system which has the "cold" condition, and that planet can have a volcanic moon which has the "heat" condidtion.
And likewise, you can have a planet in the inner system which has the "heat" condition, which has a cryo or frozen moon with the "cold" condition.

I think maybe the volcanic, cryo and frozen worlds are set to always have thier respective hot/cold conditions. And while the worldgen has some rules about where in any given system it can put planets, it doesn't seem nearly as constrained about where it puts these things as moons.

It would be nice if the two following things could be done:

• Have a rule that forbids volcanic bodies generating in the "cold" outer system, and cryo/frozen bodies generating in the "hot" inner system
• Have generated moons "look up" thier parent planet's environment conditions and inherit them

So if a planet is generated with a "hot" condition, any moons in orbit would also be hot.
Same for cold, meteors, dark, and flares.
All this is kinda non-trivial though, so may not be worth the effort for something which is essentially cosmetic.

Re: Metor impacts. You could have it also raise the mineral availability by +1. That still might not be enough to offset the extra hazard enough to actually use the things.

[Wyvern]

Have a rule that forbids volcanic bodies generating in the "cold" outer system

Consider Io, the moon of jupiter, which is known for its volcanic activity.  A hot volcanic moon far from the star is quite reasonable, as long as it's orbiting something big enough to fuel its heat with tidal forces.  Or if it has just that much radioactive stuff in it.  Or maybe it just got hit by four or five super-meteors within the last hundred thousand years, and will cool off in the next hundred thousand, but right now it's hot and volcanic.

Similarly, a hot world can be hot due to close orbit... but it can also be something like Venus, where the heat is a function of its atmosphere.  That said, a hot, atmosphere-lless world should definitely not have a cold moon.

[Clockwork Owl]

Nice one re:magnetars, I'd say make majority of them magnetars so that a pulsar come up as a nasty surprise.

[Serenitis]

<words>

You.... Are quite correct.
After some time to consider and observe the game, I would like to suggest that I was 25% correct in my initial statement.
The game handles planet positioning quite well.
Where it struggles is moons. Specifically cryovolcanic moons.

From what I can understand, cryovolcanic worlds seem to have something akin to a "built in" condition that always generates them with a cold environment. Which makes perfect sense, as they wouldn't be cryovolcanic if they weren't cold.
Volcanic worlds on the other hand, don't seem to have this feature.

Where this creates a problem is when moons are created. As the game seems to create moons from essentially a lookup of available planet types, and fits them into orbit of various planets with no consideration for any "built in" conditions as above.
Which then leads to the somewhat jarring occurance of seeing a planet close to its star with extreme heat, a random moon orbiting that planet also with extreme heat, and a cryo moon orbiting that same planet with extreme cold.
Cryovolcanics also have the tag around_giant_at_any_offset, which I'm not entirely sure of the function of. But it's a tag which is shared only with unstable and volcanic worlds, frequent moon types. So maybe this might be allowing the odd arrangement to occur?

It would be really nice if there was a check somewhere in the proc gen, that on generation looked at any planet which would recieve moons and removed cat_cryovolcanic from the list of potential candidates if the planet did not have a cold condition.
Essentially creating a tag for around_giant_if_cold.

[Goumindong]

Distance to the star doesn’t necessarily mean a lot. As an example the mean surface temperature on Mercury is far lower than that of Venus. This is despite being half the distance to the sun the average temperature on Venus is higher than the high temperature on Mercury despite Mercury being near tidally locked and having days that are roughly half an early year long.

While there is an issue of distance to the Star, albedo and atmosphere can have an even larger impact.

[Serenitis]

Spoiler

[close]

Extreme heat gas gaint next to star, with extreme heat volcanic moon.
Fine. Nothing to see here.

Spoiler

[close]

Extreme cold cryo moon orbiting above extreme heat giant.

Albedo cannot account for that level of temperature differential, even if it were the purest white sphere.
I'm not asking for turbo reality, just something that doesn't create things that look so jarringly out of place.