Brasselton, Goodbye.

[MagusLucius]

So... After finishing my first playthrough, I have just one real nitpick.  Time.

Going by age, my colonists were in their little settlement for about 10 years or so.  There are twelve months in a year, the readout even uses the same month names. (Making up new month names would probably be tedious in the extreme)

However, when I moused over the date, I got a little box that said there are ten days in a month.  Makes sense, my stats view said that the colony had been there something over nine-hundred days.  However, unless people age faster in the future, it's unlikely people would mark their birthdays by anything other than a cycle with some reference to earth.

<NerdNitpick>
Also, a planet which has twelve months of ten days each would be in an extremely close orbit around it's primary.  I can't see such a world existing around anything but a white dwarf, and even that's iffy.  </NerdNitpick>


"You're leaving in that thing? You're braver than I thought..."


"They made up their minds, and they started packing/ They left before the sun came up that day/ An exit to eternal summer slacking/ But where were they going without ever knowing the way?"

Needles: Hunter, Builder, Miner, Cook, Taylor
Tyspin: Hunter, Gardener, Oddjobs
Szilard: Foreman, Miner, Doctor, Cook, Oddjobs
Juliette: Cook, Taylor, Smith, Master Gardener
Marco: Master Gardener, Comms, Warden
Cooky: Cook, Hunter, Taylor, Smith

[Regret]

nice shipdesign, basic.

[Mikhail Reign]

However, when I moused over the date, I got a little box that said there are ten days in a month.  Makes sense, my stats view said that the colony had been there something over nine-hundred days.  However, unless people age faster in the future, it's unlikely people would mark their birthdays by anything other than a cycle with some reference to earth.

Why? Rimworld doesn't have FTL travel, so most, if not all people who exist in the universe would never have set foot on the planet, so I would see no reason to use it as a reference of age. I dont see why people wouldn't use the world they stood on as their reference. Once you have lived on a planet for a decade, interacting with mostly/only people from that planet, you would just use its day/time/year as your reference. Granted things would be difference - people wouldn't be an 'adult' until 30 instead of 15, but it wouldn't be weird because you all use the same reference. Babies would be babies until 10 or so, childhood would last 20 years, and people would live to be 300. It would only be strange when a person from off world came, and in that case it would just be the normal clash of cultures.

The gulfs between stars

In the RimWorld universe, it takes years or decades to travel or communicate between stars. Because travel times are so long, planets tend to be disconnected from each other socially and technologically. So there are no great star empires, and interstellar travel is unusual. Each star system is mostly isolated from its neighbors.

[MagusLucius]

However, when I moused over the date, I got a little box that said there are ten days in a month.  Makes sense, my stats view said that the colony had been there something over nine-hundred days.  However, unless people age faster in the future, it's unlikely people would mark their birthdays by anything other than a cycle with some reference to earth.

Why? Rimworld doesn't have FTL travel, so most, if not all people who exist in the universe would never have set foot on the planet, so I would see no reason to use it as a reference of age. I dont see why people wouldn't use the world they stood on as their reference. Once you have lived on a planet for a decade, interacting with mostly/only people from that planet, you would just use its day/time/year as your reference. Granted things would be difference - people wouldn't be an 'adult' until 30 instead of 15, but it wouldn't be weird because you all use the same reference. Babies would be babies until 10 or so, childhood would last 20 years, and people would live to be 300. It would only be strange when a person from off world came, and in that case it would just be the normal clash of cultures.

The gulfs between stars

In the RimWorld universe, it takes years or decades to travel or communicate between stars. Because travel times are so long, planets tend to be disconnected from each other socially and technologically. So there are no great star empires, and interstellar travel is unusual. Each star system is mostly isolated from its neighbors.

because otherwise ages are meaningless.  Saying someone is 17 years old or 768 elapsed, when the rate at which they count birthdays changes from planet to planet is absurd.  Especially as they have a fixed life-span.

80 years in rimworld becomes something like 26.6 years on earth, which means your colonist isn't really 17 years old, but a bit less than 6.  And this is an unmodified human.

Although, it is unlikely they'd mark time the same way we do.  A civilization advanced enough to contemplate interstellar travel, even if it takes decades or centuries would likely use some other, easily identifiable, recurring event to mark time.

[Mikhail Reign]

But in the Rimworld universe, there is no central civilization. There is very little communication between planets because of the vast distances that are involved - just because some people are capable of interstellar travel doesn't mean that they all are. Some planets are advanced, some are in the Stone Age, and everything inbetween. Just because a culture doesnt use the same reference points as we do, doesn't mean that ages are meaningless - they are still able to be used in reference to each other eg: a 12yo is half as young as 24yo and twice as older then a 6yo regardless of how long a year is. Also, you don't know how long a day is. It might be claimed as 24 hours, but how long is an hour on that planet? Again, they could very easily use a difference reference point. Right now, on earth, a second is defined as "the duration of 9192631770 cycles of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom", before that it was "the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time." On your Rimworld, without the cultural memory of earths seasons, or the technology to measure it, time could be determined any number of ways - something as simple as "the time taken to walk to that tree to that rock is a minute", which might actually take 30 earth seconds, which would mean a 24 Rimworld hours would only be 12 earth hours.

[MagusLucius]

Okay... how about this for an argument.  Your scientific definition re: cesium.  The speed of light is defined by that metric.  The base SI measurement of a Meter is defined by that metric.  The definition of 1 second is the basis of all our measurements for distances and velocities, and any change to it, which doesn't make it scientifically more precise, would literally throw science out the window.