[A16] [WIP] RimWorld Alien Exoplanet Project.

[NethanielShade]

Hey all, RimWorld is my absolute favorite game, but one thing about it ha always bugged me. It's earth. The RimWorld is earthlike, down to it's plants and animals, excluding the Thrumbo. This can probably be explained by the RimWorld being terraformed, but I've always liked the idea that it's a lightly colonized habitable exoplanet. With that in mind, I've set myself to working on a project where I'll transform the entire planet into a habitable, but not earth-like, planet. I'm starting first with textures, mainly plants, then I will move to animals, and other stuff. I've made this thread specifically for documenting all changes I make, as well as explaining them. I'm trying to make it as scientific as possible. Also, most animals will be disabled and replaced by new animals, but I'm considering turning their spawns down (because they can still be imported/survive as a non-native species on the planet) if people don't like the idea of vanilla stuff being removed. Give me your ideas.

Steps of the mod: (Subject to change)
1.) Flora (WIP)
Ideas: All plantlife will be shifted in color and changed to not be earth species. Possibly alien plant drugs.
2.) Fauna (Not started)
Ideas: Most fauna will be changed to alien species, earth animals will be removed/lower spawn rates. Hopefully will add more creatures than base vanilla.
3.) Events (Not started)
Ideas: Alien diseases (with earth diseases turned down or removed).
4.) Factions (Not started)
Ideas: Animal smugglers. Other regular colonies.

Give me your ideas to help flesh out the mod. Also, I will be making my own textures and (mostly) not asking for other people's textures, but if you want to give me textures/have your in the mod, I'm not adverse to it if they fit with the rest of the mod.

[NethanielShade]

Doing some math calculations, and confirming them with "Universe Sandbox" it looks like for a planet with a 60 day orbital period to be right in the center of a star's habitable zone, it has to be orbiting a fairly small star, like a red dwarf. In this case, it fit perfectly with the star Castor Gem Cb the third star in the Castor trinary system, Castor Gem Cb is a BY Draconis variable basically a main sequence red dwarf. Reading up on the theoretical colors of alien plants, plants around a red dwarf will most likely be black or a dark shade of any visible color. Here's the paragraph detailing it:

Darker schemes. A main sequence star that is dimmer and redder than the Sun (spectral type K and M -- red dwarfs) could have plants that absorb more red and infrared wavelengths. Red dwarf stars, which only have some 10 to 50 percent of the Sun's mass but comprise perhaps 85 percent our Milky Way galaxy's stars, radiate most strongly at invisible infrared wavelengths and produce little blue light. By absorbing the entire spectrum of visible light more completely, such plants might look black but any color might be possible. Whatever their color, however, such plants would likely look dark to humans because little visible light would reaches the ground.

And the paragraph is accompanied by this picture.

So, the question is, would people rather have dark red or dark blue plants/grass/trees?

[Hydromancerx]

Sagan 4 has purple flora.

[Wolf619]

It's funny I was thinking of doing everything kind of pink myself but wasnt sure the best way to go about it, since its pretty much the polar opposite of green id like to see pinks and purples, neon green water, i was thinking just a colour mod for mine tho.
pink and purple material to make walls would be cool, maybe like the glowing mushrooms like in caveworld flora. I'd say keep the animals the same personally since it would throw off the balance if you change the numbers but instead change all the sprites for the animals and maybe just relabel them (and their bi products)as different creatures

[Grax]

Visible color of plant's leaves depends on what color that plant CAN NOT utilize in its inner biochemical reactions.
So, the crude picture is: if the plant is green - it uses only ~red... and ...blue~.

The purple color is possible if this plant use only green or infrared/UV light.