I'm actually kinda interested in that speculative feud idea now.

Random: after looking over the history of my artistic development, on a whim I have put together an alternate history where I joined Sagan 4 in March 2009.

These are not real species, as I was not aware of Sagan 4 until 2018 at the earliest, but rather approximations of what I would have submitted if I were a forum member at the time.

Assuming I made nodents, my first submission would be a norat descendant that look like this:

(though Cube pointed out that I would probably only give it 3 toes, I'm too lazy to revise)

It would, of course, be rejected. But that would not stop me from trying again later in the year, maybe July or August.


After editing to add in the claws which I would have forgotten,


Something resembling this nodent would have been my first approved Sagan 4 submission.

Then I would cry like a baby as it's killed off in the snowball event and/or No-Snarf in early 2010.

Yes, actually totoros are being renamed to tunkis over copyright concerns, we do take it seriously here

The "volcanic" biome is basically just like, Iceland or Hawaii. Not a constant lava hellscape.

Setting: Solar System
The planet of focus, where we will soon explore the evolution of spirits, organic life, and the avolix people, is the third planet orbiting the star Adamantria, an earthlike world which we will call Vitormar. But first, we must focus on the solar system which sets its context.


(orbits and planets not to scale)

The Adamantrian star system is similar to Sol’s, though with a few distinctions. The star itself, despite the brilliance implied by its name, is slightly smaller and dimmer. As is the case with Sol, Adamantria has many planets, asteroids, and comets orbiting around it, and in order from nearest to farthest they include four rocky planets, an asteroid belt, four giants, and a second asteroid belt containing many asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets. The nearest planet to Adamantria is fairly small, and the second and third are similar to one another in size. However, while Sol’s fourth planet is smaller, Adamantra’s fourth planet is similar in size to its second and third.

Differences between the Adamantrian system and the Solar system become more striking among the outer planets, in part due to their size and rings making them far more eyecatching. Where Sol has Jupiter, Adamantria’s fifth planet is a smaller giant, more like a slightly oversized Saturn and bearing a remarkable set of rings. The sixth planet, too, is saturn-like, though slightly smaller instead. The seventh and eighth planets are ice giants, overall similar to Uranus and Neptune, though “reversed” in position--the seventh is the smaller and denser of the two. The outer belt is not remarkably different from that around Sol, though it has less mass.

Other than Vitormar, the celestial bodies surrounding Adamantria will remain unnamed until there are people present to name them.

----

The differences between the Adamantrian system and the Solar system are partially inspired by simulations of the early solar system which failed to produce Mars, basically.

I think, if something is unelaborated, the newer form slots are optional anyway.

I think that might fall more under normal scrapped organisms. This thread is intended more for like, you find a cool species and have an idea for descendants but alas, it is long extinct.

I'm planning to cover the history of the planet itself in blocks of time, which will include a primordial era of sorts. I don't plan to go into much more detail than is necessary to provide context for the Avolix themselves, however.

I would leave both support and respiration blank for now, as I'm not sure it's actually elaborated how these do the thing.

While I was making every single bearhog in Spore, I stumbled upon a very peculiar species--the wading gringlo.



Of course, this is a fairly obvious homage to the reedstilt from After Man. But the characteristics it has from Hydro's attempt to make it live and behave similarly to the reedstilt has considerable implications for what its descendants may have looked like if it had survived.

Like all gringlos, the wading gringlo was an endotherm. Had a descendant moved inland and perhaps shrunken, the hairs covering its legs might have mutated to cover its entire body, creating an effective insulating coat. With this hypothetical descendant surviving in the wake of the ice comet impact event, it may have proceeded to diversify, forming a new major group of fuzzy endotherms resembling twin-tailed mammals with dinosaur-like heads and necks.

There's many species throughout Sagan 4 history which died out, but had they not, they could have produced interesting new forms unlike anything around today. Alternatively, the evolution of some lineages might have taken completely different turns, which may have had an impact on the form they take today. Here, the subject of such may be discussed.

I created this thread because of a peculiar extinct bearhog that caught my eye, but anyone can post similar stuff here.

Generation 164 is closed. All slots are filled. Unless something is rejected, you will need to resubmit this next gen.

I kinda BSed the concept for magic together, but hopefully what I have planned for it will keep you interested! (I've also edited wording a bit)

Setting: Magic System
Magic is commonly presented as an excuse for anything to happen. However, magic within this world is not, for lack of any better term, “magic”. Rather, it is a fundamental force governed by a subatomic boson particle known as a magion which only exists within this universe. As such, it has strict properties as fundamental and unchanging as any other law of physics.

Magions have no mass and are simultaneously a particle and a wave, similar to light. Every magion particle has a wavelength and a rotation. Lone or sparse magions shift these properties chaotically and lose energy, however dense clusters of magions will synchronise with one another and produce repeating patterns which lose energy far more slowly. Collisions between clusters may result in the smaller cluster syncing with the larger one, or if they are similar in size they will instead synchronise into something lying in between their respective properties.

Magions cannot form clusters on their own, however. In the absence of a medium, they are typically spread too far apart to synchronise. There are exceptions; magions are present inside stars, and when an especially massive star dies, magions released during the supernova may be packed densely enough on their own to form a temporarily-synchronised high-energy magic wave. But outside of this, nearly all synchronised clusters of magions are contained within matter.

Magions commonly enter matter on a planet’s surface after being emitted from a star. Though magions have no mass, they are affected by gravity, much like light, and they are contained most effectively by denser materials. However, even if their magic energy is not entirely lost as heat, magions cannot stay within matter forever and will eventually escape into space. However, exactly how a magion particle bounces and flows through matter is directly influenced by its wavelength and rotation properties, and by random chance it is very common for something like an ordinary rock to contain a cluster of synchronised magions which is able to stay constant or even grow over time as more magions enter the cluster and synchronize with them. Sufficiently high concentrations of magions are capable of moving matter on a large scale in a complex and varied fashion, and eventually by random chance most planets develop magion clusters capable of some form of self-replication. With the properties of individual magion particles functioning somewhat like a genome determining fine details of how they interact with matter, this forms the basis of magic-based life, also known as spirits.

The interactions between spirits and matter, especially as part of a symbiotic interaction with an otherwise non-magical organism, is the basis of all of what one might refer to as spells and powers across the universe.

The avolix were a species I created for roleplay on the Spore wiki (original article). In some ways, they are like Hydromancerx’s nauceans, being a spore creature that I came up with and that put a lot of effort into with worldbuilding and artwork and which were intended to interact with races being developed by other people in the same universe. As they were originally designed for use in roleplay, however, my ability to flesh them out was limited, so I have decided to begin working on a standalone reboot. They were originally envisioned as cephalopods, but I have since discovered that I completely misinterpreted cephalopod anatomy while making them, so this iteration of the species will reimagine them as aliens in a magical world and include details on their evolution and planet of origin, before exploring cultural development in far more detail than I ever could in their previous two iterations.

This will be a science fantasy of sorts, with some spec elements. I have a magic system in mind which I will try to establish before anything else.

Table of Contents
Setting
Magic System
Solar System

Age of Spirits
(Coming Soon!)

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Tool use is already an act of instinctively using objects as an extension of one's body. In the right situation, non-sophont animals with crafted prosthetics are not out of the question even on Earth. I figure they know it's not really their tail, but they can also intuitively know they can use it like it is.

I've added details about it. I did intend that tools would be replacing the function, not serving as a prosthetic (though that did give me an idea, which I also added)

The molars are not usually removed, just the canines, I forgot to clarify. Would switching out teeth for fangs work? Or is there something else I need to explain? MNIDJM

I figure that the particular survival scenario is pretty rare, though. Once every few decades across the entire population. A lot of stuff has to line up, like the specific individual already being innovative enough to figure out how to make do without a tail before starvation sets in. ...Actually, that's probably what you want me to explain, isn't it?

Okay, I think I fixed its reproduction.

QUOTE (CosmoRomanticist @ Jul 13 2021, 09:56 PM)

This is what Sagan 4 needs -- people evolving the same species more than once! The seashrog shouldn't be the only species that gets all the descendants, folks (and yes, I need to participate myself -- but although I can draw pretty well, I am shit at coloring, so.... 'yknow the usual excuse from me). Just saying. Also, Sagan 4 is really getting a lot of ocean megafauna!

Note, not everything needs more than one descendant, and if everything got at least 2 descendants there wouldn't be room to make more stuff. Seashrog descendants, partners, and parasites took up a very large chunk of gen 163. If that happened with everything, there would be a mess.

I noticed there was no introductions thread, so I made one! Posting here isn't necessary, but if you want you can use this thread to announce your presence or tell us a bit about yourself.

I've added a small bit comparing trickery to humor

As I stated, the tummorsuses were motile out of nowhere and their "digestive fold" doesn't work (especially at their scale). They would have to be redesigned beyond recognition and probably have a different ancestor to function.

This is recent enough that the insert doesn't introduce problems. It would be different if, say, someone yeeted a pre-gamma ray species and replaced it with a very small burrowing tundra-dwelling roamer that proceeds to survive to the modern day, retroactively metagaming to bring back a lineage that died in 2007.

Tummorsuses should not have been approved in the first place, and I never should have submitted them. I created them to be implausible under a misguided idea that I could use Sagan 4 Alpha as a bullshit playground. It would be completely different if they were only bad on accident.