Other Forms of Alien Life
- Thread starter Leadfoot
- Start date
As far as I'm aware, there's lots of alien life in ED, we just don't see them. There's loads of Gas Giants that have a label that suggests they have at least microbial life on them. Plus there's all the non-sapient species like Delines, various Molluscs, the Baltah'sine Vacuum Krill, Karsuki Locusts, Ling Lang, Giant Irukama Snails, Giant Verrix and the HIP Proto-squid. The Mudlark was the species on Capitol. We can at least see the various molluscs in game. Planetary creatures would be a nice addition though.
But sentient and sapient life however, then yes, there's very little known in the ED Galaxy. Just the one's you mention.
posted in error
The Mars mage going by the name Vivi must of used a lightning attack spell.
I'd pay good ARX for this decal:
Related to the topic: How much life does a galaxy need to balance "realism" vs "fun to explore"? We don't have much data on the average number of civilizations per galaxy. Galaxies are just these tiny dots in the universe and there are so many of them.
Of course, I do hope to jump into an unknown system one day and find a fleet of alien ships milling around alien stations and return with new allies
That's definitely a "your mileage may vary" topic. What I consider "fun to explore" will differ from other people.Related to the topic: How much life does a galaxy need to balance "realism" vs "fun to explore"? We don't have much data on the average number of civilizations per galaxy. Galaxies are just these tiny dots in the universe and there are so many of them.
Of course, I do hope to jump into an unknown system one day and find a fleet of alien ships milling around alien stations and return with new allies
Personally, the aspects of exploration I enjoy most are less about finding things, and more about the search for things. For example, I much prefer Odyssey's so-called "heat map" to find bio- and geo- POIs over Horizon's selectable POIs. It gets me down to the surface searching for them visually. But Horizon's method is much more fun than what we had before: no clues where to find stuff what so ever, or even if it existed. It's also why I use the FSS in a non-standard way. I enjoy a bit of parallax discovery, as opposed to being handed completed map, so I just do a single pan to give me a rough overview of what the system's like, and head to what I consider to be the most "interesting" part of the system, doing a close pass by planets along the way to resolve them. Once I've explored the "interesting" parts the fun way, I'll resolve the rest of the system in the FSS to see if there's anything I'd missed.
I still find it annoying that I can't get information about worlds from my cockpit, and have to use the extremely annoying to use system map, though.
Of course, there still needs to be "interesting" things to find, but again what's "interesting" is a YMMV thing. Personally, I consider ED's "void ecology" to be extremely unrealistic, but I'm willing to give it a pass because if I assume such life is possible, then this is the distribution we'd likely see from life that can exist in a vacuum or near-vacuum. I'm far more interested in unusual orbital configurations, of which there are plenty. Others are interested in statistical outliers, or even odd color combinations.
My chief complaint when it comes to exploration isn't that there's nothing to find, it's that there's not nearly enough to do once you've found it. I've got plenty of elemental materials for engineering because it always felt strange to drop into a region with active geology, or biological life, and not take physical samples of what I find there. I'd do the same with meteorites on worlds I'd find interesting before it became possible to map the surface of a planet to help find the stuff, and I did it a lot more often before Frontier moved finding the elemental distribution of worlds from the SRV on the surface, to entirely in orbit using the DSS.
There's no science SRV that could harvest Horizons samples to return to civilization, or store the samples we take on foot. There's no specialty storage for surface samples taken with with such an SRV. There are no geological or biological labs we can install on our ships, for example, in which could be used to process those samples taken from the surface. There's no genomics lab we can install on our ships for further processing of samples we gather on-foot. With the addition of Guardian and Thargoid structures, there's no archeological labs we could use either.
Some might consider all this "busywork." But it's what I'd consider fun. YMMV
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Even at sublight speeds the entire galaxy should have been colonized (colon - ised?) by now. Yet still only dumb humans where I am.
There's an escaped human AI?!
???
There's so much story in Elite hardly anybody knows about!
???
There's so much story in Elite hardly anybody knows about!