Great find Commander. This planet illustrates something I have been arguing about. If there can be patches of color like this, is it that big of a leap to have entire planets that color?
S1E
I’m actually starting to believe that colored patches on planet surfaces do indeed signify something important, especially with regards to world generation by the Stellar Forge post 2.2.
The majority of High Metal Content planets today are colored a very monotone beige, with very little color variations if any at all on their surface. At most there are a few patches of a slightly different shade of beige or brown/tan. But it’s more than that, these planets also exhibit extremely mundane surface terrain features too. Very few canyons, and those few are less craggy, more shallow, and just generally more plain than canyons on other planet types. Mountain ranges that are low, sparse, almost eroded looking in their normalness. That is the HMC standard template that pervades the galaxy since 2.2.
Now move on to Metal Rich planets. These are more rare than HMC’s and they also are often beige in color, BUT they usually feature one or two large areas of color contrast on them. In addition to this they also almost always have much more interesting terrain generation than HMC’s. Canyons that are much more frequent, deeper and more fractal looking, with canyon floors of different coloring than the beige surface. Mountains are more varied as well when compared to HMC mountains, with coloring different than the surface and much more height variations.
Now, take a look at Rocky Worlds. These planets seem to have not changed at all post 2.2. They are almost always extreme versions of the HMC and MR worlds, with surface colors which are very often not beige, sometimes quite varied and with regular contrasting surface color areas too. They also commonly have much more frequent and varied terrain features with much more color variety, in both the canyons and mountains, and even the craters.
If you look at these three world types: HMC, MR,and RW, you can almost see them as variations on an identical scale of terrain generation. Imagine a range of 1 to 10, with 1 being a default planet template of beige and little terrain variation, and 10 being a planet with many colors and extreme ranges and variety of terrain generation. If the Stellar Forge has weighted planet generation with certain types favoring one end of the scale and others favoring the other end, then you can think of HMC’s as a 1 or 2 with a rare case of 3, MR’s as a 2 or 3 with a rare case of 4 or 5, and RW’s as a 6,7 or 8 with rare case of 9 or 10. Each planet type might have a very slight chance to go extreme to one end of the scale, but this would be extremely rare. It would explain why I could find 35 HMC’s all looking very similar, some MR’s looking different but some still looking like HMC’s, and many RW’s with a lot of variety but still a few looking like very standard beige HMC’s too.
If this is correct, then it might explain what changed in 2.2. RW’s seem to be unaffected by 2.2 so their numbers on the scale did not change, but HMC’s clearly are very different than pre-2.2, as are MR’s, there is a plethora of evidence now to prove that. Maybe HMC’s and MR’s simply had their terrain generation ranges drastically lowered, with the end result being far less variation but still a small chance of
some variation?
Ice worlds follow a very different template, sporting a wide variety of colors all throughout the surface, craters, mountains, and canyons which can stretch all across the surface in huge variations and patterns. These haven’t changed since 2.2. Rocky Ice Worlds seem to be a combination of the HMC/MR/RW and Ice world templates, with the most variety and colors and features out of all planet types, they also don’t seem to have been changed since 2.2 either. The fact that these two world types along with the RW’s were not changed in 2.2 suggests that their procedural range numbers weren’t touched like HMC and MR worlds were.
NOW, here is the big question which we all would love to see
Frontier answer:
Were the Stellar Forge changes to HMC and MR worlds in 2.2 intentional, or were they accidental?
I shall continue to document this phenomenon with the hopes that a deluge of data and evidence can pry some type of response from the Gods of the Galaxy Generation! [big grin]
