...I've come across a few in and around Colonia, and I recall a thread by someone cataloguing 200 stars of each class and mention was made about Ammonia lifeforms. I wanted to ask, have they anything to do with thargoids, maybe they thrive on them or something?
Planets with Ammonia Based Life
- Thread starter PaulieWotsit
- Start date
Woo hoo! Somebody reads my ED7K Surveys!
According to the lore, Thargoids do (or did) originally come from such a planet. To clarify, it means that Thargoids are an "ammonia-based lifeform" in the same sense that humans are a "water-based lifeform": they breathe oxygen just like us and have a carbon-based biology just like us, but when a Thargoid gets thirsty, instead of water they would drink a nice cool glass of liquid ammonia.
If we were ever to find a "Thargoid colony" or even a "Thargoid homeworld", it would appear on our sensors as an "Ammonia World". I don't believe it's ever been established in-lore exactly what climate conditions the Thargoids find favourable; just as not all waterworlds are Earth-likes, not all Ammonia Worlds are likely to be Thargoid-friendly. Ammonia Worlds have a wide variety of available atmosphere types and surface conditions, from "no atmosphere" to thousands of atmospheres pressure and a temperature span of about a hundred degrees. I doubt the Thargoids would be comfortable on every single Ammonia World.
The Codex claims some Ammonia Worlds are terraformable; this is a lie, as Ammonia Worlds are always far out into the "too cold" zone of a star to be terraformable and the system map itself never reports these worlds as terraformable. It is entirely possible that such worlds would be Thargoformable, however.
My survey results show that Ammonia Worlds are more common than ELWs, by around 2:1, but less common than Water Worlds, by around 10:2. This lines up with expectations based on the real-world laws of physics, since water exists as a liquid at a broader range of temperature and pressure than ammonia does. By extrapolation, it means that, unless the Thargoids are much more tolerant of differences in temperature and pressure than humans are, then "Thargoid-homeworld-like" planets are much rarer in the galaxy than Earth-likes.
Last edited:
Not wishing to detract from the excellent reply from @Sapyx but I thought I'd remark that the only planets listed as having "ammonia based life" so far are gas giants - unless I have missed some great discovery. (Since that is actually the wording of the OP.) I think it safe to assume that Thargoids are not native to gas giants but rather, as @Sapyx says, are native to an Ammonia World.
Actually, that's not entirely true. The system map description for an Ammonia World is:
Which is, of course, copy-and-pasted from the Water World description, only with "ammonia" substituted for "water" throughout.
It was a very interesting read, and found out a fair bit. I didn't want to post on your thread and interrupt its flow though
