Fully Automated Luxury Communism Collaboration Call Megathread

[FALCmods4all]

I know many of us would like to see more Star Trek TNG adjacent political, economic, and exploratory structures in Starfield. I think the best faction for this would be the poverty concerned and atheist minded Enlightened faction.

To this affect I’ve started a detailed outline of ideas for expanding on this faction with a fully automated luxury communism pursuant quest mod concept with a unique location, indigenous sentient life forms for TNG style cultural misunderstandings, and diplomacy missions to explore corporate sabotage of utopian idealism.

Still early stages and interested in input from others, and also to avoid spoilers I’ll try not to share too much of what I have so far here.

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Very interested in finding collaborators. My strengths are in writing,  video/animation, with some comfort better learning modeling once ck2 comes out. I have no meaningful coding or scripting skill. I’d love to see this project grow into something highly cooperative.

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Here is a bit of the vision so far:

In hopes of creating a new society free from the heavy corporate influence over the rest of the local cluster where the poor can find fulfillment, the Enlightened have started to build a city on a world previously considered far too inhospitable to sustain long term settlement.

The planet is tidally locked & 4/5 earth gravity. A strong magnetic field deflects most solar radiation. Wind patterns are calm and consistent flows.

One side burns under heavy heat and magnetic storms where towers of lichtenburg glass have formed from lightning striking silica and surrounding sand shifting over time.

One side freezes in perpetual darkness with a vast subsurface ocean full of life, some organism magnitudes larger than largest of those over discovered on earth.

Between the two sides spans a twilight belt, a jungle watered by mist carried on winds from night side vents of all shades except red since the red glow is food for photosynthesis never to be reflected.

The Twin Cities of Twilight:

At the edges of twilight there are two cities in their infancy, Dawn at the edge of the day side where the sun is always half risen, and Dusk at the edge of the night side where the sun is always just below the horizon. Dawn relies on water from Dusk and Dusk relies on solar from dawn. The planet is low O2 so people use inhalers or wear mouth masks outside. Dawn is designed like a waterpark and has an extroverted culture with gliding as sport of choice. Dusk is designed like a labyrinth of bath houses and arcades and has an introverted culture with skiing/snowboarding as sport of choice.

I envision many quests and branching city development. I also would like to see many more ways to fail than to succeed, with narratives from failure being as captivating as success so that the mod retains replay value across ng+ runs.

I’ve outlined unique faction liaisons for missions to attempt to keep peace between various other factions in hopes of creating dynamics reminiscent of classic Picard/Sisko/Janeway style diplomatic confrontations. This includes options to try and maintain relations or even integrations with Spacers and Crimson Fleet. Can the potential to eliminate scarcity tame even the most impulsive among us, or will it only encourage them to seek control over scarcity for their own power?

There are some sentient life forms present that I’ve tried to make unique and non hominid to capture the awe and tension of first contact and ongoing cultural navigation. There should be opportunity for things to blossom into unexpected kinship or crumble into complete disaster. My hope is for each decision to feel like it carries weight and requires careful consideration or learning from mistakes. There will definitely be clashes centered around resource extraction methods and consequences.

I have several companion characters in mind as well that could either serve as part of this mod or as stand alone.

And of course, what I really want is for the player to get the experience of helping to design an entire sociopolitical structure. Navigating utility with the desires of the people, balancing executive or emergency decision making with collective integrity, figuring out what fair labor distribution looks like until the dream of full automation has been completed, and of course attempting to compete with established capital power for necessary resources or even convert corporate labor to the cause.

So shall we combine our power and revolutionize a corner of the starfield universe?

Likely, the work begins in earnest once ck2 comes out, but assembling, plotting, conceptualizing could be refined earlier so that it can be among the first large scale post ck2 mods.

Interested in making this utopia building prospect a virtual reality?

Not settled on a planet name, but leaning toward Heraclitus: ‘One can never step into the same river twice.’ and ‘Dogs also bark at what they do not know.’ and ‘If there was no sun, it would be night.’

In the spirit of socialism/communism, if this project ends up using a funding method to get made and maintained, I’d be curious to experiment with a model where anything not spent directly on equipment or assets gets evenly split amongst everyone who contributes meaningfully regardless of time or skill.

Edited June 7 by FALCmods4all

[aurreth]

Quote

The planet is tidally locked & 4/5 earth gravity.

One side is burns under heavy radiation and magnetic storms where towers of lichtenburg glass have formed from lightning striking silica and surrounding sand shifting over time.

One side freezes in perpetual darkness with a vast subsurface ocean full of life, some organism magnitudes larger than largest of those over discovered on earth.

Between the two sides spans a twilight belt, a jungle watered by mist carried on winds from night side vents of all shades except red since the red glow is food for photosynthesis never to be reflected.

Most of this is likely not possible, even with the CK.  For example, the game ignores the "tidal lock" (it's called 'geostationary' in Planet Data records) setting.  Surface conditions such as magnetosphere and temperature are controlled by keywords, not biomes, and are applied to the entire planet.  You can't have one part frozen and another inferno and a third temperate, it's all or nothing. 

Most of the entries in Planet Data records are simply not used.  There are hints here and there throughout the game files that star systems, stars and planets were going to be handled in a more detailed and realistic manner, and then that was scrapped for a simple, cookie cutter approach, sacrificed on the altar of procedural generation.  Despite all the stuff in Planet Data records, the Starfield universe really is as simple, static and lifeless as it appears while playing the game.

[FALCmods4all]

11 hours ago, aurreth said:

Most of this is likely not possible, even with the CK.  For example, the game ignores the "tidal lock" (it's called 'geostationary' in Planet Data records) setting.  Surface conditions such as magnetosphere and temperature are controlled by keywords, not biomes, and are applied to the entire planet.  You can't have one part frozen and another inferno and a third temperate, it's all or nothing. 

Most of the entries in Planet Data records are simply not used.  There are hints here and there throughout the game files that star systems, stars and planets were going to be handled in a more detailed and realistic manner, and then that was scrapped for a simple, cookie cutter approach, sacrificed on the altar of procedural generation.  Despite all the stuff in Planet Data records, the Starfield universe really is as simple, static and lifeless as it appears while playing the game.

Bleak! Really hope they surprise us with fixes for this stuff with DLC sooner rather than later. Would hate to wait years for a major Planet update.

I feel like there mist be some work around. Like making most of a planet inaccessible then just doing total manual creation of cell features for the relevant locations? Lacks elegance and immersion, but allows for more unique locations, maybe, hopefully.

I hope at least freezing sun location in specific cells can be done. Worst case scenario I guess would be being forced to build custom planet sets in interior cells just escape trappings or limitations of procedural generation. 

[FALCmods4all]

On 6/7/2024 at 5:14 AM, aurreth said:

Most of this is likely not possible, even with the CK.  For example, the game ignores the "tidal lock" (it's called 'geostationary' in Planet Data records) setting.  Surface conditions such as magnetosphere and temperature are controlled by keywords, not biomes, and are applied to the entire planet.  You can't have one part frozen and another inferno and a third temperate, it's all or nothing. 

Most of the entries in Planet Data records are simply not used.  There are hints here and there throughout the game files that star systems, stars and planets were going to be handled in a more detailed and realistic manner, and then that was scrapped for a simple, cookie cutter approach, sacrificed on the altar of procedural generation.  Despite all the stuff in Planet Data records, the Starfield universe really is as simple, static and lifeless as it appears while playing the game.

Planets can have icy poles, so shouldn’t it be possible to at least rotate a planet’s orientation and replace one pole with something else then increase the size of the far pole to cover half the planet? As long as planets can have 3 ‘biomes’ shouldn’t simulating tidal lock be possible?

Doesn’t solve weather or temperature, though. Can weather and temperature be changed for the cell once entered via command? Say, using coordinates for half the planet to run a change weather & temperature script so that upon landing a ship at coordinates on the cold or hot side of a planet the weather/temperature reflects conditions like tidal lock, overriding the default planet uniformity?

I guess ideally someone finds a way to disable planet weather/temp entirely and tie weather/temp to biomes exclusively instead.

Super frustrating if everything is 100% locked into procedural generation. 

Edited June 9 by FALCmods4all

[aurreth]

Quote

Planets can have icy poles, so shouldn’t it be possible to at least rotate a planet’s orientation and replace one pole with something else then increase the size of the far pole to cover half the planet? As long as planets can have 3 ‘biomes’ shouldn’t simulating tidal lock be possible?

I've just, in the last week or so, started experimenting with axial tilt.  It's really hard to tell if changing it has any effect at all, because what you see in the sky is largely controlled by ATMO, not PNDT, and that is currently obfuscated by reflection data.  I'll look into it though.  Have to find a suitable planet, build outposts at the North and South poles, then start tilting the axis.

However, you can't just remove or replace one of the polar biomes.  Biomes are mapped to a dedicated file, one for each planet, in Starfield - PlanetData.ba2.  These files, with the extension .biom, are the actual map of the planet.  BIOM records in PNDT have to match that file or they are ignored, so to remove one frozen pole you'd have to edit the file.  We don't have the tools for that.  I'm hoping there will be something in the CK.

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Doesn’t solve weather or temperature, though. Can weather and temperature be changed for the cell once entered via command? Say, using coordinates for half the planet to run a change weather & temperature script so that upon landing a ship at coordinates on the cold or hot side of a planet the weather/temperature reflects conditions like tidal lock, overriding the default planet uniformity?

I guess ideally someone finds a way to disable planet weather/temp entirely and tie weather/temp to biomes exclusively instead.

Maybe.  It goes Planet Data, Biome, Climate, Weather Setting.  So each Biome has its own climate/weather settings.  Again, variations are controlled by reflection data, so we currently can't mess with them.

Temperature is one of the keywords that determines whether you can walk around without a spacesuit, along with atmosphere and magnetosphere.  Those keywords are linked to environmental hazards.  Would it make more sense if the temperature keyword was in the BIOM records instead of the PNDT?  Yes, but for some reason Bethesda put it at the planetary level.

I'll do some experiments.  You can't remove the Temperature keyword from the Planet Record, because that fills the planet data display you see from space.  But maybe adding a keyword to a BIOM record (Climate records don't have keywords) will override it locally.

[aurreth]

1 hour ago, aurreth said:

I've just, in the last week or so, started experimenting with axial tilt.  It's really hard to tell if changing it has any effect at all....

Yes, you can change the axial tilt.  Set it to 90 and the planet will rotate 90 degrees.  The planet, not the poles.  The sun will continue to rise and set just as if the tilt had not changed at all.

I built outposts on Frost as close as I could get to the north and south poles.  I then tilted the planet.  From space you can see the change.  The outposts are now located on the "equator".  But from the surface the planet is still spinning as if the poles were perpendicular to the ecliptic; you can spawn a chair and sit, wait, and watch the shadows move as the sun moves in the sky.  If the axial tilt was being respected the sun should remain at noon (or move in a circle) at one outpost, and the other be in perpetual night.

To make sure I built an outpost in the center of the day side.  Waited 12 hours, it was night.  So, the planet is tilting over, and the sky could care less.

[FALCmods4all]

18 hours ago, aurreth said:

Yes, you can change the axial tilt.  Set it to 90 and the planet will rotate 90 degrees.  The planet, not the poles.  The sun will continue to rise and set just as if the tilt had not changed at all.

I built outposts on Frost as close as I could get to the north and south poles.  I then tilted the planet.  From space you can see the change.  The outposts are now located on the "equator".  But from the surface the planet is still spinning as if the poles were perpendicular to the ecliptic; you can spawn a chair and sit, wait, and watch the shadows move as the sun moves in the sky.  If the axial tilt was being respected the sun should remain at noon (or move in a circle) at one outpost, and the other be in perpetual night.

To make sure I built an outpost in the center of the day side.  Waited 12 hours, it was night.  So, the planet is tilting over, and the sky could care less.

Great testing so far. Makes feel slightly less pessimistic about exotic planets, at least after ck maybe.

The mismatched solar orbits is interesting. Seems like rotating the sky box 90• and/or freezing the sky box must be hidden somewhere. You’d think in planet data freezing the star in the sky would be as simple as turning day duration = to year duration.

Hopefully someone leaks a bit more info about what planet customization ck2 will or will not let modders tweak, so people can plan accordingly. Someone make Todd do an interview with Neil DeGrasse Tyson or someone about potential future realism.

To tide me over until ck2 I started playing Elite Dangerous. As barebones as it is in so many ways, the simple process of moving from one orbiting spec in a solar system to another monitoring acceleration and deceleration does so much to give a sense of scale and navigation. Starfield really has to make it feasible to step up either the travel mechanics or or the surface realistic complexity. Until things get there, too much just feels like backdrop rather than world building.

If any Bethdevs are eyeing these threads, please make sure serious planet customization tools and some way of replacing loading screen travel make it into ck2/dlc. Even just a liminal space between destinations, exploring one’s ship for a minute or two during transit with a chance of interruption. Nothing makes a galaxy feel smaller than loading screen fast travel between planets.

Thanks, Aurreth, for messing with planets in hopes divulging their secrets in the name science. 

[aurreth]

23 minutes ago, FALCmods4all said:

Thanks, Aurreth, for messing with planets in hopes divulging their secrets in the name science. 

Oh I've been working on planets and star systems for ages.  My problem, other than not being able to create new *.biom files, is that I keep getting right up to the point where brand new, custom systems are possible and then Bethesda patches things and screws it all up.  A couple patches ago they made it impossible to jump to a non-vanilla system (CTD when you try).

I'm working my way through the CK, figuring out where everything is, then I'll try again.