so ? sea dragons are made of diamond ? why are you going to ridiculous lengths to justify something irrationnal ? Sea dragons don't make sense from a biological point of view, but it's a game, so instead of trying to justify their presence with nonsensical arguments, try instead to justify them from gameplay perspectives
No not diamonds, THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS. Kyanite, because it is in the lava biome.
Also it dose make sense, to is the hardest place to get to so it should have the most dangerous and outrageous creature in the game.
I like your grammar, "nonsensical". But it is still wrong and out of place, as i presented mostly facts and presented them in a sensible way making no assumptions.
I was taking about diamonds to prove a point that carbon based thing can survive these environments.
Yeah, look...
I was staying away from inputting into this discussion, because rather than suggestions, there was a lot of personal feelings involved.
Nonetheless, here I am
*Deep Breath* Here we go down the rabbit hole...
The Sea Dragon as a creature is entirely possible. Why? Complexity. Let us talk atoms for a second. These things make up every single molecule we know. Taking only the very basic elements we can make a colossal number of variant molecules due to composition, molecule geometry, electron configurations (pi & sigma bonds), etc. When you shift fields to biology, the complexity translates into an inconceivably massive amount of organism variations, and classifications. Then when you do the math on a universe scale you get another inconceivably large number of petri dishes for an inconceivable amount of variations to play out over billions of years.
As such, everything we know about earth biology we must discard, only using maybe the player as a reference (I'll get to that). The cell organelles we all learnt in high school biology... out the window! That includes the way in which they produce energy for life. Perhaps their organelles (due to differing conditions) have evolved to become more efficient at ATP synthesis...or maybe they don't use ATP. They harbour two energy systems working together (Normal eating coupled with a geothermal conducting organelle), thus reducing the total amount of food they must consume. My point is... we don't know, but it's possible.
Then we have the molten rocks... well. Even on Earth, we have creatures that adapt non-organic materials into their bodies. What's to say they don't have components in their mouths that prevent the conductive issues involved with high temperatures on biosamples (assuming that the problem isn't handled biologically). Perhaps some of the molten rock's heat is used to energy generation. As for the large storage of molten rocks, it would be more believable I imagine if they had a "supply" that runs out, causing them to take a scoop of magma rocks.
You might say "but we know because the player eats them", however, that doesn't answer the problem of the unknown. Maybe due to a happy coincidence they are compatible with humans. Maybe on their planet, they have two major animal organelle configurations. We simply do not know. What we do know however is that it's all well within the realm of science fiction.This isn't the story of the guy who got stranded on a planet with no fish he could eat and died shortly after, instead this is the epic story of a guy on a planet with fish he can eat. That's story telling
That also brings in another list of possible reasons for this creature (it was genetically modified, its prey died to the carar virus and they are border extinction, etc).
Have we also stopped to consider its design choice as a game mechanic? Does it make the game better? Or would you be better off without it? Does it provide an oooh factor in a plausible manner to an audience? I don't think the lava zones are 100% complete, maybe another passive creature lives there. I'm interested to see.
As such, everything we know about earth biology we must discard
Ummmm... no.
You can change the planet and the environment, but you can't change way chemicals work nor the laws of physics. No matter how far you travel in the cosmos, I promise you that you will never find a living organism made out of gas, nor a creature with a skin made out of diamond. Life on our world evolved within the constraints of various laws of chemistry & physics. Those laws are what determines how creatures turn out, not the other way around.
So sure, you could have a creature with six eyes and twelve tentacles, but if it's exerting a certain amount of heat per kilo of mass and it's made out of carbon (hint: it is), then you're going to have certain rules of physics that determine how hot it's inside are going to get, and if they get too hot then physics say that stuff is gonna start to melt. Stick it in lava and you better have some real good justification for how it survives - such as being really tiny, which produces nearly no heat and allows external heat to pass through without damaging anything (see also the effects of radiation poisoning for a better idea of what that means).
It's when you get into those arctic temperatures that you see things start to get terrifyingly large, because then you need more internal heat - and the most efficient way to keep a higher core body temperature is to just be larger overall. Which, incidentally, is why you see more whales near the poles than the equator.
In conclusion, everything we know about biology most certainly would apply to xenobiology, because both are rooted in the exact same immutable laws of chemistry & physics. You can change the environment and you can roll the dice to get different looking creatures than you would find on Earth, but it's not going to give you impossible creatures.
Correction; it's a game based on exploration and discovery - ergo, it is a videogame where the creatures making sense is PART OF THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE GAME. FORGETTING IT IS THE SAME AS SAYING DON'T GET EXPLORATION-BASED GAMES AT ALL.
As such, everything we know about earth biology we must discard
Ummmm... no.
You can change the planet and the environment, but you can't change way chemicals work nor the laws of physics. No matter how far you travel in the cosmos, I promise you that you will never find a living organism made out of gas, nor a creature with a skin made out of diamond. Life on our world evolved within the constraints of various laws of chemistry & physics. Those laws are what determines how creatures turn out, not the other way around.
So sure, you could have a creature with six eyes and twelve tentacles, but if it's exerting a certain amount of heat per kilo of mass and it's made out of carbon (hint: it is), then you're going to have certain rules of physics that determine how hot it's inside are going to get, and if they get to hot then physics say that stuff is gonna start to melt. Stick it in lava and you better have some real good justification for how it survives - such as being really tiny, which produces nearly no heat and allows external heat to pass through without damaging anything (see also the effects of radiation poisoning for a better idea of what that means).
It's when you get into those arctic temperatures that you see things start to get terrifyingly large, because then you need more internal heat - and the most efficient way to keep a higher core body temperature is to just be larger overall. Which, incidentally, is why you see more whales near the poles than the equator.
In conclusion, everything we know about biology most certainly would apply to xenobiology, because both are rooted in the exact same immutable laws of chemistry & physics. You can change the environment and you can roll the dice to get different looking creatures than you would find on Earth, but it's not going to give you impossible creatures.
Note I said "earth" biology. Of course, biology would still apply in this hypothetical world. We can still use the fundamentals that we have shown relationships between to drawn on xenobiology, such as the fundamental systems (i.e. requirement of energy, thermal properties, etc.) The very basics of life here on this planet were derived from the primordial soup. Something would've been very different given different conditions. There hypothetical fields of biochemistry that follow our current understanding of physics, chemistry and we can only begin to speculate how such systems might work. Look at the energy difference between an organism with and without and ETC, let alone entirely different based systems. We don't know enough about the creature, all we know is "Extreme adaptation to high temperature environments" as the PDA suggests. What does that mean, we don't know? Is it plausible? Yes, it's plausible and we don't know enough to discard a creature in what might be an incomplete biome, with possibly an incomplete AI.
My point is, we are not talking about rolling some dice here, we are talking about a level of configurable complexity which is beyond comprehension (in terms of us physically imagining the ranges of variation). I never made impossible claims or claimed to be able to draw a model in which an alien creature like this functioned, I said it's possible. Within the realm of science fiction.
EDIT: Was I being too quick to jump the gun by saying "out the window"? Sure I was, but what I was suggesting was, we don't know enough about its genetic makeup to be commenting on many things.
I mean we have worms (not bacteria), such as the Pompeii worm which can survive at +80°C (+47°C by itself) because of a mutual relationship with bacteria which insulates it.
Also, it doesn't swim in the lava. I myself am very sceptical of the molten rock flame thrower, but I'm not grabbing my impossible stamp.
I do think a better PDA entry could be thought of however
Well, the Blue Whale is a mammal, meaning warm blooded. Sea Dragon says lizard to me, meaning cold blooded. For all we know it could be a silicon-based life form and doesn't even have blood as we know it. No one, not even physics, says extremophiles "have" to be small. It may very well eat the extremophiles that live in/around the lava and when it eats you, it is not because you are its food, but because it is territorial. If it spits molten metal, then I'd say maybe not carbon-based and its core temperature must be hot enough to make eating organics provide very little nutrients. And that is not even taking into consideration the precursors and their probable ability to manipulate life.
Isn't it possible that the Dragon has a 'combined' biological system (Carbon & Silicon based), since it could be either a Precursor 'created' creature or one they found on another planet and brought here?
Having both may not be something we are aware of here on Earth, but could be something that exists in the Universe and we just haven't discovered it yet.
This is like trying to trying to explain discrepancies in Star Trek lore, there are plenty of ways to tear it apart and pizz on it, but it's always a lot more fun and rewarding finding ways to justify its existence.
Before anything is changed I would like to experience this creature and its biome myself. I hope things aren't nerfed/removed based on small sample size.
The thing that gets me is the biome itself. There is no place in that entire biome that is less than 50C (it's magic!), thus it impossible to swim there at all outside of the Exosuit. Or do anything else, for that matter. It's a completely arbitrary barrier that only gives frustration and makes no sense to begin with.
I just wanted to point out real quick, that if you use the reinforced dive suit your temp tolerance increases to around 70C before you start taking damage, letting you safely swim around outside the Prawn suit. (Which is pretty essential to clean the energy leeches off your Cyclop's hull before they drain it of all it's power.)
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that someone called this game realistic...
This game is far from it. Far from any natural occurrence ever actually. It's based a lot around pseudoscience. For goodness sake, we have TELEPORTING FISH CREATURES!!!
Grounding the game based on realism WILL ruin it and will ruin your own experience because you're not willing to accept a minor stretch of believably for the sake of awesome environments and creatures and gameplay. That's your own fault, not the game's fault.
Granted, we should make sure the game remains immersive, and thus far everything has brought about immersion. The Sea Dragon lives in an enviroment that seems to suits him visually. IMMERSION and REALISM are two different things, though they share similar traits. I want IMMERSION and not REALISM because real life sucks why would I want it to be like it?
I mean, here we are, making pages upon pages of stuff talking about whether it would be practical for the Sea Dragon to live where it lives... Talking about damn evolution in a VIDEO GAME!!! Imagine if you were applying these same standards to other games? That would be unreasonable because you know better than to do that, any sensible game designer will choose the game over realism. You think GTA V would be fun if I had to file a report with the police every time I hit someone's bumper? Realistically, that would make sense, but gameplay wise that'd be stupid. Yeah you can notice how much you can surprisingly get away with and not get away with in the game; running over a pedestrian isn't cause enough to have police come to the scene but punching a guy in self defense is. Thing is if you worry about that in the game and it breaks you're immersion, that's because you are taking yourself out of the immersion. Nobody else's fault but your own.
Thus creating imaginary issues about alien sea creatures in a fictional game is senseless.
I am all for the game making creature behavior and having a simple food chain... but not because it's realistic, but because it makes the game better; more unpredictable, changing circumstances, giving us more to look at, be cautious of, so on. I couldn't give a flying flip about realism!
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that someone called this game realistic...
I am all for the game making creature behavior and having a simple food chain... but not because it's realistic, but because it makes the game better; more unpredictable, changing circumstances, giving us more to look at, be cautious of, so on. I couldn't give a flying flip about realism!
I agree completely, and I think what some people are after isn't so much realism, but plausibility. I.E the situation is plausible enough you don't find it immersion breaking or otherwise out of the norm for the established "rules" within the game.
I.E a large creature should have something in it's biome that it preys upon, or some secondary method of gaining nutrition, even if the leviathan is partially silicon based and can subsist on inorganic materials such as ore and minerals, (which would explain it's ability to spit molten chunks of metal too) it's by no means realistic, but certainly plausible enough that it fits nicely with the established way the world of Subnautica works. (Though given the mention of advanced aliens, precursor bases etc, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot/all of the lifeforms on the planet were bio engineered by the alien for whatever purpose.)
Perhaps these two rather unrealistic aspects (molten magma and too high body temperature) can explain each other. The sea dragon may have an internal organ that acts like a refrigerator for the rest of the body, and concentrates the excess heat onto rocks that it has eaten, then stores them in a thermally insulated organ to be released later.
04LeonhardtI came here to laugh at youJoin Date: 2015-08-01Member: 206618Members
What if its a Geophage and actually eats lave/rock/metal? And its lava breath attack is just it vomiting up its last meal?
Which would be why it can bite through SPACE TITANIUM and loves munching Seamoth Burgers.
And why it lives exclusively in the Lava Zone where new Lava is constantly spewing forth from the planet's innards and where idiots with delicious SPACE TITANIUM submarines tend to venture into.
Comments
diamonds apparently need temperatures just above 700 °C
but they also need a supply of pure oxygen to burn otherwise they just glow.
So all in all they will survive. Be it the lava is too cool or there is no oxygen. Remember I said they can.
No not diamonds, THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS. Kyanite, because it is in the lava biome.
Also it dose make sense, to is the hardest place to get to so it should have the most dangerous and outrageous creature in the game.
I like your grammar, "nonsensical". But it is still wrong and out of place, as i presented mostly facts and presented them in a sensible way making no assumptions.
I was taking about diamonds to prove a point that carbon based thing can survive these environments.
For god's sake. IT IS A VIDEOGAME!! GET OVER YOURSELVES!!!
STFU!!
YAFC!!
STFU!!
YASCSMD!!
STFU!!
SBFC!!
STFU!!
NBEWTH!!
I only did this because i like finding thinks out and i was boooooord
and well to end this thread because it was annoying me
I was staying away from inputting into this discussion, because rather than suggestions, there was a lot of personal feelings involved.
Nonetheless, here I am
*Deep Breath* Here we go down the rabbit hole...
The Sea Dragon as a creature is entirely possible. Why? Complexity. Let us talk atoms for a second. These things make up every single molecule we know. Taking only the very basic elements we can make a colossal number of variant molecules due to composition, molecule geometry, electron configurations (pi & sigma bonds), etc. When you shift fields to biology, the complexity translates into an inconceivably massive amount of organism variations, and classifications. Then when you do the math on a universe scale you get another inconceivably large number of petri dishes for an inconceivable amount of variations to play out over billions of years.
As such, everything we know about earth biology we must discard, only using maybe the player as a reference (I'll get to that). The cell organelles we all learnt in high school biology... out the window! That includes the way in which they produce energy for life. Perhaps their organelles (due to differing conditions) have evolved to become more efficient at ATP synthesis...or maybe they don't use ATP. They harbour two energy systems working together (Normal eating coupled with a geothermal conducting organelle), thus reducing the total amount of food they must consume. My point is... we don't know, but it's possible.
Then we have the molten rocks... well. Even on Earth, we have creatures that adapt non-organic materials into their bodies. What's to say they don't have components in their mouths that prevent the conductive issues involved with high temperatures on biosamples (assuming that the problem isn't handled biologically). Perhaps some of the molten rock's heat is used to energy generation. As for the large storage of molten rocks, it would be more believable I imagine if they had a "supply" that runs out, causing them to take a scoop of magma rocks.
You might say "but we know because the player eats them", however, that doesn't answer the problem of the unknown. Maybe due to a happy coincidence they are compatible with humans. Maybe on their planet, they have two major animal organelle configurations. We simply do not know. What we do know however is that it's all well within the realm of science fiction.This isn't the story of the guy who got stranded on a planet with no fish he could eat and died shortly after, instead this is the epic story of a guy on a planet with fish he can eat. That's story telling
Have we also stopped to consider its design choice as a game mechanic? Does it make the game better? Or would you be better off without it? Does it provide an oooh factor in a plausible manner to an audience? I don't think the lava zones are 100% complete, maybe another passive creature lives there. I'm interested to see.
Just everyone take another *deep breath*
- Capta
Ummmm... no.
You can change the planet and the environment, but you can't change way chemicals work nor the laws of physics. No matter how far you travel in the cosmos, I promise you that you will never find a living organism made out of gas, nor a creature with a skin made out of diamond. Life on our world evolved within the constraints of various laws of chemistry & physics. Those laws are what determines how creatures turn out, not the other way around.
So sure, you could have a creature with six eyes and twelve tentacles, but if it's exerting a certain amount of heat per kilo of mass and it's made out of carbon (hint: it is), then you're going to have certain rules of physics that determine how hot it's inside are going to get, and if they get too hot then physics say that stuff is gonna start to melt. Stick it in lava and you better have some real good justification for how it survives - such as being really tiny, which produces nearly no heat and allows external heat to pass through without damaging anything (see also the effects of radiation poisoning for a better idea of what that means).
It's when you get into those arctic temperatures that you see things start to get terrifyingly large, because then you need more internal heat - and the most efficient way to keep a higher core body temperature is to just be larger overall. Which, incidentally, is why you see more whales near the poles than the equator.
In conclusion, everything we know about biology most certainly would apply to xenobiology, because both are rooted in the exact same immutable laws of chemistry & physics. You can change the environment and you can roll the dice to get different looking creatures than you would find on Earth, but it's not going to give you impossible creatures.
Correction; it's a game based on exploration and discovery - ergo, it is a videogame where the creatures making sense is PART OF THE ENTIRE POINT OF THE GAME. FORGETTING IT IS THE SAME AS SAYING DON'T GET EXPLORATION-BASED GAMES AT ALL.
Note I said "earth" biology. Of course, biology would still apply in this hypothetical world. We can still use the fundamentals that we have shown relationships between to drawn on xenobiology, such as the fundamental systems (i.e. requirement of energy, thermal properties, etc.) The very basics of life here on this planet were derived from the primordial soup. Something would've been very different given different conditions. There hypothetical fields of biochemistry that follow our current understanding of physics, chemistry and we can only begin to speculate how such systems might work. Look at the energy difference between an organism with and without and ETC, let alone entirely different based systems. We don't know enough about the creature, all we know is "Extreme adaptation to high temperature environments" as the PDA suggests. What does that mean, we don't know? Is it plausible? Yes, it's plausible and we don't know enough to discard a creature in what might be an incomplete biome, with possibly an incomplete AI.
My point is, we are not talking about rolling some dice here, we are talking about a level of configurable complexity which is beyond comprehension (in terms of us physically imagining the ranges of variation). I never made impossible claims or claimed to be able to draw a model in which an alien creature like this functioned, I said it's possible. Within the realm of science fiction.
EDIT: Was I being too quick to jump the gun by saying "out the window"? Sure I was, but what I was suggesting was, we don't know enough about its genetic makeup to be commenting on many things.
I mean we have worms (not bacteria), such as the Pompeii worm which can survive at +80°C (+47°C by itself) because of a mutual relationship with bacteria which insulates it.
Also, it doesn't swim in the lava. I myself am very sceptical of the molten rock flame thrower, but I'm not grabbing my impossible stamp.
I do think a better PDA entry could be thought of however
Having both may not be something we are aware of here on Earth, but could be something that exists in the Universe and we just haven't discovered it yet.
This is like trying to trying to explain discrepancies in Star Trek lore, there are plenty of ways to tear it apart and pizz on it, but it's always a lot more fun and rewarding finding ways to justify its existence.
got a good giggle outta that
I just wanted to point out real quick, that if you use the reinforced dive suit your temp tolerance increases to around 70C before you start taking damage, letting you safely swim around outside the Prawn suit. (Which is pretty essential to clean the energy leeches off your Cyclop's hull before they drain it of all it's power.)
This game is far from it. Far from any natural occurrence ever actually. It's based a lot around pseudoscience. For goodness sake, we have TELEPORTING FISH CREATURES!!!
Grounding the game based on realism WILL ruin it and will ruin your own experience because you're not willing to accept a minor stretch of believably for the sake of awesome environments and creatures and gameplay. That's your own fault, not the game's fault.
Granted, we should make sure the game remains immersive, and thus far everything has brought about immersion. The Sea Dragon lives in an enviroment that seems to suits him visually. IMMERSION and REALISM are two different things, though they share similar traits. I want IMMERSION and not REALISM because real life sucks why would I want it to be like it?
I mean, here we are, making pages upon pages of stuff talking about whether it would be practical for the Sea Dragon to live where it lives... Talking about damn evolution in a VIDEO GAME!!! Imagine if you were applying these same standards to other games? That would be unreasonable because you know better than to do that, any sensible game designer will choose the game over realism. You think GTA V would be fun if I had to file a report with the police every time I hit someone's bumper? Realistically, that would make sense, but gameplay wise that'd be stupid. Yeah you can notice how much you can surprisingly get away with and not get away with in the game; running over a pedestrian isn't cause enough to have police come to the scene but punching a guy in self defense is. Thing is if you worry about that in the game and it breaks you're immersion, that's because you are taking yourself out of the immersion. Nobody else's fault but your own.
Thus creating imaginary issues about alien sea creatures in a fictional game is senseless.
I am all for the game making creature behavior and having a simple food chain... but not because it's realistic, but because it makes the game better; more unpredictable, changing circumstances, giving us more to look at, be cautious of, so on. I couldn't give a flying flip about realism!
I agree completely, and I think what some people are after isn't so much realism, but plausibility. I.E the situation is plausible enough you don't find it immersion breaking or otherwise out of the norm for the established "rules" within the game.
I.E a large creature should have something in it's biome that it preys upon, or some secondary method of gaining nutrition, even if the leviathan is partially silicon based and can subsist on inorganic materials such as ore and minerals, (which would explain it's ability to spit molten chunks of metal too) it's by no means realistic, but certainly plausible enough that it fits nicely with the established way the world of Subnautica works. (Though given the mention of advanced aliens, precursor bases etc, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot/all of the lifeforms on the planet were bio engineered by the alien for whatever purpose.)
Which would be why it can bite through SPACE TITANIUM and loves munching Seamoth Burgers.
And why it lives exclusively in the Lava Zone where new Lava is constantly spewing forth from the planet's innards and where idiots with delicious SPACE TITANIUM submarines tend to venture into.