Do planets change?

[ZanyScum]

Do the planets stay the way they are or are there some which are in transformation or can be transformed?
The reason I ask ... these stupid plants which attack on sight give me O2 when I destroy them. But what if they are needed for the transforming of the atmosphere?

I don't think there is any transforming but I just wanted to ask. Just in case :-)

Btw, a lesser question... shouldn't the Copper holes be refilled with Copper? Or did I read that wrong in the forums? If I use the Terrain Manipulator to get ores, will these ores respawn at some point?

[Zak]

These plants do nothing for the atmosphere, no plants do, there is no such mechanism in the game so it's OK to blast them. They grow back anyway.

No, planets don't change in NMS. Once generated they stay that way. This is in theory. In reality, there may be minor changes after a major game update, but it's quite rare.

You can modify the terrain with the TM, but it's not advisable, especially for bases. There is a limit for terrain edits and once it hits this limit, the terrain will start regenerating and will cover you bases. This is bugged and the terrain even regenerates earlier sometimes. So it's best not to edit the terrain except for digging stuff out. Some players restore the terrain after digging things out to keep the terrain edits under control. TM has a restore function. I don't bother since this mechanism seems buggy anyway and you will not prevent the terrain from regenerating at some point anyway.

Yes, I believe the the ores will eventually respawn, though I'm not 100% certain when. There is no need to do anything once you mine them. Whether they do it's irrelevant because there are so many and you will eventually gain the ability to have proper mines set up so these deposits will become largely irrelevant. Also, if you use Autonomous Mining Units, they will not deplete the deposits, but they're bugged and often lose their contents.

[momopovich]

Planets in NMS are immune to change. If you destroy something or dig a hole, the terrain will always grow back at some point.

Although it's not clear how and when terrain affected by the manipulator respawns (seems to happen more often with multiplayer). Plants and small rocks grow back super fast (like every time the area is reloaded)

[Entoarox]

NMS handles world changes in 2 specific ways: Persistent and non-persistent changes.
Persistent changes are part of a Base, and each base has a limit to how many persistent changes it can have. (This limit is the same for each base, no matter how big or small)

Non-persistent changes are everything else, and these changes are stored in a cache that is part of your savedata, this is mainly there to give players the feeling of persistence, and as you make more changes to the universe, eventually the cache file reaches NMS's defined cache limit, and older changes will get discarded.
(But since these are the oldest changes, it is hoped you wont even notice things changing)

Terrain-placeable objects are themselves persistent, but they are stored as self-contained persistent objects, and do not make any of the environmental changes around them persistent like bases do.

The terrain popping back around bases Zak mentioned, is the game treating the changes as the wrong kind, as non-persistent cached changes instead of persistent base changes.
Generally, this means you either reached the base's terrain-edits limit, or you made the changes outside of the build area, which will always cause them to be non-persistent changes.
(Changes made before you place the computer down are also slightly iffy on if they persist or not)
Thus, once the cache fills, and old data is deleted, generally the only terrain you notice getting reset is terrain near places you regularly visit, such as your base.

[zombygunner]

how long has it been since our planet changed? This is also true for most planets

[Jouchebag]

Originally posted by 1grimmreefer:

how long has it been since our planet changed? This is also true for most planets

Less than 200 years but we didn't just kill the oxygen producing plants...

[zombygunner]

the world is round no matter how much we think we can destroy it. Theres nothing we can do to hurt the earth its us who will be hurting. We as humans can not re produce the big bang again no matter how hard we try and the earth is still fine

[Raven]

Originally posted by 1grimmreefer:

the world is round no matter how much we think we can destroy it. Theres nothing we can do to hurt the earth its us who will be hurting. We as humans can not re produce the big bang again no matter how hard we try and the earth is still fine

Pretty sure when our Sun turns supernova the Planet is pretty much dust again.

[zombygunner]

yeah but thats if and it wont be at our hands if it does. But afa nms goes they will only change if we make it happen by hollowing out a planet

[Zak]

Originally posted by 1grimmreefer:

the world is round no matter how much we think we can destroy it. Theres nothing we can do to hurt the earth its us who will be hurting. We as humans can not re produce the big bang again no matter how hard we try and the earth is still fine

This.

Earth will survive no matter how much damage we do to it. We will make it uninhabitable for us and destroy ourselves, possibly most of biological life, but not the planet. We can't possibly destroy Earth even if we simultaneously detonated all nuclear warheads in existence. Earth will recover from that. It may take couple of millions of years but the planet has been through a lot more than a brief human infestation and she will survive billions of years after humanity is long gone. Dinosaurs roamed the planet for 150 MILLION YEARS. They got wiped and Earth recovered just fine. Humans have been around for less than 200k years. Earth will be fine.

[ZanyScum]

Thank you guys!

Two planets meet.
One says: "I am ill, I have humans."
Says the other: "Don't sweat it, it will pass."

[Zak]

Originally posted by ZanyScum:

Thank you guys!

Two planets meet.
One says: "I am ill, I have humans."
Says the other: "Don't sweat it, it will pass."

[Jouchebag]

Originally posted by Zak:

Originally posted by 1grimmreefer:

the world is round no matter how much we think we can destroy it. Theres nothing we can do to hurt the earth its us who will be hurting. We as humans can not re produce the big bang again no matter how hard we try and the earth is still fine

This.

Earth will survive no matter how much damage we do to it. We will make it uninhabitable for us and destroy ourselves, possibly most of biological life, but not the planet. We can't possibly destroy Earth even if we simultaneously detonated all nuclear warheads in existence. Earth will recover from that. It may take couple of millions of years but the planet has been through a lot more than a brief human infestation and she will survive billions of years after humanity is long gone. Dinosaurs roamed the planet for 150 MILLION YEARS. They got wiped and Earth recovered just fine. Humans have been around for less than 200k years. Earth will be fine.

I think we need to define "hurt"

"cause physical pain or injury to."

Now, we need to define "injury"

"harmed, damaged, or impaired."

So like cutting someone with a knife? Or hollowing out mountains for uranium?

Make no mistake, we are hurting Earth. It will outlast us. But we can still hurt Earth.

[Mr. Bufferlow]

HG has revised the universe three or four times. In each case, the planets changed and some even disappeared. There was a time when some systems had up to 16 planets in a system.

I still have my home base on a planet in Eissentam that I discovered shortly after launch. It still gives me credit for discovering planets in the system that no longer exist as well as the associated fauna.

My home world went from a very craggy red and yellow world, to a green grass and mesa world, to a purple/pink mesa world with bubbles. In each case, it did remain a pleasant world with sparse sentinels and no angry critters.

Bottom line is things can change- HG avoids it anymore since people flip out when their forever home changes -but it may change again. We have no idea what their plans are.

Assume nothing.

My base on my home planet six years ago.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1340930374

My base on my home world (different save) same exact location about a year ago.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2820659675

Base computer in the wild-

[Zak]

Originally posted by Jouchebag:

Or hollowing out mountains for uranium?

Make no mistake, we are hurting Earth. It will outlast us. But we can still hurt Earth.

That mountain will collapse and move in few millions years, whether we hollow it our or not, and something else will come out of it, new resource perhaps, as it did before. Earth went through much worse. This is an ongoing process that goes on for millions of years. Our brief, little digging is nothing compared to the cosmic forces Earth dealt with in the past and it will pass and something else will be created in its place. We really are insignificant in grand scheme of things.

[UncreativelyNamed]

Originally posted by Peregrinus:

Originally posted by 1grimmreefer:

the world is round no matter how much we think we can destroy it. Theres nothing we can do to hurt the earth its us who will be hurting. We as humans can not re produce the big bang again no matter how hard we try and the earth is still fine

Pretty sure when our Sun turns supernova the Planet is pretty much dust again.

Yay, time to nerd! :D

Alas, our sun is not large enough to supernova. :( In about 5 billion years, it will exhaust its supply of fuel, having fused all of it into iron that our sun, due to its mass and size, will be unable to fuse further. It will then expand into a red giant. That expansion will most likely engulf Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. It's slightly possible that as the sun enters its golden years (reddened years?) the orbits of the inner planets might shift a bit and Mars and possibly Earth might not be engulfed, but rather "just" fry. Either way, any life that might exist on Earth at that point is toast. Eventually, the sun will simply extinguish and become a brown dwarf, basically a big, dense ball of inert matter, and the solar system will be no more. There will be no big, blaze-of-glory supernova that will probably, eventually coalesce into a new solar system. Poor Sol.

Of course, humans as we exist now will be loooooong gone when this happens. We'll have been extinct for a long time, having been out-competed by one or more daughter species, just as modern humans out-competed our cousins the Neanderthals, even though they were physically superior to us and had a larger brain-to-body-mass ratio than we do. Still, we lived alongside them (and ♥♥♥♥ erectus) for quite a long time. But, the longest-existing human was ♥♥♥♥ erectus by far, having evolved about 2 million years ago and only having died out about 120,000 years ago, so they existed for about 1.8 million years. (Modern humans have only been around for about 300,000 years.) But even if we manage to exist as long as H. erectus, that's still a tiny blip compared to five billion years.

As for physically destroying the Earth (as opposed to simply making it uninhabitable for humans)...There ARE ways that humans could make it happen, actually. Most of them are beyond our current technology, but are definitely feasible/possible with plausible advancement of current technology, assuming that we don't "duh" our way out of existence by making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves. See here: https://qntm.org/destroy

It's quite an interesting read.

(LOL, Steam censors the name of our species's genus, LOL I get it, but it's still funny.)