Possibility of life in arctic or desert?

[AFLD]

Hello, I am wondering if there is a possibility alternate food sources can exist in the tundra or desert?

Right now there is a small amount in tundra and none in arctic, meaning there is literally no reason for a species to migrate there, except to pick up the meat from whatever last species thought it'd be a good idea to migrate there. It seems when food is sparse, rather than expanding out to fill every niche the species likes to compete locally for the richest abundance and die in place?

I am wondering if this is due nothing comes far from the optimal temperature curve at start, or if species could otherwise be encouraged to spread to more diverse climates? Maybe certain adaptions improve individual efficiency at scrounging food from tundra, eating sea food, pulling food from desert, etc. So while food in desert would be sparse, specialized species could find enough there to get by, with the expense they are no longer as suited to graze standard food?

[AFLD]

Regarding metabolic heat production, does a creature with high metabolic heat only produce heat to become comfortable, or does it produce heat regardless? For example would a high metabolic hear production mean the creature must live in cold or water to avoid overheating?

[countingtls]

Originally posted by toby.n:

Hello, I am wondering if there is a possibility alternate food sources can exist in the tundra or desert?

Right now there is a small amount in tundra and none in arctic, meaning there is literally no reason for a species to migrate there, except to pick up the meat from whatever last species thought it'd be a good idea to migrate there. It seems when food is sparse, rather than expanding out to fill every niche the species likes to compete locally for the richest abundance and die in place?

I am wondering if this is due nothing comes far from the optimal temperature curve at start, or if species could otherwise be encouraged to spread to more diverse climates? Maybe certain adaptions improve individual efficiency at scrounging food from tundra, eating sea food, pulling food from desert, etc. So while food in desert would be sparse, specialized species could find enough there to get by, with the expense they are no longer as suited to graze standard food?

I've seen creatures adapted to extreme climates, just might take many many generations and a long long time, if the barrier is not strong enough they will just "migrate" in and out of the different environments. Normally it is better if existing species already exceeded the carrying capacity of the "rich region" so the fringe group would be "forced" to adapt and move outward more quickly. Or just put islands/lakes far apart so the local creatures will have no choice but to adapt.

[Quasar]

This is planned. What I’d like, however, is for extreme environments to have extremophile food sources, so that creatures have to do more to adapt to them than simply slap on a fluffy coat and turn up the metabolic heat.

I have a list of possibilities (shoals/swarms of plankton, buried tubers/roots, hives/mounds, even some weird ones like photosynthesis and thermosynthesis) but they all require a bit more effort and design work than simply putting a new type of tree in those biomes.

Currently, Metabolic Heat is a constant source of heat and will cause cold-adapted creatures to overheat. If it turned off when the creature was warm enough it would have no detriment and every creature would evolve to be endothermic.

[AFLD]

Thank you for the responses. I am glad at least the metabolic heat is a specialization, I think means which force creatures to seek different environments help to encourage speciation.

I did manage to run a long game with niche food turned on and 2000 creature cap (eventually at 1x speed and left overnight.) I found a grazing species adapted for the colder latitudes, though I also had turned down heat sensitivity to .5 so others could make do by huddling.

I wonder if very high heat sensitivity could cause creatures to slowly hyper tune their metabolic heat to fit a narrow temperature band?

Alternate food sources which require specific adaptions will be awesome when their time comes, with a very emergent game like this I imagine it's difficult to balance all factors though ))))

[countingtls]

Originally posted by AFLD:

Thank you for the responses. I am glad at least the metabolic heat is a specialization, I think means which force creatures to seek different environments help to encourage speciation.

I did manage to run a long game with niche food turned on and 2000 creature cap (eventually at 1x speed and left overnight.) I found a grazing species adapted for the colder latitudes, though I also had turned down heat sensitivity to .5 so others could make do by huddling.

I wonder if very high heat sensitivity could cause creatures to slowly hyper tune their metabolic heat to fit a narrow temperature band?

Alternate food sources which require specific adaptions will be awesome when their time comes, with a very emergent game like this I imagine it's difficult to balance all factors though ))))

I've tried to increase the sensitivity multiplier to higher value (>2), and the result is that creatures just quickly evolve to ignore temperatures and became hyper breeders and live very short lifespans before the extreme cold/hot kills them (or they cooked themselves), and they spread out pretty well even without the need to speciate to local "weather niche".

The default temperature control mechanism is definitely a bit off and not a very easy balancing mechanism for creatures to evolve into, since I was able to use super high mutation rate and "create" cold/hot extreme well adapt long living creatures by chance (but not easily with the gradual evolution process). The extreme condition equilibrium gene combinations exist, just not that easy to take the first step towards them, considering other easier solutions exist along the way.

[Quasar]

Originally posted by countingtls:

I've tried to increase the sensitivity multiplier to higher value (>2), and the result is that creatures just quickly evolve to ignore temperatures and became hyper breeders and live very short lifespans before the extreme cold/hot kills them (or they cooked themselves), and they spread out pretty well even without the need to speciate to local "weather niche".

I believe the issue is that creatures can adapt to 'heal' faster than they take cold/heat damage, which is more efficient than wasting food-gathering time on temperature-control behaviours. They have short lifespans: time is more valuable than health/energy.

One approach I intend to try out in 0.13.0 is to suppress healing when taking damage. Creatures will need to find an area of safety before they try to heal. I may also remove passive-healing entirely, and force creatures to sleep in order to heal. Either solution should make AI-induced behaviours more important to their survival.

[countingtls]

Originally posted by Quasar:

Originally posted by countingtls:

I've tried to increase the sensitivity multiplier to higher value (>2), and the result is that creatures just quickly evolve to ignore temperatures and became hyper breeders and live very short lifespans before the extreme cold/hot kills them (or they cooked themselves), and they spread out pretty well even without the need to speciate to local "weather niche".

I believe the issue is that creatures can adapt to 'heal' faster than they take cold/heat damage, which is more efficient than wasting food-gathering time on temperature-control behaviours. They have short lifespans: time is more valuable than health/energy.

One approach I intend to try out in 0.13.0 is to suppress healing when taking damage. Creatures will need to find an area of safety before they try to heal. I may also remove passive-healing entirely, and force creatures to sleep in order to heal. Either solution should make AI-induced behaviours more important to their survival.

I set out to start a new experiment in a long continent across the whole map (the same seed actually with previous tests) with latitude temperature gradient that have one end at 50 degree and the other -10 degree and a temperature sensitivity multiplier of 3 and very high fertility to let creatures be able to find food easier. I also set a very high breeding range of 100 for hundreds of generations using sexual reproduction. The result this time is somewhat different.

First, creatures quickly evolved to ignore temperature (all <0.2, and most 0) the same with other experiments, but I let the evolution kept going much longer after a day and overnight, and then dropped the breeding range slowly to 38 where meaningful split can happen (in fact all the way down to 45 I started to see speciation of small 2 creatures splinter species, and then I dropped the range 1 at a time slowly saved and reloaded to find the right splinter range where they don't fracture to tiny groups stay around 10 to 12 species with about 1500 creatures overall)

I observed that although most creatures during the 100 breeding range period in previously day started as packed high litter size (>2), low pregnancy length (<0.7) hybrids, and those ventured into cold/hot extremes are those faster breeders amount them, but when I came back, I observed what I can only described as quite similar to the founder effect when I dropped the breeding range and split them up into their own species. Those in the cold zone form their own large population species (>500 creatures), but the original species stay in the middle temperature zone splinter into 3 to 4 major groups (around 100 to 300 each), one of them is even a pure carnivore species (with about 200 creatures diet all 1). And interestingly due to lack of food to the extreme hot asphalt and hot desert zones, the ones adapted here on the extreme hot end became fast moving amphibious and migrate from shallow water to eat corals to graze savanna/tropical rainforest glass, dead trees. And the roaming carnivores followed them even to the sulphur lake water zone (majority carnivores roaming in the temperate zone, but they wonder up and down the coastlines to extreme zones)

And when I kept them running the litter size began to drop. The carnivores dropped the most all the way back to 1, and pregnancy length increase back of 0.9. Where most others dropped to about 1.2. While the extreme conditions creatures dropped less. The cold one is about 1.3. And interestingly the hot zone one is just 1.1 on average. And they stay with 0.7 pregnancy length. I think they reach certain equilibrium once they start to exhaust the resources and truly adapted to their environment and tune to population replacement breeding rate. I see oily fur warm blooded (>0.6 matabolic heat) cold creatures in the cold zone, and then colder zone long fur light warm blooded (0.3 to 0.5) species, to lukewarm blooded smooth skin, even squidlike cold blooded species (the carnivore species is the cold blooded type) in the starting temperate zone. And surprisingly the amphibious species adapted to extreme hot zone are extreme warm blooded (>0.8) with short fur and their sister species living in the rainforest is broken/rough skin warm blooded (0.4 to 0.6). The weird effect of over-cooling seems to force them to stay as high warm blooded creatures when they get constant water over-cooling to stay in the shoreline zone (but they have a very high optimal internal temperature of >30 degree)

I think given enough time, even though species tend to find shortcut adaptation first easily to stay alive in extreme conditions, they will begin their local adaptation when the pressure of high population kicked in where certain small groups mutated into the right combination to adapt a different strategy to stay competitive. And I think the roaming carnivores play a crucial role as well, they seems to be happily contempt with scavenging corpses dropped by the fast breeders, but cannot stay in the extreme zone in large numbers. But those who truly adapt to the condition where they don't need constant healing and can survive long march win out over the short lived rapid breeder since they don't need constant rest and sleep often.

P.S. I let the simulation continue to run till now, and one 30 or so creatures split into a new species lived in the very end of sea ice/taiga zone and have higher hp, higher energy capacity, higher stamina, curlup all the time, and strangely low litter size (most just 1, but several with 1.4), and longer pregnancy length.

[countingtls]

After another day or so continue running, I finally started to see truly well adapted species that can live in cold weather without the need of constant curlup or rest to stay alive. They became hotblooded (up to 0.9 and higher) and have a pretty high internal optimal temperature of 32 or more. Now two dominate species one lived in cold part of the map, one in hot part of the map (both >500), and 2 minor relic species spread out on the fringe of either side of the shallow water coastlines of the temperature region.

One thing caught up my attention is that the dominate species now start to increase their litter size back up to 1.7 to 1.8, and reduce pregnancy length to generally below 0.5, even as low as 0.2 in some cases, more so for the colder region species has shorter pregnancy length, while a big portion of the hot zone species still has 0.7 length. The relic minor species kept their 1 litter size, and in fact increase their pregnancy length up to 0.9. It seems like their low density (and generally low aggression and higher empathy) make them pick a different reproduction strategy.

Now I think the rise of higher litter size and shorter pregnancy has much to do with competition within crowded zone first when there is shortage in food in the beginning, and then the trend goes on to allow them spread to extreme end without much changes. After that, the constant dying and repopulating in the extreme zone give opportunities for those with longer pregnancy and lower litter size group if they happened to also has the right mutations combo to stay longer in the extreme zone with plenty space to venture further in the extreme zone. Only when they fully well adapted to the whole region the pressure of competition for food start to make the high litter fast breeding strategies more desirable again.

Also the true carnivores species splintered and all died out eventually I think it has more to do with all the dominate species are now jerks, high aggression, low empathy, highly competitive. Not sure if the mutation of carnivore head type will happened again in the future. But I set the mutation rate pretty low, so it might take a very long time to get there again (or I have to increase breeding range again and see if they stay hidden long enough to spread?)