![]() Levels don’t end until you’ve recycled all your buildings. The horror of recycling is about to begin Any hurdle can be overcome or ignored if the rest of the game is fun enough – but if it isn’t, well… Games don’t always need to make sense or reflect reality, but if they don’t make sense according to the player’s understanding of the fictional world, which in Terra Nil’s case is meant to be pretty close to our own, they introduce a hurdle for players learning the rules. Putting aside the fact that it’s weird to sonar scan for animals, wouldn’t it make more sense if I was, I don’t know, airdropping or releasing these animals, rather than looking for them? I’m not trying to be pedantic here, I struggled with this bit of the game until I realised exactly what was going on. How does this make any sense?!? My sonar scans clearly weren’t detecting existing deer and wolves they were bringing them into existence. So then I go to scan the same bit of forest again (the old scan now helpfully and suspiciously reading as “outdated” unlike other results) and yes, the wolves appear. I did another sonar scan in the grassland, which detected deer. Sure enough, the forest was there, but not any nearby prey in the adjacent grassland. I thought I’d satisfied those conditions, so I did a sonar scan in one of my forests. To fully restore a biome, it’s not enough to introduce a healthy mix of plants, you also need to add at least three species of animals, all of which have their own special conditions for example, timber wolves need forests and nearby prey. It’s toward the end of a level where things get confusing. Other concepts also fall into the “weird but fine” category, like the solar amplifier that sets land on fire to generate nutritious ash one would have thought that a flamethrower would’ve worked, but the building does look pretty. After that, irrigators enable plants to grow on clean land, but they can only spray water in two directions, so you need to rotate and fit them together efficiently, because all of these buildings consume some of your limited resources. I would have guessed that in the real world this is an incredibly intensive activity involving lots of trucks and treatment plants, but a “toxin scrubber” building works well enough here. It’s a little odd that you can only build them on rocks given that the platonic image of a windmill sits in the countryside, but that’s a small problem. ![]() That makes sense! We’ve all heard of windmills and we know they’re green. These generate power for nearby buildings. There's a lot of parts to the game like that where it definitely sparks my curiosity and makes me look up the interactions.Your first building in the first biome is a windmill. I don't really know if you could ever remove the shading though. Where I live in Australia there is a pretty clear succession progression and so it wouldn't really be necessary unless you were specifically trying to skip straight to the climax vegetation, but I can imagine a feedback loop in tropical rainforests where the shade leads to the understory species, but without the shade it stays too dry. I was really interested in the shading though. Like we would definitely plant fire tolerant trees that will encourage fire in the future, and that will have a long term positive effect in helping restore the ecosystem - but in the game that's an instant effect, while in reality we'd hope that in 50 years time there's been one fire and it would have helped keep the changes in plant mix that we'd made! I think the educational aspect of the game is more about the ecosystem interactions and effects. I haven't been involved in projects that do much more than that. Perhaps some sort of soil replacement might be necessary first too. Real restoration works is mainly just removing the wrong plants, planting the right ones, maybe with some sort of plan regarding wind and shelter, in my experience. ![]() New Reddit banana background by sergei akulich from Pixabay ![]() Solarpunk slogan: "Move quietly and plant things"įundraising related to solarpunk, open source, environmental, and non-profit projects are acceptable content. ![]() Here's a good intro essay and reference guide. Solarpunk is everything from a positive imagining of our collective futures to creating it. ![]()
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