Ticking time bomb worlds, some with plenty of in-game time to explore, some with mere hours, all on their way to a destructive and potentially final end... and our intrepid explorers must plunder the wealth, save the wildlife and harvest the rarest of objects there. So this one could be tricky... Depending on how time flows, if it flows at all for objects not being generated on screen, this would either need to be simulated apart from them or incorporated into the calendar. What this is essentially about are worlds that are running on borrowed time. Either due to massive mantle disruptions, an orbit that is quickly escaping its sun, (and dooming it to become a dead world, as suggested elsewhere,) a sun that is slowly pulling the planet into itself, or impending collision with another world, there exists a number of planets or systems that can be explored, plundered, even colonized or allowed to possess an already-present civilization. But the clock is ticking. If not explored/plundered quickly, the rare species on its surface will be destroyed, the indigenous folk will be lost forever, and all life on the planet will end, potentially rendering the planet impossible to explore in the impact/sun-diving scenarios. What I'm guessing would need to be done to make implementation "easy": I know squat about what it takes to make the wonders I see in the occasional YouTube video of this game. If I had to theorize, however, I'd say that representing these disasters would be done through "cheating": the sun-diving scenario just makes the sun huge in the sky and creates high-temperature problems on the planet surface, up to and including requiring armor that involves advanced coolant systems, dealing with flora bursting into deadly flames at random, etc. The world impact would be similar, except the incoming planet would be huge on the skybox and gravity would start getting... interesting. Penguins minding their own business suddenly get launched into air, eventually dropped and splattered upon the rocks. Players will need grav boots to avoid meeting a similar end. Both of those "massive destruction" scenarios end by simply erasing the planet upon destruction, maybe a flash on the screen if the player stays on for too long, (or they get emergency-teleported out? I don't even know if that's a thing.) The other scenarios are far simpler. Seed the world with life, then slowly destroy it. Grave worlds become museums of darkness and ice, with former inhabitants forming corpsicles milling about, frozen at the moment of their death. Mantle issues just mean the world gets drowned in lava and the earth splits in giant gashes, meaning it'll either cool in time, (and let deep exploration happen quickly,) or something needs to be done to get rid of the lava. (The giant gash version would be a world gen thing, I suppose.) Seeing now that I've made three paragraphs of probably meaningless speculation, I think I'll stop; you all get the picture.
I don't know about this, it's an interesting scenario, but consider this: You cannot be everywhere at once. Planets like that would die around you (If they'd wait for you it would feel rather weird). Also, people might not want to lose planets like that. And how would you handle spawning these anyway? Would it change already-existing planets, or would new planets appear? Both would be strange and/or annoying. After all, planets do not suddenly pop up and people don't like their mining planets to suddenly vanish either.
It wouldn't be weird at all, planets are generated when you first go to them, so it wouldn't be a big deal for the game to generate planets with a countdown. However, your poll sucks. I'm not saving shit.
But how do you assure people will actually go to them? There's a bazillion stars out there, who says you even find them on your starmap before they vanish? Them starting to die when you first go on it feels way too rpg-ish. Like a house that only burns down once you're in it.
Because they aren't on the map until you go to them. The planets literally don't exist until you jump to their system. It creates them on the fly. Do you know how long it would take to generate 10 billion planets if it made them all at once when you created the server? A long damn time. Here's how it would work: You jump to a system, and get a computer alert that one of the planets is in the process of exploding/imploding/whatever. It doesn't "start exploding" when you get there, it "just happens" to BE exploding when you get there. And it wouldn't exactly happen in every system you visit.
AFAIK it creates the sectors when you start a new game, but the actual planets have different "content" so to speak. Of course I could be wrong on that, but it's true, your system wouldn't work out so well. If it's wrong, it could work.
You don't need to make all the planets, just a timer. Once the player visits the planet, the game compares the timer to the present time and decides what state it's in. If destroyed, the visitors are greeted with either an insane, broken collection of collided planets with wonky gravity or a recently deceased planet that drifted too far from its sun. Really, the "timer" would just be some integer counting off every "time unit" spent by the character, or something even more clever to avoid any notable weight on the memory, (considering that I couldn't imagine more than a few hundred "marked" planets in any collection of ten-thousand, this weight is probably light as it is.) Also, I would say no to only starting the timer once visited, (because I agree on it being too RPG-ish,) only because most catastrophes wouldn't destroy the world altogether, merely making it inhospitable, difficult to navigate or awesomely dead. In effect, letting a planet "die" in most cases will just make it a very different place to visit. Lastly, if eliminating the "complete destruction" scenarios is the deal maker, I could see it still being an exciting addition to the otherwise passive exploration. Plus, if the infrastructure is put into place to allow for such "timers" for worldgen-altering events, just think of the possibilities once modding really gets started.
Could the "timer" system be part of the content? Furthermore, could we then have these "special" planets have two content loaders, one for pre-disaster and one for post? Something I probably should have factored into the discussion: will the player be TOLD that these worlds are on the path to catastrophe remotely, or will they only discover it upon visiting? Personally I assumed it would be the latter, thus turning a routine survey mission into a desperate race against time, (or just a notable event that'll happen in the far-flung future, depending on when you visit it.) Having little time means saving/grabbing/killing as much as you can before you suffer the planet's fate. Having plenty of time means long-term goals need to be changed for the planet; if the terraforming idea in another thread takes off, for instance, perhaps it could be used to include orbit correction. If not, then perhaps your original plan of terraforming has become a salvage operation. Which also means... SAVING planets from their doom? That's far-flung, but potential slice of awesome our intrepid explorers might be able to pull off. Nevermind. If ever planets are "doomed" in some way in the release, we'll think about the idea of saving them with SCIENCE later.
Not sure about the implementation, but I like the Thinking Big of this idea. Planet-wide disasters, of the sort that you often see in Star Trek. A population dying of a plague; massive droughts or planetary freezes; vulcanism annihilating a planet's surface; massive solar flares; impending asteroid or comet impact; supernovae; black hole influence; dangerous shifts in planetary orbit; or something weird and unique like ice-nine or strange matter converting an entire planet into something uninhabitable. A disaster properly foreseen, requiring the action of the player to avert it, or possibly to organize or participate in an evacuation of the population. Or, for nastier-minded players, the ability to provoke such disasters.
