Environment and weather

The planet keeps time

Every world runs a day–night cycle and a longer environmental rhythm on top of it. Light matters mechanically — a Solar Array lives and dies by it, and so does the Habitat, whose own array is the grid a young colony runs on — and temperature swings between day and night can be brutal on the archetypes that run hot or cold.

While the sun is up, output is steady — the day has no better or worse hour, only a latitude, and the one thing that dims it is the sky. Cloud over a site takes a bite out of every panel under it, and a storm overhead takes a large one.

On the unlit side of a world, solar output is not reduced. It is nothing. Whatever the colony spends after dark comes out of a Battery Bank, or off a plant that does not need the sun at all — geothermal, a reactor, a generator burning something you had to make first.

The environment is deterministic for a given seed and turn: the weather is not rolling dice against you. A colony that pays attention can genuinely plan around what is coming.

Deciding what the night costs

Because the reserve is finite, the colony declares who is allowed to spend it. Every consumer sits in a power band, and the settlement sets how deep into the battery it will reach: bands at or above that line keep running through the night, bands below it live on surplus production and switch themselves off at dusk.

That makes darkness a scheduling problem rather than an emergency. Life support and housing ride the reserve; a smelter or a laboratory waits for morning, and nothing is lost by letting it. You can also park an individual building outright — it keeps standing and keeps its storage, but stops drawing — or throw the whole settlement into conservation mode, which keeps survival systems alone and lets the battery recover.

What the climate costs to hold off

A world that sits far from comfortable does not merely look hostile — it bills you, every turn, forever. Holding a settlement at a temperature people can live in is a standing energy cost, and on the colder and hotter archetypes it can dwarf everything else the colony spends put together. This is the single largest reason one landing site is worth more than another.

The bill arrives in two parts. Keeping the people themselves alive is not negotiable and cannot be shed: a brownout may darken a workshop, it will not switch off the heating. Every other module pays its own surcharge on top, scaled by how big it is, how much of it is heated interior, and how exposed its shell is to the outside — and that half a brownout will shed, so a cold night puts out the heated workshop long before it touches the habitat.

Cold and heat are not symmetric. Heating scales gently with the gap, because insulation is passive and anything the colony burns turns into heat anyway. Cooling has to push heat uphill into an ever-hotter sink, and there is nothing you can burn to get cold — so a hot world of a given severity costs more than a cold one.

None of this is a fixed property of a square. It moves with the season, and it moves with the weather: a front standing over a site strips heat where it is already freezing and traps it where it is already baking, so the bill always gets worse while the storm is overhead and eases when it passes. Every place reports its own reading, along with the range it will swing through across a full year — read that range rather than today’s number, because you will still be standing there in winter.

Crews in the open

A settlement is a buried, insulated mass with a battery; it averages the day away. A field team is people and a vehicle standing outside, and it feels everything the settlement shrugs off — the season, the night, and the front overhead. On a hostile world the difference between noon and midnight is a real operational fact.

The only thing between a person and that is what they are wearing. There is one field suit and it answers everything at once — heat and cold, the atmosphere, the radiation — competently at all of it and brilliantly at none, with what it is made of deciding where it is strong. A pressurized rover cabin is better still, and it covers everyone it seats.

A suit covers its wearer and nobody else. That is the whole shape of the decision: a crew three suits short has three people out in it with nothing, and the unit card names the worst off of them rather than averaging the crew into a comfortable single number. How many suits the colony holds is therefore a real ration — it decides how many people may go outside, not whether anyone may.

Heating is neither free nor absolute: it runs off the energy the team is carrying, and in a true extreme it runs flat out and still loses. The chemical and radiological barriers cost no power at all — there is nothing to run — but they are no more absolute for it.

Whatever the suit cannot hold off lands on that person. Their work slows, their injuries become markedly more likely, including the kind that leave something permanent behind, and a poisoned sky makes them ill on top of it. Nothing forbids you from sending a team anywhere; the planet simply charges you for it, and it charges you by the head.

Weather as a condition of work

Weather regimes differ by world and by region — dust, storm, cold snap, each with teeth of its own. Conditions modify what field work costs and what it risks: the same route is a different proposition in clear air and in a storm front. Hazardous ground plus hostile weather is where crews are lost.

The living cover

Vegetation is not a painted backdrop: it is a living field that grows toward what each place can carry, thins with winter and polar night, and retreats under whatever the colony builds. Sunlight is not its only table — where a planet’s own heat reaches the surface, the cover can live off that instead, untouched by season or night. Ground under settlements and roads reads as cleared; once a structure is abandoned, the cover creeps back over years, so a colony leaves visible scars and watches them heal.

The Biosphere mode of the planet lens reads the field — live values only where the colony has surveillance, the ground-survey estimate over walked land, and nothing at all over ground neither watched nor walked. The sector, region and location panels state the same cover as a Biomass reading beside moisture, under the same rule: live where you watch, the walked-ground estimate where you do not, no reading with neither — and the reading says which.

And the cover is lived off: wildlife exists as individual creatures with inherited, evolving ways — no two worlds carry the same fauna. Herds graze scars into the field, scavengers follow the dead, and the colony enters their senses like anything else in their world: most learn to avoid its noise, some probe its perimeter, and an attack on a field team is the act of a real creature — the fight that follows is against those bodies, not against a hazard number. On the map, wildlife shows only where you hold surveillance.

What the colony learns of them, it earns: the first sighting writes a species into its book under a code, a scientist on a standing field study reveals its ways and eventually earns it a name, and a standing hunt turns wildlife into a trickle of food — every kill a real body taken from the world, part of it left where it fell for the scavengers.