---
# System prepended metadata

title: Planetstation Writeup

---

# Planetstation Writeup

Last update: 7/9/2024

## Theme & Design

- Map setting is a **planet.**
- Map has our server's 'goal' of 80/20 science/fantasy theming.
    - The premise of this map is at its core, not very compatible with an Expanse-like hard realism of sci-fi & whatnot. This is intentional and is not a mutable thing; to have this map work & be fun at all this has to be the case, as it is explicitly not meant to be a 'normal' bay-like planet map. For one, the multi-biome structural alone is somewhat unbelievable, let alone the eldritch / archotech shit under the surface.
- The map will exhibit a large amount of experimental features and design.
    - This will double as our permanent rolling-development map.
    - Anything meant to drastically contrast from existing stations will be marked as **(E)**
- The map will **not** have a large overmaps component.
    - Not many, if any overmap planets at all.
        - At first, it will; these will be removed as the station's planet is slowly expanded.
    - Trade station, off-map stations and ships, etc, are valid still.
    - This is due to memory constraints, mostly.

### A forewarning.

This map, **if** done, will involve a **massive** undertaking of code / mapping / spriting resources over time.

This map is not meant to enable a story arc.
This map is not meant to 'enforce' lore.
This map is not meant to serve a singular purpose, and then be discarded.

This map will be a constantly in-dev project, expanded with the latest things, with more threats and scenarios constantly hurled at it.

Much like what we want for our 'primary shipmap', this is built as a jack of all trades map without a given purpose, instead existing as an inexhaustible gameplay loop.

This, in turn, means that anything put on this map (like Scorians, potentially), has to deal with this fact. We will run other maps along this, because this map is also not designed to be the 'one and only', only *one of the primary*.

## System

- Star system with multiple systems; this is the only planet that's inhabitable
- **Not owned by anyone.** Nanotrasen has majority control by arriving first (and pushing a few unnamed local explorer/miner group out of the way).
- Mid-frontier, placement is either between the major governments / factions or between Orion and the Exclusion Zone (Uh Oh!).

## Dimensions

Heavy optimizations to planet and turfs will be required.

We currently drive the server with ~30 levels, but only half of them are planet levels.

Planet levels are quite literally an order of magnitude more expensive than space levels to maintain (100+MB per, worst case), while space levels are usually less than that by far, especially if sparse.

The *goal*, is:

- 192x192 levels
- 2x3 general outdoors level dimensions (~576 by 384 total levels, to be expanded to 576 by 576 if optimizations permit)
- 3-stack of 0: ground, -1: caverns, -2: abyss
- The station level is special and has 2 additional levels above, for our multiz station
- Other 'above' levels might be added to the other levels but **should be avoided if at all possible**. I know people like multi-z but it opens us to a whole bag of problems that I want to avoid dealing with.
    - Remember: New shuttles can land literally anywhere there's space, and the station's levels have ample space.
    - If all else fails we can add a single additional 'air' level somewhere else for more landing pads.
    - Most of the map is however not landable due to tree / canopy cover.

Levels will be generated with a special continuous generator that produces smooth results across level borders.

## Station

- Semi-secretive research facility; it is one of the most well-developed places on the planet, and is often, much like NT ships, a very viable and capable forwards operating base for not just NT but also visitors / contractors / people NT is willing to assist (for a price or otherwise).
- The map is designed from the ground up to both be an open-ish design with lots of ways to get around, *and* be a secure facility.
- The station is **mostly 2-3 levels**, with some quirks.
    - Third level is mostly for certain areas like bridge, AI, airbridges, shuttles, certain department functions and offices, etc. If it makes sense to use it, we will, but this is more of a 2.5 level map and not an 'enforced 3-level' like many others are designed around. This is because it makes no sense to force usage of 3 levels if there's not enough to pad it with.
    - The mining base, and a small outpost will be on level -1 (caverns) and -2 (abyss)
- The station as per my usual design specifications should be generally-airtight. The planet has breathable air **all year round**, but it is still an alien environment, and therefore it is extremely risky to just make a full open air station; or so the thematics go. That said, the station is not a monolithic fortress like stations usually are.
    - **(E)** Service, recreation, civillian sectors will be a separate building with far more open air design. The building will be 2-3 z-levels, have small outposts for most of the departments.
        - Unlike Tether, this will actually be thought out; don't start screaming 'no second medbay pls!!!'
    - **(E)** Thematically, this building is also meant to be the unrestricted area. Unlike the rest of the station (more on that later), it does *not* have access restrictions on its exterior doors, and doesn't have controlled airlocks and whatnot.
    - Facilities for all service sectors (so, an out of the way small cafe/kitchen (no bar) combo, xenobotany substituting as botany) will be somewhat available in the main cluster too, but won't be nearly as nice. This is to keep with 'there's always a separate recreation area from the main one' **without encouraging pulling population away from the main ones.**
    - **(E)** The service sector will be 3-5 tiles away from the main station, complementing a side entrance. It will also be connected via **airbridge**, into the station proper. Airbridges are controlled by command remotely.
    - **(E)** The service sector has no restrictions on air-tightness, though it should still be air-tight/environmentally controlled where possible. Basically, it's allowed to be pretty unlike most station designs.
- **All maintenance and external airlocks have access restrictions on the main station, as well as security functions.** The station is *not* a romping ground for visitors, because boy there's going to be a lot of visitors passing through.
- **Exploration gets to stay.** Yippee! They'll be given their usual RIGs.
    - They are however, downsized to a pathfinder, 2 explorers, and no FMs/pilots. Pilots exist, but aren't part of exploration unless invited by the exploration team. Their shuttles are entirely separate.

### Airbridges

This map will have usage of the usual elevators and stairs, but also **airbridges**.

These are retractable bridges used to provide high-speed transit to certain otherwise separated areas, like the command cluster, civillian cluster, AI core, and certain other areas.

They can be controlled with the right access and/or remotely, eventually.
They are airtight while closed.

### General Layout 

Here's the cliffnotes.

- Station is aligned to a corner of the 2x3 level grid; not flush with it (I hate mountain-embedding yet another station tbh, if I want to secure things I have better ways like **actual walls** for crying out loud).
    - If we're feeling extremely daring we can have the station be central aligned instead of side aligned, but I'm not a big fan of this because for incomprehensible design reasons I do want the station to feel defensible, as boy, we're going to be throwing some *dangerous* things at this map.
- **Widescreen considerations:** the main opening of the station should probably be left / right to make it *feel* bigger.
    - Align station with bottom left of level grid? That's the 'tgstation lavaland standard', too.
- Service sector, as specified above, is more exposed to outside.
- There'll be a shockingly large amount of overmaps peripherals/shipmap things here for uh, undisclosed reasons.
- Bridge will be at the front, near the airbridges to service sector.
    - Because I'm feeling super mil-rp-y lately, this would likely also have a 'battle bridge'-esque beat with another highly secured command facility near the actual AI core, which would be at the back of the station for security.
- Departments should be:
    - **Vertically localized**: Believe it or not, there are actual issues with stacking departments on-top of each other, like 1. engineering explosions blowing up medbay, 2. scientists breaking into secure areas via tearing the floor, and 3. more.
        - This is not an absolute, we do need some vertical mixing.
    - **Horizontally clustered**: Close enough to feel homely, basically. You shouldn't need to run for a full minute to get to another department, or something insane.
- **(E)** Science-Engineering division; in new design for science, several subdepartments are joint engineering-science. This will be mapped but not immediately implemented.
    - Mechatronics (not cyborgs / AIs / prosthetics / augments)
    - Materials Science (including toxins)
    - If things don't work out it'll just be science-only again.
- **(E)** Biotechnology / Genetics sector; in new design for science, several subdepartments are joint medical-science. This will be mapped but not immediately implemented.
    - Xenobiology
    - Xenobotany
    - Genetics
    - If things don't work out it'll just be science-only again.

### Shuttles

Undecided; exploration, security, cargo, medical definitely get shuttles. science might, there might be 2-3 civ ones, command might have a drone still; who knows! I'll decide on pads / hangers when doing department layouts.

## Orbital

**Experimental.**

The station *may* have an orbital station whose purpose is to be a transit dock.

- Shuttle hangers (not docks; everything is internal for security).
- Transit to residential sector / central command
    - Centcom is technically accessible from in game but security measures will be in place to prevent players from breaking in.
- Small departmental things might be up there; same as civ sector, with a cafe / whatnot. Again, small areas, so it's an active choice to go up there but it's not as pleasant as the actual civ sector / doesn't really have proper department tooling in the accessible area.

This is very much just a consideration; Tether wasn't really well liked, and putting normally 'out of game' destinations like central command adjacent to the playable world isn't really done much.

### Quantum Gate

**Experimental.**

Unlike the Tether, we won't use a big clunky elevator to funnel all the players through. That's antiquated and honestly quite silly.

Instead, we'll use a quantum gateway that you can walk through, see through, hear through, and *shoot through*.

The gateway can be controlled by command systems on both sides.

If the gateway is offline, the station will need to use shuttles to transit up and down.

- While nearly impossible due to the amount of shuttles we usually place on maps / will place on this map, it *is* possible for the station to lose all egress methods due to the quantum gate being offline'd as well as all shuttles being unavailable.

## Planet

The planet is a three-layer system.

### Level 0: Ground

Ground level. 

- Continental planet
- Jungle next to station with thick canopy (think tree and leaf *turfs*, with an 'above' level, maybe / maybe not)
- Weather (normal planet weather, jungle can block rain)
- Day Cycle / Sunlight
- Seasons: 4 seasons.
- *Relatively* clear terrain with some rocky hills to block movement without drilling through or going around.

This is **not a safe level, unlike most maps.**
The station is fenced off and the station level is generally safe, but other levels are procedurally generated, and have hostile mobs.

### Level 1: Caverns

Underground level.

- **Volcanic Caverns**; tl;dr this is lavaland's replacement.
- ~1km underground
    - Requires elevator to access; it's far too deep for stairs or ladders.
    - Two elevators.
    - Elevators take ~10-20 seconds to transit, but are 5x5-7x7.
        - Sorry gamers, I hope you didn't think you escaped Tether-esque design...
    - idk elevators are dumb but I don't see another way
- Relatively large mining base; nearly unnecessarily so.
    - This is because it's possible to be stuck here. That'd be bad, right? This is effectively an forward base, with miniature department stuff as usual.
    - Powered from above, but has its own backup power.
- The caverns are utterly, unrealistically tall; high enough to have **weather**; 2-3 km in height.
    - Ash storms
    - Cycles of how much light from lava areas radiates across the place
    - Caverns are held up by massive pillars of metamaterials.
        - See where this planet is going now? If it's 'nowhere good', you're right!
- Terrain: Convoluted ridges / paths, some open areas, generally pretty annoying to navigate.
- This **does not** get telecomms / sensors / etc from station by default; a **relay** is maintained at the base to provide this.
- **Power & Network connections are not inside the station.**
    - This means it's not protected by the elevator.

Regular lavaland mobs will be present.

Everything else would be a TBD, other than:

- We will explicitly **not** have roaming, non-event megafaunas that are capable of immense damage or body annihilation. We do not want this, it is too game-y
- We will **not** have random high-level magical gimmicks/loot everywhere. This is not the point of the map.
- We **will** start to slowly implement things like concrete / hardmapped structures, procedural ruins, new mobs, etc, as we go.

### Level 2: Abyss

Heavily TBD; this will be added, but **non-accessible** from first implementation, as the game is frankly not dangerous enough as-is to make this work yet.

- Yet another unbelievable subterranean planet layer.
- Requires elevator to access.
    - One elevator
    - 7x7
    - 30 second transit time
    - idk elevators are dumb but I don't see another way
- Medium mining base
    - Powered from above.
- **Locked off by default.**
- **Does not** have telecomms/etc by default; a relay is maintained at another location, much like in caverns.
- **Pitch black.** Technically can have 'natural' light, but effectively doesn't happen.
    - If something glows, it's probably not safe either.

This is, when / if it is released, would be pretty much the hell-level that kills people. Everything is on the table, including encounters with **natural-spawn megafauna** (while I'm willing to *entertain* the idea of specially designed megafauna - **not** bullet hell /tg/ megafauna - I am not going to have them just be free loot drops. Bringing science weapons and mechs doesn't mean you'll win, not even close really.)

## Ecology & Content

### Ground

Ground is uh, mostly normal.

- The fact that there's living flowers that shoot bolts of solar radiation at you is what we call 'a fun time'.
- *Sometimes*, some POI might have a cave entrance or something going down and creatures come up and we have a fun time etc etc

### Caverns

Lavaland content, basically.

- Up to mid-level mobs here; not megafauna, but far more dangerous than current lavaland mobs.
- Nanite creatures
- Xenoarcheology 
- **Lots** of ruins and even functional boundings

### Abyss

Uhhhh

- Megafauna (not the bullet hell kind, but slow / RP-balanced and pretty much a `run` situation)
- No lights; lit things are usually bad (either attracting danger, or are lures for prey)
- All buildings should be rare & major danger 
- Ironically more open than caverns; this is **not** a good thing for crew (things tracking them can track them better.)

## Mechanics

### (E) Surface Events

While the planet is usually safe, rare cases of extreme weather do happen.

In this case, the station (including the civ sector) is entirely equipped with fully-interior modes of transportation, like the airbridge system, and a way to fully air-tight the entire space.

The primary installation (not the civ sector) is also reinforced against a myriad of threats, from nuisence flocks of flying fauna and heat waves, to full-blown hurricanes with flooding. It *is* a space-worthy station, after all.

### (E) Stealth

A spatial grid is imposed over the map.
Actions like shooting and whatnot will radiate noise and attract mobs, potentially causing (heavily controlled) mob spawns.

### (E) Ghost Restrictions

The Abyss, as well as potentially *parts of* the Cavern layers, **will not allow free ghost roaming.**

- Ghosts can observe any *player* in it, from their perspective.
- People who die can observe their body.
- Otherwise, you cannot free-roam, or hear stuff on that level.
- Cavern might have this half or fully applied; it is understandably a bit boring to have no ghost coverage but I don't really want ghosts meta-ing what's on the level, tbh. 
    - Partial application involves blanking out areas around certain ruins while leaving the rest.

### (E) Procedural Generation

Unlike most station maps, this map would be wholly procedurally generated, down to the tiles around the station. Everything's just a placeholder for the maploader system to inject tiles/features as it wishes.

- This means *almost* everything is. There's not going to be much of a lore explanation.
- Areas around the station will be spared this treatment but only directly around; the terrain / seasons will still be generated but there won't be offmaps/etc
- Offmaps and more dangerous stuff get gradient'd away from the station, towards the edges of the 3-zlevel-gap, so that you have to travel for hundreds of tiles potentially to meet something. This keeps the station safe.

### (E) Mob Spawns

Mob spawns will be numerous, but semi-constant.

- Being super loud *may* awaken more mobs, but there'll be a system in place to ensure that mobs don't spawn where they shouldn't / wouldn't be sensical
    - As an example if you go into a cave and it's an one wide hallway a mob shouldn't just spontaneously generate behind you when you're not looking; that's nonsensical and not okay. Virgo rogueminer system does this, I think it's shitty.
    - Another spatial store like the one used for stealth only to record what's *logically* fully explored, so mobs don't do just that.
- There's a reasonable hard limit to the number of mobs that can spawn in a given area on a given round, so fully purging everything is still very doable and valid.

## Special

### Scorians

If implemented with lava caverns, this would potentially be the permanent map for Scorians, freeing up the rest of the maps to no longer require the quantum pad.

Given that if this map is made, it would be maintained permanently (given the large amounts of features & gameplay planned for it), this would given Scorians a permanent place, and a consistent story on a map that will be utilized permanently into the foreseeable future.

- This would require a major retcon of Scorians.
- We are not doing crazy stuff like 'megafauna gods under the ground', either. This map does have some quirky stuff, but it still has to be a planet that's safe enough to justify studying rather than just making you potentially able to get Surtur'd movie style.
- I'd highly suggest using this map for that, because to be entirely frank, if we actually pull this map off, it's probably the one and only map with enough dev power and thought into it to give Scorians a **permament** home with interaction.
- Unfortunately, there's still some issues with doing this to consider.
    - The lore would more or less be 'they inherited / developed occult sci-fantasy technology, and are in the bronze age', and are either life-seeded or went underground due to a cataclysm or some shit.
    - They shouldn't be full primitives anymore and develop towards bronze/later ages.
    - It does seem weird for a pre-FTL civilization to exist on the same planet as NT, a Trans-Stellar Corporation. On a temporary basis, okay, but on a permanent basis, this might be a little strange.

### Technological Corruption

Aside from Scorians, dangerous fauna, special factions like Hierophant devices, there are also a myriad of weird technological threats at play both below and sometimes above the surface.

Processing cores and self-replicating machinery (not nanobots; think half-alive hybrid assimilation / parasitic things like tech-horrors) have been rumored to be found underground. 

While the station is a marvel of engineering, its presence is constantly attracting attention. How long until something big finds us?

### Why we are Here, and what can happen to us?

The planet contains a myriad of xenoarcheological marvels, gizmos, history, ores, and more.

It's barely explored at all.

Corporations want this. Nanotrasen got here first, and poured some resources to secure this foothold.

Many others want a piece of the pie. Not all confrontations will be friendly. Nanotrasen allows people to generally come around and visit in a show of good faith (and to discourage / have a reason to enforce against 'illegal' trespass), but this is obviously biased towards them; many will not want this.

There might be groups trying to sneak on, cause trouble, steal things from the station, etc.

There might be more threats under the ground that the station hasn't been aware of; remember, the planet is not explored. All people know is that natives, ores, and a myriad of alien technology is at play.

For a lighter note, it is still very nice on the surface; secured areas might as well be vacation destinations. Many visit on tourist trips, and many more come for the archeological opportunities, or just to engage in business with the Nanotrasen staff.

It's not unheard of for meets to be held on the station, or on the orbital either.

### Continuous Development

Buildings can be built and torn down on the map; the station should generally enjoy a **300-tile border in all directions**, where things are 'only' proc-gen'd and otherwise static and boring and not too wacky.

Towards the edges of the 3x3 ground (caverns & abyss is always considered 'volatile' / changes permitted no matter the distance from the station) away from station is a good opportunity to introduce and over time, mutate the map as our needs change.

You can even attach more zlevels to the map - temporarily - for event purposes, like making a certain event involve a station on a *further* z-level than the usual playable space, and only spawn when the EM is on so players can't loot it if it canonically should be occupied.

This is highly experimental, of-course.

## Concerns

- kinda unrealistic to have matryoshka planets; rock is heavy, holding up rock isn't easy
    - "primordial pillars" of some fuckalloy that holds them up lol idk why am i doing this planet again maybe i should've split this into 2 planets or just did a single level planet where volcanic areas are far away from station idfk lol
    - (the reason i don't propose single level is because ironically, walking 1000 tiles is not really amazing either, but it's okay i guess.)
        - if we get rid of needing to support weather on lower levels we can make this a lot more realistic; caverns can be just very spacious caverns, and **not** literally big enough to support weather patterns.
- having underground be too far away from surface means there's no chance of 'invasions' by underground creatures going up
    - which sucks