Terraforming Reloaded

Terraform the planet

The air outside is no longer bottomless. What you vent stays. What your base draws in is gone. Move enough of the right gases and the pressure, temperature, sky and weather outside change for good, saved with your world.

Release candidate. Every part of this is checked against the game by automated runs rather than by long play. Back up your save before its first session, and report anything odd on GitHub with your Player.log.

[hr][/hr]

Two things set the temperature

Which gas it is. Each one either traps heat or sheds it: [table] [tr][th]Effect[/th][th]Gases[/th][/tr] [tr][td]Traps heat[/td][td]pollutant (strongest), volatiles, carbon dioxide, steam[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Sheds heat[/td][td]nitrous oxide (strongest), hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Does neither[/td][td]helium, hydrazine, hydrochloric acid, ozone, silanol[/td][/tr] [/table] Nitrogen and oxygen are not filler. Both shed heat, and harder the thicker they get, so air you can breathe is cold air. You make up for it with carbon dioxide: a breathable Mars holds more carbon dioxide than oxygen, about 75 moles per outdoor cell against 57.

How much of it there is. Thick air narrows the gap between day and night whatever it is made of. Helium is the clean example: it neither traps nor sheds, so it is pure thickening.

[hr][/hr]

How it plays

• An endgame project for a base built to move gas in bulk: rockets hauling ice back from orbit, gas traders, big vents, tank farms.
• Hot worlds are hot because of the air they start with. Strip the greenhouse gases out of Venus or Vulcan and they cool.
• Cold worlds warm in stages. Vent a gas that freezes at the temperature you have now and it just snows into the ice caps, doing nothing. So you start with a gas that stays airborne while it is still that cold, let it lift the planet a little, and that unlocks the next gas up. Everything that froze on the way is still there, and the caps hand it back as the planet warms.
• The Moon and Mimas start with nothing. Their first air swings hard between day and night until it thickens.
• Storms are milder on a world you have cooled.
• Storms answer to what you have done. Take away most of a world's air, or make it temperate, thick and clean, and it stops getting its own storms. Solar storms keep coming unless you choose otherwise: on the Moon one is four times the usual solar power.
• A world you have not touched reads exactly as it does without the mod.
• Custom worlds work. WORLDS.md in the mod folder is for world authors.

[hr][/hr]

How long it takes

One setting, Planet size, decides the pace. Hours to reach air you can stand in with your helmet off: [table] [tr][th]World[/th][th]Terraforming strategy[/th][th]Short 1/100[/th][th]Standard 1/20[/th][th]Long 1/4[/th][th]Unmodded 1/1[/th][/tr] [tr][td]Venus[/td][td]Strip the air, tank what you take[/td][td]8[/td][td]40[/td][td]201[/td][td]806[/td][/tr] [tr][td]The Moon[/td][td]Add gas, nothing to remove[/td][td]15[/td][td]73[/td][td]367[/td][td]1,467[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Mars[/td][td]Add gas, nothing to remove[/td][td]15[/td][td]75[/td][td]376[/td][td]1,503[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Europa[/td][td]Tank the oxygen, warm, put it back[/td][td]44[/td][td]220[/td][td]1,101[/td][td]4,402[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Vulcan[/td][td]Strip the fuel first, then fill[/td][td]44[/td][td]222[/td][td]1,108[/td][td]4,431[/td][/tr] [tr][td]Mimas[/td][td]Warm it in stages, from nothing[/td][td]72[/td][td]360[/td][td]1,802[/td][td]7,208[/td][/tr] [/table] Unmodded is the planet at the size the game itself uses. The others shrink it, so there is less air behind every outdoor cell and less of it to move.

The hours are time spent moving gas, and the strategy is the rest of the story. What sets the pace on every world is ice arriving: there is no oxygen tap, and the carbon dioxide a cold world needs has to be burnt out of volatiles on top of that. Taking gas away is much faster, because a vent draws in a share of the whole planet's air at once. So Venus is quick in hours and still a big project: what it really costs is somewhere to put what you take out, about 48 large tanks at Standard size.

Rough scale, not a promise. They assume four ice mining rockets (about 330,000 moles of ice an hour) and twenty large powered vents, worked out rather than measured. Half the rockets doubles every number.

Size changes nothing else about the world: the air, pressure and temperature you start with are the same at every size. A save made before you installed the mod carries the full-size planet until you rescale it.

[hr][/hr]

Console (F3)

• terraform : pressure, temperature, gases, and whether the mod is running
• terraform set : the settings the world you are playing keeps for itself. terraform set <key> <value> changes one for this world only. One that deletes something for good asks first
• terraform size <share> confirm : change how much air the planet holds, and so how long it takes. Pressure, mix and temperature stay where they are
• terraform reset confirm : put the planet back as the world ships. Your base is untouched
• terraform gas add / remove : put a gas into the planet or take it out, for testing
• terraform curves export / reload : tune the temperature response. See CURVES.md

[hr][/hr]

Removing it

Your changed planet lives in the save, so deleting the mod does not undo it. Run terraform reset confirm, save, quit, then disable. Skip that and a changed world snaps back to its shipped temperature: a breathable Venus is 737 K again, and new air on the Moon sits near absolute zero.