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Feature Suggestion: Nocturnal animals


DangerousDodo

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Hello all!

This is mostly an idea, not incredibly fleshed out, but I thought I would share this since I haven't seen anything similar to it suggested. Currently, all nichelings are diurnal (active during the day) organisms. I thought it would be really cool to have a "night phase" in the game with resources and events only accessible to animals that are nocturnal in nature.

 

For example, if an animal is nocturnal, it has no moves in the daylight phase of the day, but is able to use its 3 turns during the night phase. Generally speaking, there would most likely be higher spawn rates of both predators and smaller prey. Some species are exclusively active during the late hours, so it would be cool to see some 'night phase exclusive' NPCs as well.

There are some flaws in this concept, however...

How would the nocturnal or diurnal behavior of an animal be "passed down"? Nocturnal animals' physicality enables them to survive at night.They have superior eyesight, are usually slimmer and less heavy-coated to evade heat, along with a plethora of other traits that enhance their ability to survive in the hours past sunset. Perhaps there would be an eye gene that determined what phase of the day an animal is active?

In short, adding the nocturnal mechanic would:

  1. Add a second part of a day
  2. Introduce new events and wildlife exclusive to animals who happen to be nocturnal
  3. Nichelings can only use turns during the appropriate "phase of the day"
  4. Possibly some new genes that would aid a nocturnal animal (?)

Anyways there's my little idea. Thanks for looking!

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Maybe it should looked at as not nessiarly a second phase of the day. What if instead you do it as a biome. Maybe a cave. Some of the biomes have creatures unique to it. So this way you can have a dark biome with all its unique critters that use the dark to their advantage with unique genes that would help in this biome but overall not nessiarly useful in others. 

Edited by Meigui
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Fun fact:
In a veeery early version of Niche (way before early access) there were noctural animals :D
Now, it would be quite a big rework, since we'd need to rethink all animals that move during night time.
I still think it would be awesome though!

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I love the idea of having a nighttime/nocturnal mode. A good replacement for the day time predators like the blue birds could be some sort of owl like creature which could perch in/on trees and otherwise works the same way stealing baby niches if they have one gem and are left unattended. For the bearyena replacement I'm not sure... I would suggest a fox like creature kind of like the arctic ram foxes but a bit different. It could attack adult nichlings kind of like a bearyena, but if it were to attack a baby nichling it would try to run away with it and you would have to chase it and kill it to try to save the baby. If it got away into a fox den or something then it would then "eat" the baby nichling. I know this would be extremely difficult if not impossible and would probably take a very, very long time being that you would basically be remaking the entire game to work at night time and replacing all the predators, but if it were to happen these would be my suggestions for possible predators that could work in a nocturnal environment.

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I like this idea, but I would be concerned about balance - how would an active animal interacting with an inactive animal be handled?  There aren't really 'safe spaces' an animal could hide in during it's non-active time, which seems like it would leave it vulnerable to attack.

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@Aysling

Yeah that could spawn issues, agreed. Not quite sure how that would be sorted out, that's kind of a tricky thing. I guess if something like this were to be added there would have to be some extra features added alongside it in order for it work properly and smoothly.

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