Hi Tenna, welcome to the community!

Well.. if all the ursaphants die, all the ursaphants are dead :) Because nothing spawns into this world, if a species goes extinct -- they're extinct. They won't be able to come back. Resources will deplete and superior ones will be discovered and new lands will open up for exploration... there's going to be a 10-year story plan, which means there'll have to be enough resources to accommodate that time-frame for the world to survive if people think ahead.

ie: Replanting the forests you cut down and hunting a particular species less so that it has a chance to repopulate.

Resource quality will also be a thing :)

"if all the ursaphants die, all the ursaphants are dead:)"

You're a monster!

But in all seriousness, ecosystems and biology was kinda my thing once upon a time - ecosystems are relatively delicate things. Some animals are voracious predators but normally there is a higher level predator hat keeps them in check so they don't wipe out an animal lower in the food chain. Even with no humans in the game world, an ecosystem could be set up and not be balanced so half the life forms are wiped out in a year.

I'm not being doubtful or a cynic I'm just curious (in a non technical way) how is that prevented? Is that just a matter of letting simulations run super fast and constantly tweaking numbers till it balances out? Or has this already been done before and there is a model to base it off of? Or when numbers of animals drop (especially at the primary prey level) do animals' hunger higher up in the food chain get reduced so they don't exhaust the food supply as fast? Bicycle Walrus was talking about how fox will hunt something else when it's primary food source is exhausted....in regards to spatialOS giving objects a sense of realistic behavior....will the starvation aspect be slowed down so animals don't starve to death as quickly as they normally would?

One solution to a complete ecosystem collapse is to have animals at the base of the food chain (something like rabbits which are eaten by just about every predator) breeding rate increase as their numbers drop but taper off as they get higher.

That would help with maintaining the integrity but some animals will over breed and exhaust available resources (rabbits, rats and even deer at a slower rate etc) in contrast to larger predatory animals that not only breed at a much slower rate but their behaviors also prevent over population to some extent unlike rabbits and rats:ie,lions - jeuvenile males are sent off to form male prides, only the alpha male in a pride is allowed to mate, cubs from other males are killed when a new male takes over, when males are cast out they must travel to a new region to try and form a new pride etc etc.

Then there are examples of opportunistic feeders (mostly fish) who will literally eat themselves to death if there is an over abundance of food because they are constantly seeking food.

Ok yeah....it's late and I can't sleep but ecosystems fascinate me and I'm just curious what their approach to balancing it will be.

Good luck! Excited to see it all come together!

Manipulate the ecosystem near you. If there's a high demand for Rabbits, simply reduce the number of competitors that eat the same foodstuffs, and reduce the numbers of their predators. The net result will be an increase in rabbit numbers. At that stage when it's at a healthy rate, you can start to gather them or actively farm them.

One of the challenge is simply knowing what the numbers are; healthy, low or over populated or extinct. You can't see every animal in an area/region.

However, that could be part of some husbandry or rangeresque skills that allow character not only to track animals in a region but to know if they are almost extinct, simply low population or over populated.

On this subject of the ecosystem and possible extinction, with tying into land ownership, will one be able to build fenced zones for things such as farming plot claims, animal pens* and 'wildlife preserves'**?

And tying into the Land owning/Squatting, is there going to be a way to tell if "Tree X is owned by Player X "Ursaphant (M/F) is protected species by Lord Farquaad." "You have entered My Swamp's land^ " when attempting to harvest/interact with said resource? Which would tie into the question if players would be able to recognize their own, and other players' land boundaries without having prior interacted with and being told/shown by a player? *(for domestic) *(For endangered or otherwise "I enjoy these animals and will keep a number to please myself and my king. (Maybe)") *^ (Get out of My Swamp!)

Resources will be depleted. <-- Yep. I truly, truly pray SBS has thought of the worst possible scenario and doubled it. Because I've been reading a lot from them and I just get the feeling they are vastly underestimating gamers.

Plan for 100 gamers to harvest 1 million rocks. Ehh, 6 months should be PLENTY of time. Ha! I can guarantee you 5 of those 100 will have hose 1 million rocks gone in 2 weeks.

I reckon there will be massive resource burnout in the early game, until people learn their lesson the hard way through scarcity and overall self-induced difficulty of progression and the playerbase develops the necessary measures and precautions to avoid it happening as they expand further.

The best part of this game's design layout is it allows the playerbase to be an organic and dynamic entity in itself; what we do, the system reacts to. In turn, we react to what the system does, and the interplay changes how we play at a fundamental level compared to other MMOs. That initial overharvest - which I see as inevitable - will be the bucket of cold water over our collective head that tells us, for the first time, that we are playing something completely different, and that the rules of play have changed.

I'm figuring that when they get Spatial well integrated with Soulbound engine they will fire up a number of instances and let it run for 10000 years or something and see what things look like at the end of that priod..

The real issue is going to be what happens when players get involved. You just know that some group is going to decide that all spiders need to be eliminated or something and end up destroying the entire planets ecosystem and before you know it we're all on Dune playing a survival game.

I'm also picturing a control room at their offices. Surrounded by wall to wall screens, knobs and sliders for manipulating all sorts of variables to keep the world ticking along. Maybe a sit and spin chair for Caspian? Some sort of hairless rabbit maybe?

Once an animal is gone it's gone for good? I'm sorry but I have never played an MMO where that would work. If the crafting environment is vibrant and healthy we wont have a creature left after a month. That is the nature of the MMO gamer. I just don't see that working tbh. The tendency in the gaming world is to kill everything even faster because they know it will be gone soon which just compounds the already flawed mechanic as well. Please share your plans for keeping that in check....

"If all the animals die, the species is extinct"

There's a few problems with this.

The world is procedurally generated, yes? So if I explore a new area, or more players join and new area is generated, would there not be chance that these animals are spawned here? Or have I misunderstood the way the procedural generation will work?

It's a cool concept though.

I like the extinction idea, but if we haven't learned from our one real history, people will repeat it. I also see people purposely grinding a resource or animal until extinct so they an sell the goods at an extremely high price.

Also how will we as players have the ability to monitor the resources to know when to slow things down, make laws and hunting seasons?

oh people will most certainly hunt things to extinction at first,for the reason of higher prices on their pelts etc. But then people will learn that they can't carry on like that,and there probably will be laws in most areas to preserve animals and forests etc.

I guess for actual monitoring its a matter of looking at where there were forests and where there still are forests and seeing if you need to slow down,ofc once new continents are discovered people will either exploit the old continent in order to fuel developments on the new one or there will destroy the eco-system of the new continent in order to bring back rare animals and plants to the old world to sell for high prices. When a new continent is discovered we'll see a massive shift in eco-systems either way.

Personally I plan on trying to get a breeding group of all the animals I really like so if they do become endangered there is still a source to release some into the wild,I would highly recommended to people that have a favourite animal that might also have good quality pelt or meat that they also do this.

There would be animals there,but the game engine will already know whats where. So although an animal may appear extinct you may find more of them in a new area. But if all animals of one species die,that species is extinct,gone for good unless there is some sort of godly intervention,but of course Elyrians don't know if the gods are real.

Yes the world is proceedurally generated - however it's done in advance - not as you enter a new area.

The caveat may be that a new continent/island may not be populated at game start, though I'm pretty sure it'll be mapped out complete wih, biomes, rain, weather, etc etc. It jsut probably won't have animals on it until someone is close to discovering it. This would save on server resources if nothing else.

Animals may become extinct on a single continent, and get re-introduced from another.

I'm also expecting that compared to other games we won't be harevsting 10000 rabbits to get to level2! It's more like trap and skin 3 rabbits - make a stew, cure the hides, hand craft them into knife sheaths over a few days or weeks, and sell for a few coins - to a player that is sick of having nowhere to put his knife away.

The world is procedurally generated at the beginning, not as players explore new areas to my understanding. That said, extinct in a region does not necessarily mean extinct in the world and could result in some regional conflict or cooperation in an attempt to recover.

The idea of running the game (sans players) in fast forward to identifying a natural balance of the ecosystem brings two other ideas to mind for me...

1 - Once a natural balance is identified, further tweaks can be done by estimating player greed through dialing NPC greed to the max and seeing how long it takes for the ecosystem to collapse.

2 - Those of us with Alpha 1 access need to work with the dev team to include "resource rekt" days where as many as who can get on are trying to destroy the ecology. (personally I'll likely be a bit conflicted as I'd have joined the Ranger's Guild if I was planning to operate in EU, but I'll just have to remember it is to ensure it takes enormous effort to unmake the game in release).

(thanks @Lisc for the initial idea)