I was reminded of this topic when considering the planet editor: The Planet Editor - #3 by Deus
I initially thought it was okay to represent living outside of your preferred temperature ranges with a generic cost to your energy. But then I realized this would result in basically no variance to the appearance of life across different planets, besides just spending your MP on different enzyme tolerances. So it would be really good to slightly vary the impact of being outside of your preferred environmental ranges across the different factors, which will provide a relatively low-maintenance way of introducing more engaging evolution, and thus, greater replayability.
Thankfully, it seems that @Buckly already foresaw this! I just wanted to add a few suggestions to his post.
To start with temperature, I think it would be a cool idea to have metabolic processes slow down in environments that are too cold as Buckly mentions; but in warmer temperatures, we should instead represent how heat speeds up metabolic processes, and thus, increase the cost of processes. Thus, the effect of heat can be represented by introducing a cost that scales with how much warmer the environment is than what is preferred for your organism. And like Buckly mentioned, living in an environment too cold for your organism will result in your processes slowing down.
So ultimately, the cold will reduce your energy produced, and the heat will increase your organism’s costs. This provides a very cool effect, where players are incentivized to alter their physiology alongside just placing whatever enzyme corresponds to the environment you are in. In a warm environment, and struggling to get by? Look at cutting down on some of your costs. In a cold environment, and having trouble generating enough ATP? Put down more ATP-producing parts to compensate. If we combine this with the fact that:
- We will have it so that tolerance ranges shrink with increased mass, meaning prokaryotes have to worry less about environmental ranges
- We will also have it so that the effect of environmental enzymes reduce with increased mass, meaning larger organisms will need to place more enzymes or seek other methods of adapting
This will mean that these physiological adaptations will be more emphasized for larger, more complex organisms. It will be very important to get the balancing down, which in itself is a balancing act, but this hopefully should mean we provide a natural slope for new players to approach this system, while offering more complexity to deal with as the player gets comfortable with the basics. And of course, it improves replayability significantly.
I think similar things can be applied to other environmental factors (which it looks like Buckly has done with Pressure as well). I plan to look over this thread and amend things to make it more streamline. Adjusting concepts with this perspective in mind can make environmental tolerance adaptations more natural and streamline.