Let’s think a bit about the planet editor.
First and foremost - there is too much information for a player to wrap their head around if we throw everything we know about climate modeling at them. So I think the most important thing to consider in this concept especially is user friendliness.
I honestly think we can approach the planet editor very iteratively. Part of the planet generator/editor curse that goes around is the fact that the scope is huge with minimal direction offered so far. Granting ourselves some cut-off point will help us implement the planet editor without pulling our hair out accounting for every unbalanced and broken possibility offered from the start, and will also allow us to create settings in a way that is very manageable for the community to handle.
Ideally, I think the goal is providing several presets that leaves the player with a satisfactory feeling of customization - and, in the long-term, some sliders can be offered for more advanced customization. Especially for the current stage, I do not think the player needs more than a single page of well-crafted and implemented presets.
I think we need several more options than the below photo, but Civilization always does a good job of providing map presets to the player in a way that is very accessible (Temperature, Rainfall, etc.):
So honestly, I think the first few versions of the planet editor can largely be handled in this way. Toggled presets for different options, and clearly understandable, impactful settings.
THE INITIAL SETTINGS
So, what are some initial settings we can aim to represent?
Temperature
This one is obvious, and for now, I think we can get away with a Cold, Temperate, and Warm settings. Cold settings make the temperature colder on average, and makes frozen sea patches much more frequent. Warmer planets increase temperatures, and have a reduced frequency of frozen patches.
Sea Level
Shallow Seas, Moderate, and Deep settings, influencing the frequency of shallow seas, abyssal patches, and deep ocean floors.
Compound Abundance
Sparse, Average, and Frequent settings, influencing the average availability of each compound represented as a cloud.
Geological Activity
Dormant, Average, and Active settings, Influencing how frequently events like meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions occur.
Climate Instability
Stable, Average, and Volatile settings, Influencing how volatile the environment is, impacting variance in compounds and environmental conditions and increasing/decreasing the frequency and extent of cooling, warming, and Snowball Earth events.
Atmospheric Haziness
Clear, Average, and Hazy settings, influencing how much sunlight reaches the surface patches.
Compound Settings
Customizing the frequency of the various compounds can also be present as options, though with a few more toggles available per compound. For example, instead of the typical “Low, Medium, High”, we should probably implement “Very Low, Low, Average, High, Very High” to offer variety across the different compounds available to the player to use.
Keep in mind that the impact and behavior of the compounds should generally be unaffected, just their frequency. So having very high oxygen on a world where oxygenation is simulated won’t have oxygen be very high from the beginning, it will rather mean a higher cap of oxygen once oxygenation occurs. And a very high carbon dioxide amount will also have an impact on the temperature of the planet.
As such, we should generally display the average temperature and compound amounts of a planet somewhere in the planet set up GUI, and have let players know whether a given value is relatively warm, average, cold, sparse, etc.
With time, and when it actually means something to our simulation, we can gradually transition to the more grandiose vision of the editor which deals with things like number of means, the exact positioning of a star’s orbit relative to the sun, planet size and mass, etc. Currently however, I think we should start with shooting for these levers of control, and then gradually add complexity as we see fit.
I might start re-looking at the effects of environmental factors, such as temperature and pressure, on the player to see if we can make differences in planetary settings result in different-looking builds; it would be ideal if the difference between high and low temperature planets is more than just “let me place more of x environmental enzyme”.