Not me spending my whole shower imagining a rewilding sim with a procedurally generated world like dwarf fortress where you plant various plants and try to shape the ecosystem throughout the process of ecological succession
The plants would all have different stats based on their spreading and competitive capabilities and each little square of land would have stats based on the plants that are there and other conditions
Every time you advanced the clock forward by another year your plants would grow and potentially spread to new squares, and there would be a chance for new plants to "volunteer"
Each square would have a "Disturbance" stat that lowers every time you advance the clock and rises according to major removals of plants or cultivation activities, and modifies other stats including how competitive certain species are and which species could volunteer
For example, Dandelion would have a high chance of volunteering on squares with high disturbance stats, but not on squares with low disturbance stats
It would be partly a strategy game to see how you can fight and outcompete invasive species and raise biodiversity, like for example you might want to combine plants with high resistance to being outcompeted with plants that have an allelopathic effect to debuff an invasive plant enough that the volunteer chances of a square go up and you can have natural regeneration of trees
The reason I think this is so cool is that if stats were intentionally made as accurate as possible, you could legitimately use this to model rewilding strategies in the real world
Like just imagine an ultra-complicated rewilding sandbox game where the world is made up of squares of land with stats for Disturbance, Soil Compaction, Soil Depletion, Mycorrhizae etc. and there are like. thousands of plants each with their own stats for spread, resistance, growth rate, regeneration, and interactions with land stats
You'd have gamers modeling new methods of invasive species control by doing bizarre shit no one would ever do in real life
A reddit thread by someone who clearly spends too much time playing the game: 5600 biodiversity in year 10 WITHOUT spending any gold on the native plant society
"Okay, your first step will be to locate three or four squares with high (100-95) Disturbance stats that are adjacent to squares with Topsoil Loss of under 95. Immediately set up a dandelion grinder. Unless you have kudzu or another high-level invasive immediately encroaching upon your starter plot, don't bother with fighting invasives just yet. Get some gold by selling dandelion greens, ignore the prompt to upgrade your tools, upgrade your seed storage unit instead, and start seed collection on 20-25 squares of your choice. Sell any seeds you have more than 5 duplicates of and buy the controlled burn equipment, then do a controlled burn in two areas, each covering 6-8 squares, directly adjacent on two sides of your dandelion grinder. Discard seeds of high level invasive species but otherwise seed EVERYTHING left in your inventory in the burned areas, and advance all the way to year 5 without doing anything except keeping the dandelion grinder at a constant disturbance level. Biodiversity might drop initially at some point during these steps, but don't worry about it. Harvest tree saplings and place them in the squares directly surrounding the dandelion grinder. Make sure you have at least one black walnut tree. Now—"
The thread immediately after it: Kudzu ate my house. Is there any way to salvage this save slot?
