Facts about planets

I have compiled the following list of facts about planets for everyone that wants to set up a specific planet, but has been having troubles doing so:

1. Planet Radius to scale ratio:

0-279: Scale 1
280-690: Scale 2
691-977 : Scale 3
978-1196: Scale 4
1197-1200: Scale 5

2. Radius to number of Halleys required:

50-249 Radius planets require 3 Halleys to launch.
250-349 Radius Require 25 Halleys.

3. Other Interesting Facts:

- Planets over 1200 don't work (yet).
- Planets crash the game below Radius 50.
- Planets stop spawning Mexes below r= 81.
- Planets below radius 245 that have any Height setting (above 0) will get shading problems (shadows where they aren't supposed to be).
- Desert planets require a minimum of 25-38 (depending on the seed) water height to actually be desert (and not mountain).
- Playing with planetary orbits does nothing outside editor (when you load up your system the game will give default orbits to all the planets, rather than preset ones).
- Planetary mass only defines which bodies will orbit each other. It has no effect on the number of halleys or Mex density.
-Sometimes, when you place the planet it's orbital rotation inverses. You will have to notice this, usually it happens on every next planet but I have seen instances when it didn't (so let's say the first planet you placed travels clockwise, the second one will then travel counter clockwise, but the third one will be clockwise again).
-The gravity well of a planet depends both in it's mass and radius (possible mass*radius, but needs confirming).
- Radius 199 or lower planets cannot support stargates.
- moonlets (moons of moons) have an uncanny tendency to only smash the moon they are orbiting around and not the target planet.
- Planet smashing will still spawn the double or tripple music bug, depending on the # of times you smash
- Lava planets have been known to eat ungodly amounts of RAM, especially after radius 400. Please avoid them until this has been fixed. Might be linked with no water spawns infinite mountain biome and eats up RAM bug.

LOL wrong forum

You either need 3 or 25 halleys? Really?

EDIT: Moved to General PA

ok now you can delete the other thread

I just did

TY - next time I'll try not to post these things when I'm in a hurry to see a tournament match.

They need to balance it a bit better than jus 3 or 25 halleys...Make it to where even 6-7 haleys can move a scale 2, 12 for a scale 3 & so on but i think they will eventually do this.

This guide is very helpful! Thank you!

Oh, certainly. It almost goes without saying.

Planets over 1200 work on my system. But it says they are 'experimental'.

What happens if you increase the mass of the planet for a radius 91 planet?

Nothing much. The only thing that may happen is that planets will start circling the R=91 Planet.

Oh ok. I thought that mass was also directly related to number of metal (metal density), so a r-81 planet would have lots of metal because it was really heavy.

Awesome, I had been wondering what the number behind a planets scale where.

How do the numbers behind mass correlate with radius and scale?

Mass only has one function in the game currently: Orbital bodies with greater mass have a higher area of influence than those with smaller (Planet "A" with mass 100 will be capable of orbiting planet "B" with mass 10 000 at 10 times greater radius than planet "C" who only has 1000 mass). Mass has no impact on radius or scale.

25?? I'll give it a try.

man, that's gonna take a long while to do.

Now that I have some free time (no midterms until january, YAY), I have updated the data on metal planets. If anyone wants me to test something else, let me know.

updated on 3.1.2014 - Lava planets work now as well as metal planets. I have added a couple of details more about placing orbits and how gravity wells seem to work.

I think we must be using the same computer. Does a Scale 4 planet also take you 5 minutes to load?

Yea...large scale planets do tend to take a long time to load in (but never so long that the game would start before I'm loaded in), but I get very little lag later in the game.

Really??? I've got double your RAM, a wimpy but more modern graphics card, and a Core 2 Q9550, and I drop below 1 FPS on the regular, number of units and planet types depending.

Lava planets hurt the most, followed by Earth types, and anything with a lot of mountains and elevated terrain features, but I'm sure that's true for everybody. But seriously, unless the planet is tiny, I couldn't claim anything like "very little lag" late-game with a straight face. See?