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Neophyte World Builder: Chapter 18
🕑 Added 2025-10-03 22:12:01 +0000 UTCChapter 18: The Grand Experiment
I crossed one more thing off my to‑do list with the creation of disease and infection. I wasn't proud of it, but I knew a life without that sort of pressure would be very different from what I understood. I still had doubts about it, especially about my implementation. I felt it was fairly clever and not as bad as what humanity had to live with in the early days, but I had a feeling this wasn't my specialty.
I still wasn't sure what I had done in life, but all of the unfamiliar words in the interface that I'd been working with were a big hint that I hadn't worked with disease very much.
I did not immediately turn the Time Dilation back up. I left it at its current state, still moving at a crawl; for every minute I spent tweaking things, seconds passed in the world. I took the opportunity to fiddle with the scripting interface again and crossed something else off my to‑do list.
The script read: if I had positive Reality Points and the cost was less than 250, then expand the universe along the circumference of the torus once the Magicite shell had reached 80% saturation; at the same time, expand the shell at the apparent “cap” ends with semi‑randomized terrain that matched up with the current terrain touching the shell. Continue expansion until the shell was drained to 15% of its capacity.
Scratch Pad - TODO LIST
Further define magical systems
Introduce decomposition, disease, and infection
Dinosaur Island
Create spellcasting magical system
Automate world expansion
With the automatic expansion of the world handled, I found myself right back to staring at the interface and the sluggish, slow‑motion progression of my now populated land. I’d been procrastinating, and I knew it. As much as I tried not to think about it, the earlier screw‑up I’d done had been pretty humbling.
I knew I had to progress. But with the mistake before, it had just been some plants that had died… lots and lots of plants, to be sure, and I felt bad about that. But there’s a big difference between failing to get your garden to grow properly and watching a dog die, for example.
And I was managing a whole lot of “dogs.”
Well, technically, I wasn’t managing any dogs at all. I hadn’t brought any in... only wolves. I presumed if humanity, or whatever species I would put there, wanted dogs they would domesticate them like my ancestors did. Maybe that was wishful thinking. Maybe I would have to make some dogs after all. I hadn’t gotten to the intelligence phase yet.
I brushed away the thought, because here I was procrastinating again.
I’d considered everything I could think of, and it wasn’t like I could do anything more unless I sat around and stared into space. Maybe if I had a partner who was willing to debate me I could think of more things. But Orpheus – while she was becoming a lot more talkative now that I was starting to seed animal life – still didn’t seem to want to debate me or push back at anything.
I mentally looked at the Time Dilation control and almost pushed it, but then I had another thought. This time, it wasn’t procrastination that brought me up short.
I’d been wondering how fast I should set the time dilation in order to witness the seasons… and then I remembered that my seasons were still a little primitive.
That gave me something to think about.
I pulled up my interface again, in a different section, and looked at the route I’d set for the sun. I could probably do something about this. While the sun didn’t put out nearly as much heat as the one in my own world, it was still the major contributor to the climate of wherever it was passing over.
Thinking about climate made me realize I wanted a little more variation there as well.
The path of the sun was currently a straight line. So I lifted my finger and – much like the curve tool in graphic software – I gently started nudging the path to have variation.
I did it in three dimensions, of course, so it ended up being more like a helix… but not as smooth and regular. That was fine. I didn’t want it regular.
The variation wasn’t much. I didn’t want it to come anywhere close to leaving the vacuum in the middle of the cylinder, and I still needed it to “charge” the stars up. Yet even a small variation should have a pretty big effect on the climate.
Small was, after all, rather relative.
That gave me climate. But for seasons, I needed variation throughout the year.
For that, I added a bit of jitter, for lack of a better term. At times, the curve flattened, making the path more direct. I wasn’t sure if this would do what I wanted, but it made sense to me. Hopefully, it wouldn’t lead to destruction. But it might lead to some extreme environments.
I was okay with that.
I didn’t need everything to be like a biome Earth had.
If a part of my little universe looked like Venus or Mars, that was probably okay.
At last, I couldn’t really put it off any longer.
Even though I supposedly had my emotions muted in some way, I still felt nervous trepidation at the idea of setting loose all these creatures I’d personally created, or at least given life to, onto the world.
They might die instantly. And even if they didn’t, I’d have to watch them murder one another and become something else over time. For my own sanity, I went in to find the notifications for this section.
I was a little bewildered by all the notifications I could have… and many of them didn’t make any sense. Some were greyed out already, but fortunately, the interface quickly sorted them when I concentrated on finding the species extinction ones.
I managed to set it to only notify me if a species went extinct and didn’t have any descendant species that could be traced back to it. I then quickly designated a few animals I wanted to stick around in similar forms to what they already were – like the aforementioned wolves – and set their mutation rates much lower.
Hopefully, that would help build a recognizable world.
After all that, I set the time dilation fast enough to watch the seasons go by every few minutes… and settled back in my chair to watch.
To my immense relief, things didn’t appear to collapse immediately.
My little moss predators started eating things up pretty quickly, and the vegetation I wanted to spread actually began to spread. Various herbivores came out to nibble on the grass and leaves, and a quick adjustment to the interface let me see how the Mana was flowing and colorizing now that I’d put those rules in.
I knew it would take a little while to actually see results and gauge if it had been fully successful… but thus far, it looked to be working.
I knew, of course, that some areas would suffer due to the new climate changes and the adjustment to the seasons, but I couldn’t see a way around that.
WARNING
Species reproduction has failed to create viable births for one season.
The notification that did pop up was sudden and unexpected… and then quickly repeated multiple times.
I quickly slowed the time ratio down again, feeling something resembling panic despite my supposedly muted emotional reactions.
Fortunately, while I had made a mistake, it was actually an easily rectified one. The interface let me go to the site of the notification and see what the inviable birth error was caused by fairly quickly. It hadn’t meant season in the sense of weather and climate, it meant season in the sense of reproductive cycle.
Okay… so I had made a mistake, but this one wasn’t as dramatic as the last.
It was caused by a Monster Core – and some of the other Mana-related features – not being tied to any inheritable traits. That was easy enough to fix.
I quickly made the adjustment… and, strangely, felt better. Once I’d caught an actual mistake, the fear eased a bit.
I turned the time flow back up again and took a deep breath.
Hopefully, that was the only real mistake I’d made this time.
