In game right now, the sun rises in the West and sets in the East (and the worlds, afaict, are all “upside down” viewed from the Sanctum).
I noticed this a while back but didn’t realize how much it bothered me until yesterday, when I switched over to Testing for a bit and had a completely new character who didn’t have the compass unlocked. I wanted to explore but keep a sense of where I started, so I did what I figured I’d do irl and watched the sun for a bit and went from there. Which was all kinds of fun! But then later, when I got the compass, I was totally messed up.
It’s true that space is space and doesn’t have to be like Earth. But conventions like East = sunrise are meant for just this kind of (imaginary) situation. It’s how you’d define East in the first place if you crashed on a planet…it’s not “any arbitrary direction”, it’s “perpendicular to rotation axis in the direction of sunrise”.
So what you’re saying is, East on the planet you’re on is the opposite of Earth. In that case, by your own argument, east/west isn’t wrong, you’re just confused . (Sorry, couldn’t resist, been reading a logical debate recently).
How about a 50/50? East is Earth-East on some planets and opposite on others?
Ha, me being confused is in general a safe assumption! And sure, worlds don’t come with coordinate grids on them already… But my main issue is that it’s confusing to have it flipped for no good reason, and in a way that makes things less fun (for me) instead of more. Especially because I’m terrrrrible with right and left but I can do okay with a mental map and east/west. I cannot get it through my head that I’m north of the ring instead of south. So yeah, I am essentially begging the devs to change a thing cause I’m a bit dense.
SCIENCETIEM In general (because they formed together) planets in the same system do spin in the same sense, unless they get whacked or dynamically perturbed or came from elsewhere. Also OMG THINK OF THE CONFUSION if I could never trust a coordinate system ever again. Tho I guess planets generally aren’t toroidal or full of murderstock either so…
While true, we would seem to be dealing with more than one system judging by the different colored suns.
You might write this off as the effects of different atmospheres, but I’d be forced to fire back that logically these planets don’t have atmospheres based on the fact that you can see dark parts of other planets (darker than the “sky” of the planet) from the ground while the sun is up! Obviously there are fake envelopes of mystery material magnetically levitating in the sky (let’s call them firmaments!) that give the sky color like an atmosphere during the day and “scroll up” at night.
Teg logiczor!
Yes, cuttletrunks have antigravity engines, not low mass/density gas bags! You heard it here first.
In other news, teleporting from one “side” of a planet diametrically to the other results in both the sun and other planets still being in the same location in the sky! The planets are logically flat but somehow connect to themselves again at the opposite sides, I know because I’ve built a “ring” (read: flat) “around” (read: across) one! ILLUMINOORTI CONFIRMED! They control the fake weather with simulated space necromancy, leveraging the power of the legions of ancient dead buried in Nasharil and Munteen VIII!
All the creatures are solar powered synthetic constructs with no need to breathe air or eat food! We ourselves are synthetic robot slaves! The evil reptilian Illuminoorti necromantic overlords are watching YOU, learning how best to keep their omnicidal control over even larger numbers of synthetic robotic slaves!
It’s true! I SAW THE WHOLE THING!
They’re slowly eating our synthetic souls through a profane Illuminoorti ritual that they will use to rebirth the worlds in darkness for their increased swarms of slaves beyond the end of time!
@Illuminoorti is as much the entirety of the Illuminoorti as the Federal Reserve is legitimately part of the Foederal government (hint: It’s privately owned, no matter how much they like claiming to be part of the fed).
Well, neither can you make any assumptions about the inclination of an alien planet relative to its orbital plane, or the presence/direction of any magnetic field. So I expect what you’d do in such cases is define North as the pole which, if you hover above it, makes the planet appear to rotate anticlockwise.
It’s just a convention. But conventions exist for a reason, which is to give some consistency and thereby make communication etc easier. Breaking convention without giving a reason or explanation leads to confusion without any discernible benefit.
OMG. Yes, this is “just a game” and no, I don’t actually care about axial inclination, and yes, I can argue planetary physics all night long but I do not care in this case. I just want my mental map to be reasonable, and for basic orienteering techniques in a game where exploration is a big deal to at least kind of work.
I think this may come as an issue due to how the world wraps around. In truth the world is a “cube” and by the use of some techniques it looks like a planet and wraps around.
In hindsight though, I believe players are able to obtain the compass right at the beginning, with all the objectives, daily exp, etc. Getting the compass should be attainable within the first minutes? Making the orientation and exploration relevant pretty early on.
Plus I believe devs might be considering minimap by the looks of the Oorto post. Where's Oorto?
Yeah, I got it pretty quickly. I think it’s the first skill point. But I spent a while running around at lvl 1 looking for a good place for my campfire while trying to remember the globe of Solum from the Sanctum. I’m still a fairly new player, too, so the novelty of the worlds and finding the “perfect spot” is still there (I mean I don’t have a good idea of Solum geography that’d make me quicker).
The other thing that started me thinking about it was that there’s absolutely no choice involved as to your first…3? Or so skills. They go in a line. Which seems to go against the spirit of a free-explore-buildy game, no? And there’s no reason I can see that Compass needs to come before Sprint – they could easily be choices in parallel – except that Compass lets you know all the things are opposite of what you think they are. but that’s for another discussion!
Also I don’t want it to sound like I’m requesting a full orbital physics sim or spherical surface topology or anything! cause I’m not. Just a swap of the letters and direction names. Help a blockhead out huh?
Edit: or just don’t call them NSEW but… Oortward and Antioortward and idek?
Bruh, hate to be contradictory and all, but if you really think about it, a 2 dimensional square surface cannot be successfully wrapped around a cube without being folded way back over itself. Sure, it lies flat on the first face, but as soon as you start to wrap it around those first four edges and four corners, you lose the 4/9 of the map that went out over the corners rather than the edges, because they have to be folded under or over the parts that went around the corners.
Much as a cube is an appealing thought (and has been used in some other voxel games to represent a planet), it wouldn’t work at all for this game. In addition to the previous problem, every time you crossed a border, let’s say in the North for example, all of the sudden the borders in the zone you’ve just come into from the South of are wonky. The East border would connect to the North border of the map you would have been on if you had first crossed to the East instead, the West would be the North border of the West-first face, and the North could be either the South, OR North depending on whether which of the first-crossed faces got priority to determine the back-side of the cube’s orientation.
And that’s all in the special case where you started out on the “center face” of the map cube! It’s ten times wonkier otherwise!
Easier and more accurate to just say that it wraps to its opposite edges, because it can’t be successfully wrapped around any three dimensional object and maintain the shape and translations it already has in reality.
Killjoy is here! What you said is only true if you live on one of two specific points, both latitudinally and longitudinally , on the face of the Earth, otherwise the times would be slightly offset! Also, if the sun rose directly in the East, it’s not going to set (directly) in the West because by the time the day is done (let’s assume 12 hours for the sake of simplicity) the planet has already moved more than 0.5 degrees along the course of its path around Sol. So, it’d be about (35 degrees divided by 720 = ) something like a 20th of a degree offset from the West by that time. I don’t feel like calculating for the curve of the earth being an exponential function on a cartesian plane for the first 90 degrees of rotation… …or for the fact that the Earth is ovoid rather than spherical… …so I won’t! Evil Smiley.
I was just trying to point out. How trying to make everything earth like and based on east and west may be difficult. Considering how our building surface and world we live in is a cube of big proportions made to look like a planet in the sky. And made to wrap around like a globe. I was just trying to just give an explanation from the games standpoint to the situation.
I noticed it when trying to discover the 50 locations on a solum. How it kept changing east and west on the ui coordinates.
Oh, I see what you mean now, a rectangular prism. I was just kind of joking though, tbh.
I’ve actually noticed that with Epsilo in particular (not sure about other planets), it’s got a lot of “fake” landmass if you view it from another planet. Having built a ring around it, this is pretty easy to judge, as you’d naturally expect some part of the ring to be visible at all times when it isn’t directly perpendicular to your line of sight, but in reality, even part of the ring is visible perhaps half of the time, leading me to the natural conclusion that about half of the displayed landmass is fake (and it’s all in one “area” too, hence the areas of planets where it looks like the whole hemisphere of the planet has zero settlements).
I’ve never seen the N/S/E/W directions on the compass change without me going through a portal, though. I suppose I’ll pay special attention to it when I circumnavigate Vulpto (that raw red gleam farm is cruelly steep…) today, perhaps I just missed it.
Edit: Were you traveling in the N/S or E/W axes when E/W flipped? I can test the E/W axes really easily by sprinting around the ring.
Oh, do you mean the “southeast of serpens balboa” type location indicators? Yeah, those flip nonsensically pretty often due to the weird shapes of a lot of regions. If you mean the actual compass directions though… I’m thinking that that doesn’t happen, but I still have to test.
Edit: Are you certain you didn’t get turned around by any chance?
but please consider East=sunrise for 1.0?
. (Sorry, couldn’t resist, been reading a logical debate recently).
And sure, worlds don’t come with coordinate grids on them already… But my main issue is that it’s confusing to have it flipped for no good reason, and in a way that makes things less fun (for me) instead of more. Especially because I’m terrrrrible with right and left but I can do okay with a mental map and east/west. I cannot get it through my head that I’m north of the ring instead of south. So yeah, I am essentially begging the devs to change a thing cause I’m a bit dense. 
but that’s for another discussion!