Why some colors are rare on color-cycling planets

General
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How colours are chosen each cycle

Seed / tick changes
The exo world advances the seed (or tick) on the single WorldColors recipe it points at (max-range).

Base colour is generated
A hue, luminance and saturation are sampled for the Base node (currently full hue circle, lum 50, sat 55).

Roots derive from the Base
Veg-Solid Root and Min-Liq Root apply their lum/sat shifts.
Vegetation, Solid, Liquid, Mineral Roots inherit from those.
Sand and Gleam add their own extra shifts.

Final materials are linked
Every block type (rock, grass, gleam, wood, creatures, etc.) is assigned a colour from one of these derived nodes.Mapping to the 254

  • The continuous HSLuv values are converted into one of the fixed 254 palette indices. The whole set is coherent because almost everything shares the same Base.

Why some colours are never (or almost never) reached

  • Coherence rules - Materials must stay related. Extreme combinations that would look broken are avoided.
  • Narrow probability - Even with full hue range, pure reds, pure cyans, etc. are small targets on the colour wheel.
  • Upstream limits - Gleam cannot change hue on its own — it is locked to the Mineral Root. Sand in most recipes is locked to warm hues.
  • focusStrength & ranges - Higher focusStrength or tighter min/max make some regions much less likely.
  • Discrete mapping - Some of the 254 indices only get chosen if the generated colour lands in a very small “attraction” zone. Others have larger zones and appear more often.
  • Single recipe - Only one graph is evaluated per cycle. There is no system that systematically walks the full 254.

Result
You get a new coherent family of ~30–60 colours each cycle. Over a long time you will see a wide variety, but a handful of the 255 (especially the most extreme or awkwardly placed ones) can remain extremely rare or effectively unreachable.

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2

The less technical version:

Every time the world cycles, it’s like the game is painting with a new set of coloured pencils.

It first picks one main colour (the “Base”).
Then it makes all the other colours rocks, grass, trees, gleam, etc. as variations of that main colour so everything still matches.

That’s why the whole world changes together and still looks like it belongs together.

Why some colours almost never appear:

Imagine the game has 254 coloured pencils in the box. But each cycle it only pulls out about 40–50 pencils that look good together.

Some pencils (the really unusual ones) only get chosen when the main colour happens to be just right. Most of the time the game picks more ordinary starting colours, so those rare pencils stay in the box.

There’s no setting that forces it to eventually use every single pencil.
It just keeps picking nice matching sets, and some colours are simply unlucky.

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3

Blink, Rift and Umbris are like three special “moods” the game can paint in.

  • Blink = warm and bright (oranges, yellows, greens, light blues)
  • Rift = cool and mysterious (blues, purples, cyans)
  • Umbris = dark and red (deep reds, dark purples, almost black-reds)

When the world is using a normal wide palette (like max-range), it can pick any mood.
Most of the time it picks something in the middle, so you see the usual mixed colours.

Blink, Rift and Umbris only show up when the game happens to pick a starting colour that sits right in their special mood.
Because those moods are smaller targets, they appear less often — that’s why they feel rare.

It’s not that the game is avoiding them on purpose.
It’s just that they only get chosen when the random starting colour lands in their particular corner of the box.

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