January 2022 Challenge: The Lands of the Living

[Diamond]

This a 'super-Earth', a terrestrial planet that is significantly larger than ours. A lot of the science is probably suspect here, but meh. Like gravity - in reality it'd probably be much higher than Earth-standard, but I've hand-waved that away because reasons.

A trio of colony ships, off course and lost and running low on supply and hope, landed here and quickly found that they were trapped - the planet is extremely poor in mineral content. Very little useable metal - very very little. So little in fact, that they were unable to effect the significant repairs needed to get spaceworthy again. Over time, their geneticists started to figure out ways to adapt the native plants (some of which are incredibly hard and durable) to fill many of the functions that metal would normally serve. But by this time, the new societies had started to regress, to forget their former mission, and settle into life on this world.

Now, a thousand years later, Old Earth is a legend. The planet is covered with cold deserts in the north and south, with a (relatively speaking) thin band of habitable land spanning the Equator - the so-called Lands of the Living. All else is Death. As the planet is so huge though, this habitable band is quite wide north to south, probably around a thousand miles or more. The region on the map is where the colonists originally landed. There are many more areas of civilization, but this is considered to contain the oldest cultures.

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[wminish]

I like the concept for this map, I look forward to seeing how it unfolds.

[rdanhenry]

Lesser density would make it possible to be larger than Earth and still have tolerable gravity. The larger science issue is with diet. We require a certain amount of a good number of metals for our health. An environment, and hence a diet, too low (or in most cases, too rich) in any of these elements will prevent human thriving. So, this is definitely in the "soft" science fiction category, but that's fine. It's a fictional map, not a research paper on potential exoplanet colonization.

On the map-making front, I do wonder what effect a low density planet would have on geological processes. I expect that if you did get plate tectonics, they'd end sooner than on Earth. If nothing else, you're down heating from radioactive heavy elements. You'd probably need to get a lot deeper into mineralogy of the planet that you'd want to in order to figure out things like maximum mountain height and such. Interesting topic, but nothing to tackle in a monthly challenge!

[Diamond]

My thought is that the tectonics are dead and the mountains are low (think Appalachians instead of Himalayas). There's a sort of subterranean equatorial ocean that interacts with a vast chain of seas, lakes, and rivers paralleling it on the surface. Would it be totally bonkers to be able to circumnavigate the planet that way? If nothing else, it's giving me good story fuel, which is hard to come by lately.

Like you said, it's not meant to be a hard scifi settings by any means, so a lot of hand-wavium is being employed here.

[Diamond]

Starting to rough in some color; next will be adding depth/shadows/highlights to ALL. THOSE. MOUNTAINS.

Thanks to Kellerica for the parchment texture!!

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[Kellerica]

Heheh XD I feel your pain.
Looks good so far, though.

Glad someone is finding use for those textures!

[Diamond]

Mountains are done. Added what's hopefully just a suggestion of hills, and started to add in forests.

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[Diamond]

I changed up the forests so they mesh more easily with the mountains.

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[Bogie]

Nice map, coming along very good.

[Diamond]

I'm dropping out of the challenge this month. Too much work stuff going on, and not enough time for mapping. I'll likely start a WIP thread for this at some point, since I do want to finish it, and already see things I can change and improve.