Mod idea: dynamic star lighting

[Mitchz95]

This idea originated on another forum, where myself and some others were working out what the plant life would look like on an Earth-like planet orbiting an M-class red dwarf. We ultimately reached the consensus that said flora would likely appear black or brown, reflecting little light in order to capture as much energy from its sun as possible. The skies and oceans would likely appear tan or orangeish as well because the sun's light is too dim for it to look blue.

That got me thinking about Stellaris. The planets in the game all tend to have the same colors (depending on its type) regardless of the type of star it orbits, so you'll still have blue and green continental worlds even if the sun is a blue giant or red dwarf. It would be cool if a mod were to change this so that the appearance of planets is based on the color of its sun. This could also affect how ships and stations are lit up inside the system.

Again, this is just a mod idea. I certainly wouldn't expect anything like this in vanilla!

 

[linkeagleandzen]

That sounds brilliant. And I know for sure Paradox has said graphical mods won't affect checksum in HOI4, hopefully the same will be true of Stellaris.

Let's see if we can get a dev to comment. I'm not really sure how to do that.

In the meantime, we could speculate other star type effects. For instance, planets orbiting white stars would likely have very desaturated, brightly coloured fauna evolved to reflect a high level of light to reduce sun damage and bleaching of chlorophyll-like proteins. Heck, maybe such plants would be reflective in places like mirrors, that'd be incredibly interesting. I've no idea what effect this would have on the atmosphere or ocean colour, however.