Will we ever see multiple biomes, with rivers, lakes and waterfalls, on planets as diverse as our Earth, with tropical zones, sandy dunes, swamps and forests all on a single planet?
TL;DRThey'd love to do diverse Earth-like planets and plan more diversity and revisits as tech evolves, with Pyro and Nyx expected to push biome diversity further, but there's still a way to go.
We would very much love to do that. Earth is obviously the big goal we eventually want to get to. There's a lot of things that still need to be solved to be able to do anything as diverse as Earth. But I think we can definitely already do something that's more diverse than single-biome planets. And I think we're already doing that for the most part. For the future, we'll definitely do more diverse planets. And we'll also come back to existing ones and add more diversity as the tech evolves and allows us to do stuff like that, like rivers and waterfalls. Once those are going to be a thing at scale, we'll definitely come back to them. And probably also make some biomes that go along with them, just so they're nice. But all the other stuff, we all want to do that. It's just, more or less, all the interesting biomes, like a swamp, you definitely end up being in a place where you want terrain displacement, like snow or mud you walk through and wade through, and get the player trekking through and leaving a depression in the mud, stuff like that. A lot of interesting and exciting things we do want to do and we hope to get to in the near future or in the far future, we'll see, but it's still the goal. Until we've done Earth, I think we aren't there yet, tech-wise and content-wise. So it's definitely the goal and we will just get more and better the longer we do it, but there's still a ways to go.
If you look at how we started with Cellin and Daymar and Yela, they were technically like Star Wars planets, right? They only had one thing. And then we tried to push it with every new release. And then eventually we had microTech, which was very different. You have the icy, snowy parts and then the lusher regions with the trees. So I don't think it's a spoiler because people saw some of that already during CitizenCon, but I feel like Pyro and Nyx will push the biome diversity to a degree that's different and better than what we have right now. So I think people will enjoy that when they eventually see it.