The game assumes you need to breathe, so any non-breathable atmosphere (or no atmosphere) is scored as 2.0 for colony cost. You can’t get around that.
For v2.7.1, it also assumes you need water (that changes for some species in v3.0), so zero water is scored as 2.0. It drops linearly to 0 by 20% water.
Due to the complexity involved, my advice would be to play a ‘normal’ game with realistic environmental requirements to get used to Aurora, before trying to stretch the limit of what is possible within the normal mechanics.
Robot populations could be a nice headcanon for species that “breathe” inert gases.
The active stuff (oxygen, methane and so on) would be corrosive for their sensitive electronic “organs”. Vacuum would be a temperature hazard (or something), so some form of atmosphere - like in real world storage facilities - would be required.
All yours then - if you go to sleep tonight and toss and turn because “Damn, I want robot people in my game!” I’d certainly not complain.
Not the way I wish your day to end though.
I tried a campaign once as a “machine descendants of humans” RP and gave them very low oxygen requirements, and very broad temp, pressure, and gravity tolerance. It didn’t last a week because of how trivially simple it was to colonize every system almost immediately. It got very boring very fast. I wouldn’t recommend it.
I didn’t say infinite tolerance, I said very broad range. Humans have a temp range of 24 degrees. Just expanding that range to 100 degrees, which present day machines can easily handle means most systems had cheap targets for early colonization. It means you can ignore a lot of the effects of eccentricity. Venusian planets were still off-limits but otherwise the number of colony candidates was insane.
This isn’t theoretical. I played a game with these setting and I can tell you it removed any decisions you normally have to make about when and where to colonize. It made the game boring enough to quite after a few days.
This always makes me miss LG-infrastructure. Hauling in twice as much regular infrastructure just doesn’t have the same soul even if it’s functionally equivalent. I liked the idea of the LG-colonies having a separate civilian economy where they ship LG-infrastructure around to support each other.
Take hydraulics for example. Those are optimized for oil temperatures of 50-55 degrees Celsius (at least in construction and farming applications, which is what I know).
You can work with 40-80 degrees, but in the colder range you loose power and responsiveness, while in the higher range you loose longevity to the tune of ~75% shorter lifespan if you consistently max out your temperature.
Beyond 80 degrees you can have an immediate failure at any time.
The machines surrounding us are optimized to work at the same temperature ranges we are and they fail at the same temperature ranges we do.
You can expand their viable range if you add heating and/or cooling systems, but you can do the same for people.
That’s what Infrastructure in Aurora does.
The point I agree on is that a 100 degree tolerance range before gene modification takes the fun out of colonization. That’s not on the machines though.
Equipment mounted externally on the ISS cycle between -150 and +100 every 90 minutes. Mars rovers cycle between 0 and -70 every day. They work just fine. That was my basis for the choice.
