I think that they would actually trade, you can say that the Merfolk are eaten by the landfolk as much as the landfolk are eaten by the Merfolk. I think just straight up it’s more interesting if the two species can trade with each other without thinking of the other as dinner!
For the sea peoples, if magic is accessible in this world, another interesting take on it might be for the sea people to develop magic more aggressively because it allowed them to create underwater 'fires'. That could also create some interesting cultural differences/potential conflicts.
Some thoughts on a seafolk community discovering fire via a more "Muggle" approach! It would be interesting if they were able to observe fire on the land (idk, lighting storms), and some time ago wonder if that power could be replicated. Perhaps their old timey engineers were able to discover that water extinguishes flame, so in order to make a flame underwater they need to create a dome of sorts, and remove the water and replace it with dry air. You get some sort of rudimentary glovebox/ sand blast box / fume closet. Through this they learn not only about fire, but also that it consumes oxygen, produces smoke and alters the air pressure inside. That's a lot of chemistry they would never have given thought to. They might even learn about the nature of water: hydrogen being volatile, oxygen being a key part of the fire triangle, and salt being an umbrella term for all sorts of compounds with similar properties. From this they might experiment with the makeup of the air, discovering some gases are combustible, others are not, that there are ways to manipulate this.... it's possible they would even learn this more sharply than a land-based society, who take air for granted. Retrieving these air resources would require seapeople who are comfortable being in shallow waters for extended periods. Learning about air pressure might lead to hydraulics, which might lead to transport systems powered by propulsion and manipulation of pressures. Imagine merfolk who are too lazy to swim because they've got a Seapeople-mover 4x4! What a culture shift! All this manipulation of resources would be very industry heavy, so I imagine airless domes where staff wear "inverted wetsuits" to stay alive and healthy working in a dry environment. In real life, fish can survive outside of water for longer than we give them credit for-- certainly longer than we can survive below water. If this extends to the seapeople, perhaps damage to these suits would need first aid, but not be necessarily fatal. But an explosion would be. They'd be very pollution conscious, too, I reckon: remember if bad goop is released, it would be visible regardless of liquid, solid or gas (which would bubble up toward the surface.... and surely sea people swimming above the industry would choke on this and spot the problem very early on). I would wager this would be identified and addressed way faster than an equivalent society of landlubbers, who have the luxury of "out of sight, out of mind". Electricity is a trickier thing, but if they learn about ions (maybe from busting apart sodium and chlorine from common salt) they might learn about static charges. But using this in a practical way underwater? I don't have the scientific knowhow and I'm not willing to pretend I do.
another option is through magma exposure at plate boundaries and using this ultra hot layer to shape rudimentary metals. it would lead to a more nomadic people but instead of chasing animals around they would chase these sources of heat. you could also use that as a way to introduce technological development and evolutionary divergence with them getting more advanced allowing them to approach closer to these sources of heat and make even more advanced stuff while evolutionarily those who work the metals could start to diverge and get more and more able to survive in that heat while the rest of them dont change much. given enough time these two species could split entirely requiring the metal workers and originals to work together and so on
R.A. Reynolds I mean, a lot of our “fire” technologies require an environment very different from that we live in. Separating iron from ore pretty well requires an oxygen-free environment. Mind you, Iron smelting is a fairly advanced technology, and they actually use fire to remove the oxygen. The hard part is that first step of messing around with simple campfires. By the time electricity becomes a matter of study, they’d’ve been playing this game for quite awhile, so the leap will be quite a bit smaller, though still perhaps a bit greater than the challenge faced by their landlubber cousins.
@@itisALWAYSR.A. Speaking of hydraulics, I feel like water pressure would be a much larger part of seafolks' lives than air pressure is on land. It would almost certainly be a well known phenomenon that kids learn about. You'd have all sorts of cultural values about being careful around narrow crevices and tunnels in the wrong place, because a bad wave could smash you against the rock at any time. It'd be a very natural extension of that to wonder if they could harness that power.
He was vague about it, but he basically explained that it's unlikely an underwater species would be mining for ores for personal use because first, they'd need the tools to do so. Secondly they mostlikely need a way to refine said resource. Which could be either explained with "magic", should it exist in the setting, or as he said through trading with other (landbased) races. If it's not some fantastical mineral that can be shaped via means other than smelting and forging, it's unlikely an underwater race would make use of iron, gold or other "realistic" minerals, and thus would have no reason to mine for it. Their only means would be trade.
4:35 You've forgotten about native ore and cold working. Copper and tin are soft enough that they can be shaped without heat, but still hard enough to have some advantages over basic stone tools, not to mention they can be shaped in ways that stone or flint cannot. If an underwater people had access to local native copper, they would be stuck in the "copper-age." In addition, if they're like reverse-whales where they can hold their breath or otherwise survive out of water for a short long enough amount of time, then they can go on land to start fires and forge better tools (although how likely is it that they would discover fire and forging in the first place).
Love your work, when i started worldbuilding for my DnD compaign and i was opsessed to create a realistic map, your videos saved me hours of researching, and for that i thank you
One potential avenue they could get access to underwater firing processes is plasma. We already know of one subset of crustaceans that can generate plasma. The issue is sustained production, but it could likely be done given what we now know about their armor now. I could imagine some species - after figuring out they could repeatedly create plasma to burn and melt things, but it leads to them being heated a little too much - they slowly evolve a better way to get rid of heat through creating a more hole-like skeletal structure with muscles to feed "cold" water through to keep a constant safe temperature, quite literally natural watercooling. So you end up getting this one group, or the whole species, capable of creating sustained plasmas for cooking their food, resource extraction, etc. That'd be a really cool idea to play with.
I read this as "neural geological strucutre" and now I'm on a tangent about living on a living planet and mining the brain cells for organic computing.
You’ll get a lot of basalt formations of many kinds on a large igneous province, I’m not entirely sure what dictates their locations but I think it might mostly be irrespective of the actual surface features, having more to do with the structure of the mantle below.
Large Igneous Provinces are scattered widely. They're typically going to be associated with hotspots (Iceland), bolide impacts, and stable continental interiors (Siberian, Deccan Traps).
As for hexagonal pillars (the ones I'm most familiar with are in the Hebrides), those are going to be anywhere there is a mantle plume so large igneous provinces and old plate boundaries, especially if partially submerged (Scotland). Caves are most common in old volcanic vents or in areas with Limestone (Yucatan, Florida). That is shallow ancient seas that have been uplifted by moving or sea level drop. If the aquifer is close to the surface caves will form.
For sea people: I think black smokers would be pretty valid as a source of ores. Also you could make them somehow use hotspots or middle-ocean ridges for heating the metals? But I'm not sure if this could work in water... but well, that's what came to my mind anyways. :)
Well sadly black smokers only heat the water so much. I think about 500°C? THat would be enough for tin and lead, but pretty much all the real technology metals will only somewhat soften. Tho, the temperature limit is the boiling point of water. And that rises depending on pressure, so i didn´t run the math but mayyyyyybe, you could get workable ranges at depths below 12km in really deep ocean trenches. tho without having metal tools getting something into and out of such a type of furnace is a whole different proposal. If you want to get a bit into the fantastical i guess you could invent a seaweed that has high mineral content and can bake into a ceramic.
There's a lot of people talking about needing heat to work metal. Completely valid, yes, but I'm surprised that no one has thought of these "sea people" being able to breed creatures to essentially digest the ores. The creatures would excrete the metal, either as small pellets or, to put the metal into a more workable form, excrete the metal into shells of a sort. The shell could have the organic matter worked off by some sort of chemical compound that can exist underwater without really dissipating into the water completely (a sort of acidic mud that eats the calcium of the shell away leaving behind the metal lattice or layer once they breed the ore-eating organisms to an appreciable state...or, rather than mud, another organism that eats at the shell but not the metal). To be sure, working it with fire is much easier and faster by a magnitude of about ten thousand, but it's humanocentric to think that fire is the end-all-be-all of technology. Just because it is for us doesn't mean that an aquatic creature with sufficient determination and intelligence can't find a work-around when it comes to working metal. Also doesn't mean that a land-bound (above-the-surface) creature with human-level intelligence would even be able to metaphorically put two and two together when presented with fire in the wild. I'm just saying that I don't know how fire and animal husbandry tie toghether besides the point that land-bound food needs to be cooked. Even that is a limitation of the human digestive track, not necessarily that fire is vital to animal husbandry processes. Though, realistically, living under the water presents other issues that stunt social growth (lack of temperature fluctuations = no motivation to store food for lean times, no way to reliably view the stars if you can't at least poke your head out of the water, etc). Essentially it's the fact that they live in the water at all that stops them from moving beyond hunter-gatherer rather then their lack of fire. Any "undersea civilizations" that did arise up from the native aquatic life would have to depend on 'farming' their prey fish for a lean time most likely related to sea currents. And even then, there would have to be a reason that these stone-age sea people would not be a nomadic society. ...sorry, a bit of an autistic word dump here :P I'ma go before I go off on how nomadic or hunter-gatherer civilizations, while inherently more primitive are not necessarily full of beings lacking fully developed self awareness.
Could you please do a video about where crops will grow, such as wheat, and rice. I imagine that the same principle of applying fictional resources real world counterparts?
You know, most articles about crops on wikipedia also list where they grow, most even have maps. Unlike most of the geology sections. I mean it would be nice as a summaray but much easier to find out for yourself. Also we can be much more creative with plants, since they are not as bound by rules as minerals are.
One thing about Fantastium is you could give it unusual properties. Make it biogenic, then perhaps over hundreds of thousands of years it decays in water, but forms an oxide layer with air, protecting it forever if it isn't exposed to bodies of water. Thus, it only exists in significant quantity where coal would be but water wasn't.
Thanks for making this series. It reminds me of a book from "The Magical Society" that explained things like plate tectonics and dominant wind direction to GMs, but I forgot the title. Anyway it kinda breaks my suspension of disbelief when we need global shipping just to get all the raw materials, but in a city building simulator you usually get fresh water, clay, trees, fertile farmland, marble, iron, copper and uranium all in one spot.
Hey Artifexian, I was curious, and I know this question has nothing to do with resources, but I want to build a world and I want to create a large region that the main story takes place in to be under a constant fog. Do you know what sort of environment would produce that sort of effect?
Maybe a coastal area with a warm current and upwelling along the coast (like San Francisco). Warm moist air is cooled by the upwelling to create fog, and then blown inland. Or a plateau downwind of a warmer and rainy forested area.
Any place with cold onshore currents and winds. Especially if there are hills and mountains in the way (N California, British Columbia) or hot lands (Namibia).
1) find a way to create fog (water evaporation) 2) find a way to transport it (wind in a correct direction) 3) find a way to stop it in desired location (mountain range around it)
If sea folk have access to the ocean bottom I think they could trade manganese nodulles with land civilizations with advanced metallurgy, perhaps they could produce an unmatched steel with them making the sea people quite rich and perhaps different sea civilizations make war with each other for rich territories
On underwater mining and forging. I have used a bit of hand waving and created a culture which uses black smokers and other undersea volcanic activity to forge. I don't know how effective or efficient it may be in real life, but it's at least an idea. Plus, if you have Fantastium, there's no saying it can't be forged underwater. Maybe a method of forging only exists underwater, either requiring extreme pressure or the water itself. Just a few ideas.
Well, if we're speaking in terms of using real world materials. A black smoker can get to about 250C, the only metal that could be worked under those conditions would probably be tin, and theoretically lead. However tin isn't normally found near geothermal formations, let alone as a native metal. So while rudimentary metal working could be done using black smokers in principle. Any notable metallurgical advances would require outside intervention. Your proposal is although an interesting one I must admit, and it's use in a story would be a very interesting concept.
@@josephhughes2265 Fair enough. I admit I used handwaving and the denizens of my society use the heat and pressure to forge kraken shell pieces, not metal.
suggestion on sea people mining. if it’s a fantasy world, add a somewhat common brittle mineral that reacts with water in a powerful exothermic reaction but forms a passivating layer. then they can crush it to create heat where it’s needed
I recall reading a story (maybe Bradbury) about a species that was colonizing the galaxy and their ship crashed on a water world. They seeded the ocean and gave their creations high technology but the sea people they made couldn't use it because no fire under the ocean. They ended up using amoeba and plankton to make a machine to voyage to the only spot of land on the whole planet. Very pertinent short story.
1:50 You mean like this? Functorum Functorid(A Material needed for warp drives and antimatter production) can be taken out of the water in the Form of Lithium selenide which can react with Hydrogen and Oxygen around 4000K to lithium hydroxide And Hydrogen selenide which can be inserted in solved Form into a fusion reactor where they react to the nobel gas Chocranium, which decays into the alkali metal Functorum and the halogen Functorium which can react to the Salt Functorum Functorid which won't be affected by antimatter or plasma.
So, in my hobby worldbuild, I have yet to definitively decide, but the "sea people" would probably either use some sort of primal form of magic to extract metals from ores and form them, or alternatively, I was thinking of some sort of bacteria or algae doing the extraction instead. Kinda like the idea that they dig up the ores, crush it up, let it get "moldy", which then proceed to either excrete or accumulate the metals in it.
Go with magic. Because that would essentially be what the mold would do anyways. unoxidized metal is too big a chemical energy source for live to leave untouched. So while algae and bacteria love to concentrate metals, they do so in some compound and never as the metal itself. Tho you could probably have an plant that gives you straight soda or hydraulic cement.
4:10: Barring excessive use of phlebotinum, of course. If you have magic that lets you create forge-grade temperatures underwater, the merfolk can be as advanced as the landlubbers. But that makes things more complicated in several dimensions, so keeping your mermen at Stone Age tech levels might be better. Note: "Stone Age" includes all pre-Colombian American cultures. (Some could work metal, but never types or quantities which drastically altered the civilization below the level of rituals and royal garb.) The Aztec, Inca, Maya, Mississippian, etc were all Stone Age, technically, so your merfolk could do anything they could do. Well, they're probably going to be worse weavers than the Inca, worse chocoholics than the Maya, and worse at keeping turkeys than the Aztec, but you know what I mean.
But remember that the sea people don't have access to fire, in general and that limits them to getting metal. This means for example that they cannot relay on cooking meaning they cannot afford a brain abnormaly large for their group which in turns means there is probably a great number of inteligent species underwater instead of the remarkable land one because the land one can cook (and thus can ignore requirements for having a brain too big to be eating constantly like we should if we ate the same things other apes do). Not only that but they also don't have a very powerfull tool to scare predators off, this might not be a problem if the group with sentience is already the top of the food chain but it might be if it isn't.
@@xxxm981 The best source I can find is Pinterest, so I'll just assume that it's waterproof. Because the problem isn't really a lack of material; it's that developing weaving to the point that the Inca did would be kinda pointless if everything got wet and rotted. Though IIRC the Inca made boats out of ruggedly-woven stuff, so there's clearly some solution to that problem.
Can you do something about plants and societies? One of my settings is a theocratic authoritative kingdom set in a world where magic crystals grow from plants. The continents will be one of the supercontinents of past Earth since it's just an alternate timeline to our universe. Eventually they met a kingdom whose religion is based around a healing crystal found only in the northern hemisphere. Eventually the theocratic authoritative kingdom will declare war on them for not carrying the same religion and because they don't want to give them the healing crystal plants because they consider it holy. My problem is that, at the beginning, all humans live around the equator because they used to eat from a plant that gives them nutritious fruits that can survive indefinitely as long as it's in the equator's climate - because lore. Currently, how a group of people move from the equator up north is a massive plot hole cause I haven't gotten a reason for them to need to move from a bountiful and secure place and, despite being omnivores, haven't thought of hunting animals for food thus not knowing what they would eat would also be another hindrance to moving.
This may seem a Deus Ex Machina solution but depending on how your magic system work you could have them teleported there or being called by the plants. Or if you want to maintain realism, you could have some sort of plant that acts like a drug when burned and some person (who accidentaly drugged themself) claiming that he/she has seen the promised lands up north and thus convincing enough people to go there in search of said lands. You don't even need to have the people of the south concious of such properties of the plant but it might be interesting to tell about it in some manner (and interesting way to do it is to have prophet of multiple religions seemingly interconnected having these reveletions close to this burning plant). Of course, you could change the burning plant for some other natural way of giving inhaled drugs but that's not easy enough to see it from outsiders (so that they don't have a clear reason to discredite the prophet).
I don't know if that is possible with your lore, but maybe they were forced to move into exile, because they did something bad, either by accident or because of difference in goals and ideas. For example, maybe they found an insect that lays its eggs into the fruits and they liked the taste of the fruit filled with the eggs. So they caught more insects and started to "ruin" the fruits in the eyes of the other people.
My take on the how long ago the past should be question. If you are asking about a people's sense of history, or series of events, consider what a history professor I had said. For a human, history is any thing over 20-25 years ago. Any thing more resent is still in the cultures idea of "current events". Generally any thing older than a young adult just graduating collage. It's long enough for those acute lessons of active events to fade. For example. the AIDS crisis/pandemic is over 30 years ago. Many of those lessons are forgotten. They are unknown to an entire generation of adults entering their prime. The World Trade Center attacks are 19 years ago. While this event is potent, and society changed it self drastically because of them, it is still fading from the current cultural awareness. It is on the threshold of becoming history. Think of it this way. What events over 20 years ago in your culture helped shape it today, but are not in the for front of a collective sense of the present.
The see people get the ores and get to trade with the so-called fire people for Pleasant trees of the land. On my world there’s actually a species that does both; they live in freshwater most of the time, but can fairly easily go on dryland the majority of the time or live at sea.
Hydrothermal vents supposedly reach around 350 degrees C, and the melting point of lead is 327 degrees C. If an underwater civilization were to use hydrothermal vents as a forge, I'd think they would be able to extract lead from certain ores or native clusters. Any resources for lead ores?
I know this is very fantastical solution, but why not use zombies to mine net. In my world that would probably be the easiest solution since I do have a twilight zone merfolk, but they can’t reach into the very deepest parts of the ocean, like the trenches.
@@nettlesandsnakes9138 i guess you could. Sounds like a pretty good idea for you to use, but i don’t think it has much to do with what i was saying, haha
Hey, this is a bit beyond your niche but it's a bit related to climates, and it's weather phenomena like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, etc, more in how humans dealt with (and perhaps saw) these things.
i'm planning to make my merfolk utilize underwater caves and air pockets in them (also helps in giving them arms), so they would be able to use fire in them. now this would 100% be a slow as fuck process to reach higher levels of advancement, but when they are building their civilization the world is still an ice shell, so no other species could rush them.
I'm pretty sure it's just because the gold spreads out a lot more, meaning there is gold int the other places it's just so spread that it doesn't form up in big deposits? IDK though, it's just my guess
Aren't massive asteroid impacts (e.g. Vredefort and Morokweng in South Africa) are an important considerations in bringing heavy mineral deposits closer to the surface?
I wish you had also tossed out ideas for completely fantasy minerals, like idk alloys that only occour naturally over magically-charged ley lines or something.
My Keplerian world basically has iron ore scattered all over and it is very concentrated in an area a few miles in radius from the Black Sword River, which has seasonal floods. And my Keplerians are underground dwelling humanoids. Think ant nest scaled up and you basically have your Keplerian city structure. So for them, a floor above the ground might be Floor -1, 2 floors above, -2 and so on as they tend to extend downwards and horizontally. Of course, they use things like rocks, clay, etc to reinforce their tunnels to prevent collapse, but I was wondering, could this high iron density also help, like maybe the iron ore is strongly magnetic(think magnetite and you basically have it, lodestones are magnetite that is magnetized naturally) and they use some of it to magnetically repel against the forces that would cause collapse their tunnels. It's not a big deal with like the home tunnels, but more so with the road tunnels, if you get what I'm saying, because the road tunnels tend to be more horizontal, so gravity makes it want to collapse, but maybe arranging some of the iron ore in the tunnels in a certain way would make the magnetic forces balance out gravity and thus the tunnel doesn't collapse? Of course, that would require knowing the direction of magnetism in every piece of iron ore, but that shouldn't be too hard, right as they could just put 2 pieces of iron ore close to each other and see what happens.
I don't think we have any idea. The need is to be able to melt down metal ores and extract impurities. High amounts of heat does this fine. So you could use a volcano. But then you have to get it back, which would prove... harder.
Also if the sea people had a fantastical way to make fire, like magical fire underwater, that could definitely advance a civilization. So many cultural ideas that could arise from that…
It's less "make fire" and more "figure out a way to do what fire does". The important thing is being able to melt down and purify metal ore. If you've got a magical means of doing that, then the big question is what it costs and what does it generate as a byproduct. Us non-magical land-dwellers use fire because the main fuel source is plentiful, so we can build a fire into a furnace and drop the metal in. Of course, CO2 is the byproduct of the basic chemical reaction of combustion, and it's increasingly a problem. What kinds of problems does the sea people's magical means create? Does it leech life force from the general vicinity, forcing the underwater smithies to be placed away from population centers and making its workers the untouchables? Random idea, since life force is a somewhat common cost for magic stuff.
Well, yes native copper does exist. However copper workhardens. So while they could have small knives and spear tips, without getting to at least red heat, you can not do anything big or complex with it.
I would like further clarification on the old mountain question. He brought up the Apalachian mountains as an example of old mountains, but I am wondering how far that extends. Those mountains are at least partially buried by sediment, and connect to the Ozarks, but only underground. Should that connecting region be considered old mountains or not?
Yes. Geologists tend to call them orogenic belts, because they don't have to be mountains any more, or even exposed at the surface. A good example is the Wopmay Orogen in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, formed about 1.88 billion years ago when the Hottah Terrane, a volcanic continental arc, slammed into the Slave Craton and formed a mountain range in the same way the Cascades formed much more recently when volcanic arcs rafted into North America. If you flew over that area today, you might charitably describe parts of it as a bit hilly, if you squint really hard, but most is, relatively speaking, pretty damn flat and much of it was covered with other rock that was scraped off due to glaciation.
Question about sea people technology, If I give them Hydrothermal vent or radioactive material, do you think them being more advanced then stone age is feasible?
No. The problem is heat. The hottest hydrothermal vents can reach 400 C, which isn't nearly enough to do anything with metal. The other problem is the heat capacity of water. Even if you could somehow create some kind of forge that somehow got hot enough to make metal able to be worked, as soon as you took it out of the forge to smith it it would immediately cool and harden, and probably shatter the first time it took a blow.
Well, if you had a REALLY hot natural reactor..... maybe. The problem is, that while water is an excellent shielding to radiation, anything placed in the heat of something that gets to red heat by its own nuclear decay will also become fiercly radioactive. Not to mention that a lot of radioactive particles will get into the water and if ingested or inhaled, will kill you FAST. But it is a really cool idea tho
Last video was awesome, maybe 2 good answers here tho. Felt like a lot of the answers were just, why not take this chance to make something up. Maybe we get different things out of world building, but i care far less about culture and far more about geology and geography.
0:21 "It's such a rich field" haHAhaHAha it's a great joke because we're talking about minerals, and ore deposits are a wealth source... see? rich! 😶🌫
Actually, on underwater cultures, they could get nuclear energy and use said heat instead of fire. Yes, much more uncommon and dangerous but cancer won't be showing its signs until they get post-agricultural minimum (and posibly even not before industrial) so it isn't a big setback. Furthermore, for what I understand water is great as protection of radiation so they could even get away with it more than a terrestrial culture.
the problem is that water can only be heated so much. YOu can get it up to 500°C pretty well, but that is not enough for serious metal work. If you have a really strong natural reactor, you could ofc place your metal on or into the core....... But that would be sufficiently radioactive to kill you within days. Tho prolly pretty good for cooking.
They would have a much harder time getting to higher technology stages. But that does not mean they would be stuck in our equivalent stone age. They might focus more on soceity building and animal husbandry over time. Sea people would definitely have a very alien tech history.
Still can't get over that Follow Up is just "FU". Makes me laugh every time.
"Maybe your sea people can trade with them."
That's a funny word for sinking their ships, eating the crew, and stealing their tools.
I mean, it is trade, just not voluntary or survivable trade.
You have a town harvesting Merfolk for their valuable bones ONE TIME and nobody forgets it 🙄
@@roll20tales27 and you get nothing back
@@roll20tales27 its just a bad deal
I think that they would actually trade, you can say that the Merfolk are eaten by the landfolk as much as the landfolk are eaten by the Merfolk.
I think just straight up it’s more interesting if the two species can trade with each other without thinking of the other as dinner!
For the sea peoples, if magic is accessible in this world, another interesting take on it might be for the sea people to develop magic more aggressively because it allowed them to create underwater 'fires'. That could also create some interesting cultural differences/potential conflicts.
Some thoughts on a seafolk community discovering fire via a more "Muggle" approach!
It would be interesting if they were able to observe fire on the land (idk, lighting storms), and some time ago wonder if that power could be replicated. Perhaps their old timey engineers were able to discover that water extinguishes flame, so in order to make a flame underwater they need to create a dome of sorts, and remove the water and replace it with dry air. You get some sort of rudimentary glovebox/ sand blast box / fume closet.
Through this they learn not only about fire, but also that it consumes oxygen, produces smoke and alters the air pressure inside. That's a lot of chemistry they would never have given thought to. They might even learn about the nature of water: hydrogen being volatile, oxygen being a key part of the fire triangle, and salt being an umbrella term for all sorts of compounds with similar properties.
From this they might experiment with the makeup of the air, discovering some gases are combustible, others are not, that there are ways to manipulate this.... it's possible they would even learn this more sharply than a land-based society, who take air for granted. Retrieving these air resources would require seapeople who are comfortable being in shallow waters for extended periods.
Learning about air pressure might lead to hydraulics, which might lead to transport systems powered by propulsion and manipulation of pressures. Imagine merfolk who are too lazy to swim because they've got a Seapeople-mover 4x4! What a culture shift!
All this manipulation of resources would be very industry heavy, so I imagine airless domes where staff wear "inverted wetsuits" to stay alive and healthy working in a dry environment. In real life, fish can survive outside of water for longer than we give them credit for-- certainly longer than we can survive below water. If this extends to the seapeople, perhaps damage to these suits would need first aid, but not be necessarily fatal. But an explosion would be.
They'd be very pollution conscious, too, I reckon: remember if bad goop is released, it would be visible regardless of liquid, solid or gas (which would bubble up toward the surface.... and surely sea people swimming above the industry would choke on this and spot the problem very early on). I would wager this would be identified and addressed way faster than an equivalent society of landlubbers, who have the luxury of "out of sight, out of mind".
Electricity is a trickier thing, but if they learn about ions (maybe from busting apart sodium and chlorine from common salt) they might learn about static charges. But using this in a practical way underwater? I don't have the scientific knowhow and I'm not willing to pretend I do.
another option is through magma exposure at plate boundaries and using this ultra hot layer to shape rudimentary metals. it would lead to a more nomadic people but instead of chasing animals around they would chase these sources of heat. you could also use that as a way to introduce technological development and evolutionary divergence with them getting more advanced allowing them to approach closer to these sources of heat and make even more advanced stuff while evolutionarily those who work the metals could start to diverge and get more and more able to survive in that heat while the rest of them dont change much. given enough time these two species could split entirely requiring the metal workers and originals to work together and so on
R.A. Reynolds I mean, a lot of our “fire” technologies require an environment very different from that we live in. Separating iron from ore pretty well requires an oxygen-free environment. Mind you, Iron smelting is a fairly advanced technology, and they actually use fire to remove the oxygen.
The hard part is that first step of messing around with simple campfires. By the time electricity becomes a matter of study, they’d’ve been playing this game for quite awhile, so the leap will be quite a bit smaller, though still perhaps a bit greater than the challenge faced by their landlubber cousins.
@@itisALWAYSR.A. Speaking of hydraulics, I feel like water pressure would be a much larger part of seafolks' lives than air pressure is on land. It would almost certainly be a well known phenomenon that kids learn about. You'd have all sorts of cultural values about being careful around narrow crevices and tunnels in the wrong place, because a bad wave could smash you against the rock at any time.
It'd be a very natural extension of that to wonder if they could harness that power.
Or they could store air in air proof containers to make fires in, like we do for reactions that require water.
I expected an "FU" video to have a very different tone...
ck
Yeah, I was suspecting some sort of out-of-character raging at TH-cam for wacky demonetization - happy that it's just "follow up"
@@mongobongo1147 I was thinking it was going to go through some mistakes Arti made in the previous video and correct them.
Never ever worry about making a long vid. I will listen for hours if it's informative.
"It's such a rich field", you say. Mine it then! :)
Maybe sea people can cultivate corals or other organisms that extract minerals from ore and redeposit them in a controlled manner.
But keep in mind that that isn't how they work in real life. But interesting concept nonetheless
Potentially plausible: tunicates concentrate vanadium out of seawater, and the scaly-foot snail uses iron to build its scales and shell.
@@ArkinMC This is a fantasy world so I see no problems with that
He was vague about it, but he basically explained that it's unlikely an underwater species would be mining for ores for personal use because first, they'd need the tools to do so. Secondly they mostlikely need a way to refine said resource. Which could be either explained with "magic", should it exist in the setting, or as he said through trading with other (landbased) races.
If it's not some fantastical mineral that can be shaped via means other than smelting and forging, it's unlikely an underwater race would make use of iron, gold or other "realistic" minerals, and thus would have no reason to mine for it. Their only means would be trade.
@@Jpteryx They don´t do that as native metal however. So even if you do that, you still have the issue of smelting or electro-refining.
youtube has added a chapter feature so you no longer need to add a chapter list in the description/comments
Yes thank you, I was wobdering what that was called
The chapter feature is based off the chapter list it detects in the description.
Can’t seem to see it on mobile
@@codekillerz5392 youtube likes to introduce features in waves. The feature is channel exclusive- some people have it and some do not.
The dooblydoo is more reliable than those features 🙃
4:35 You've forgotten about native ore and cold working. Copper and tin are soft enough that they can be shaped without heat, but still hard enough to have some advantages over basic stone tools, not to mention they can be shaped in ways that stone or flint cannot. If an underwater people had access to local native copper, they would be stuck in the "copper-age."
In addition, if they're like reverse-whales where they can hold their breath or otherwise survive out of water for a short long enough amount of time, then they can go on land to start fires and forge better tools (although how likely is it that they would discover fire and forging in the first place).
Love your work, when i started worldbuilding for my DnD compaign and i was opsessed to create a realistic map, your videos saved me hours of researching, and for that i thank you
One potential avenue they could get access to underwater firing processes is plasma.
We already know of one subset of crustaceans that can generate plasma.
The issue is sustained production, but it could likely be done given what we now know about their armor now.
I could imagine some species - after figuring out they could repeatedly create plasma to burn and melt things, but it leads to them being heated a little too much - they slowly evolve a better way to get rid of heat through creating a more hole-like skeletal structure with muscles to feed "cold" water through to keep a constant safe temperature, quite literally natural watercooling.
So you end up getting this one group, or the whole species, capable of creating sustained plasmas for cooking their food, resource extraction, etc.
That'd be a really cool idea to play with.
Can you talk about natural geological structures like hexagon basalt pillars, arches, spikes and caves?
That makes me think about Minecraft.
Also Minecraft fanfiction has a lot of mining adventures. xD
I read this as "neural geological strucutre" and now I'm on a tangent about living on a living planet and mining the brain cells for organic computing.
You’ll get a lot of basalt formations of many kinds on a large igneous province, I’m not entirely sure what dictates their locations but I think it might mostly be irrespective of the actual surface features, having more to do with the structure of the mantle below.
Large Igneous Provinces are scattered widely. They're typically going to be associated with hotspots (Iceland), bolide impacts, and stable continental interiors (Siberian, Deccan Traps).
As for hexagonal pillars (the ones I'm most familiar with are in the Hebrides), those are going to be anywhere there is a mantle plume so large igneous provinces and old plate boundaries, especially if partially submerged (Scotland).
Caves are most common in old volcanic vents or in areas with Limestone (Yucatan, Florida). That is shallow ancient seas that have been uplifted by moving or sea level drop. If the aquifer is close to the surface caves will form.
It just doesn't feel right when you don't go really close to the camera for "Edgar out"
Social distancing.
For sea people: I think black smokers would be pretty valid as a source of ores. Also you could make them somehow use hotspots or middle-ocean ridges for heating the metals? But I'm not sure if this could work in water... but well, that's what came to my mind anyways. :)
Well sadly black smokers only heat the water so much. I think about 500°C?
THat would be enough for tin and lead, but pretty much all the real technology metals will only somewhat soften.
Tho, the temperature limit is the boiling point of water. And that rises depending on pressure, so i didn´t run the math but mayyyyyybe, you could get workable ranges at depths below 12km in really deep ocean trenches.
tho without having metal tools getting something into and out of such a type of furnace is a whole different proposal.
If you want to get a bit into the fantastical i guess you could invent a seaweed that has high mineral content and can bake into a ceramic.
There's a lot of people talking about needing heat to work metal. Completely valid, yes, but I'm surprised that no one has thought of these "sea people" being able to breed creatures to essentially digest the ores. The creatures would excrete the metal, either as small pellets or, to put the metal into a more workable form, excrete the metal into shells of a sort. The shell could have the organic matter worked off by some sort of chemical compound that can exist underwater without really dissipating into the water completely (a sort of acidic mud that eats the calcium of the shell away leaving behind the metal lattice or layer once they breed the ore-eating organisms to an appreciable state...or, rather than mud, another organism that eats at the shell but not the metal).
To be sure, working it with fire is much easier and faster by a magnitude of about ten thousand, but it's humanocentric to think that fire is the end-all-be-all of technology. Just because it is for us doesn't mean that an aquatic creature with sufficient determination and intelligence can't find a work-around when it comes to working metal. Also doesn't mean that a land-bound (above-the-surface) creature with human-level intelligence would even be able to metaphorically put two and two together when presented with fire in the wild. I'm just saying that I don't know how fire and animal husbandry tie toghether besides the point that land-bound food needs to be cooked. Even that is a limitation of the human digestive track, not necessarily that fire is vital to animal husbandry processes.
Though, realistically, living under the water presents other issues that stunt social growth (lack of temperature fluctuations = no motivation to store food for lean times, no way to reliably view the stars if you can't at least poke your head out of the water, etc). Essentially it's the fact that they live in the water at all that stops them from moving beyond hunter-gatherer rather then their lack of fire. Any "undersea civilizations" that did arise up from the native aquatic life would have to depend on 'farming' their prey fish for a lean time most likely related to sea currents. And even then, there would have to be a reason that these stone-age sea people would not be a nomadic society.
...sorry, a bit of an autistic word dump here :P I'ma go before I go off on how nomadic or hunter-gatherer civilizations, while inherently more primitive are not necessarily full of beings lacking fully developed self awareness.
Could you please do a video about where crops will grow, such as wheat, and rice. I imagine that the same principle of applying fictional resources real world counterparts?
You know, most articles about crops on wikipedia also list where they grow, most even have maps. Unlike most of the geology sections.
I mean it would be nice as a summaray but much easier to find out for yourself.
Also we can be much more creative with plants, since they are not as bound by rules as minerals are.
Yeah I guess that makes sense.
Very good answers, and that fire people/water people story virtually writes itself.
You never cease to amaze me. Great information in a simplified way!
One thing about Fantastium is you could give it unusual properties. Make it biogenic, then perhaps over hundreds of thousands of years it decays in water, but forms an oxide layer with air, protecting it forever if it isn't exposed to bodies of water. Thus, it only exists in significant quantity where coal would be but water wasn't.
Thank you so much for answering my question!
Thanks for making this series. It reminds me of a book from "The Magical Society" that explained things like plate tectonics and dominant wind direction to GMs, but I forgot the title. Anyway it kinda breaks my suspension of disbelief when we need global shipping just to get all the raw materials, but in a city building simulator you usually get fresh water, clay, trees, fertile farmland, marble, iron, copper and uranium all in one spot.
Hey Arti, If you also put a 0:00 Timestamp the Timeline should automatically be put into chapters on the YT video :)
Hey Artifexian, I was curious, and I know this question has nothing to do with resources, but I want to build a world and I want to create a large region that the main story takes place in to be under a constant fog. Do you know what sort of environment would produce that sort of effect?
Maybe a coastal area with a warm current and upwelling along the coast (like San Francisco). Warm moist air is cooled by the upwelling to create fog, and then blown inland. Or a plateau downwind of a warmer and rainy forested area.
Any place with cold onshore currents and winds. Especially if there are hills and mountains in the way (N California, British Columbia) or hot lands (Namibia).
A cloud forest!
1) find a way to create fog (water evaporation)
2) find a way to transport it (wind in a correct direction)
3) find a way to stop it in desired location (mountain range around it)
These have been soooooo useful thank you!!!!!
If sea folk have access to the ocean bottom I think they could trade manganese nodulles with land civilizations with advanced metallurgy, perhaps they could produce an unmatched steel with them making the sea people quite rich and perhaps different sea civilizations make war with each other for rich territories
4:24 what if these poeple decided to go back to the deep sea AFTER getting all the cool stiff we have
On underwater mining and forging. I have used a bit of hand waving and created a culture which uses black smokers and other undersea volcanic activity to forge.
I don't know how effective or efficient it may be in real life, but it's at least an idea.
Plus, if you have Fantastium, there's no saying it can't be forged underwater. Maybe a method of forging only exists underwater, either requiring extreme pressure or the water itself.
Just a few ideas.
Well, if we're speaking in terms of using real world materials. A black smoker can get to about 250C, the only metal that could be worked under those conditions would probably be tin, and theoretically lead. However tin isn't normally found near geothermal formations, let alone as a native metal. So while rudimentary metal working could be done using black smokers in principle. Any notable metallurgical advances would require outside intervention. Your proposal is although an interesting one I must admit, and it's use in a story would be a very interesting concept.
@@josephhughes2265 Huh. I didn't know they were that cold. I thought they got a lot hotter than that. Good to know. Thanks.
@@Thunderous115 that's still about 700 degrees Fahrenheit. Only thing keeping the water from boiling is the pressure.
@@josephhughes2265 Fair enough. I admit I used handwaving and the denizens of my society use the heat and pressure to forge kraken shell pieces, not metal.
@@Thunderous115 still a lot better than I could have done. Gotta give you kudos on that.
Please do some videos on how cloud formations on gas giants work? I’d like to know how to make a nice looking planet and not a beige blob.
suggestion on sea people mining. if it’s a fantasy world, add a somewhat common brittle mineral that reacts with water in a powerful exothermic reaction but forms a passivating layer. then they can crush it to create heat where it’s needed
I recall reading a story (maybe Bradbury) about a species that was colonizing the galaxy and their ship crashed on a water world. They seeded the ocean and gave their creations high technology but the sea people they made couldn't use it because no fire under the ocean. They ended up using amoeba and plankton to make a machine to voyage to the only spot of land on the whole planet. Very pertinent short story.
Could you do a guide about different kinds of wood?
When you make another one of these can you talk about where to place other kinds of geology, such as karst landscapes?
1:50 You mean like this?
Functorum Functorid(A Material needed for warp drives and antimatter production) can be taken out of the water in the Form of Lithium selenide which can react with Hydrogen and Oxygen around 4000K to
lithium hydroxide And Hydrogen selenide which can be inserted in solved Form into a fusion reactor where they react to the nobel gas Chocranium, which decays into the alkali metal Functorum and the halogen Functorium which can react to the Salt Functorum Functorid which won't be affected by antimatter or plasma.
So, in my hobby worldbuild, I have yet to definitively decide, but the "sea people" would probably either use some sort of primal form of magic to extract metals from ores and form them, or alternatively, I was thinking of some sort of bacteria or algae doing the extraction instead.
Kinda like the idea that they dig up the ores, crush it up, let it get "moldy", which then proceed to either excrete or accumulate the metals in it.
Go with magic. Because that would essentially be what the mold would do anyways.
unoxidized metal is too big a chemical energy source for live to leave untouched. So while algae and bacteria love to concentrate metals, they do so in some compound and never as the metal itself.
Tho you could probably have an plant that gives you straight soda or hydraulic cement.
4:04 unless ofcourse there is a matieral that allows underwater-fire
You ever just watch a video about rocks and metal.
I have played Minecraft and Terraria, yes
A good example of how can an underwater culture interact with a land culture is in the book War with the Newts (by Karel Čapek).
4:49 Long ago, the four nations lived in harmony...
Good morning and well
I am from Sudbury, and it's an ancient meteorite crator. It has a lot of nickle and copper ore.
Looks like TH-cam really likes your content recently
another idea would be for the sea people to discover a substance similar to naphtha or napalm, and use that to create underwater fire
the sea people can use the heat from the black smoker to make a forgo. or have the ability to use magic to metal the ore into the metal.
4:10: Barring excessive use of phlebotinum, of course. If you have magic that lets you create forge-grade temperatures underwater, the merfolk can be as advanced as the landlubbers. But that makes things more complicated in several dimensions, so keeping your mermen at Stone Age tech levels might be better.
Note: "Stone Age" includes all pre-Colombian American cultures. (Some could work metal, but never types or quantities which drastically altered the civilization below the level of rituals and royal garb.) The Aztec, Inca, Maya, Mississippian, etc were all Stone Age, technically, so your merfolk could do anything they could do.
Well, they're probably going to be worse weavers than the Inca, worse chocoholics than the Maya, and worse at keeping turkeys than the Aztec, but you know what I mean.
But remember that the sea people don't have access to fire, in general and that limits them to getting metal. This means for example that they cannot relay on cooking meaning they cannot afford a brain abnormaly large for their group which in turns means there is probably a great number of inteligent species underwater instead of the remarkable land one because the land one can cook (and thus can ignore requirements for having a brain too big to be eating constantly like we should if we ate the same things other apes do).
Not only that but they also don't have a very powerfull tool to scare predators off, this might not be a problem if the group with sentience is already the top of the food chain but it might be if it isn't.
actually they might be great weavers, there is tons of natural fibers underwater, look up byssum cloth.
@@xxxm981 The best source I can find is Pinterest, so I'll just assume that it's waterproof. Because the problem isn't really a lack of material; it's that developing weaving to the point that the Inca did would be kinda pointless if everything got wet and rotted.
Though IIRC the Inca made boats out of ruggedly-woven stuff, so there's clearly some solution to that problem.
Can you do something about plants and societies? One of my settings is a theocratic authoritative kingdom set in a world where magic crystals grow from plants. The continents will be one of the supercontinents of past Earth since it's just an alternate timeline to our universe. Eventually they met a kingdom whose religion is based around a healing crystal found only in the northern hemisphere. Eventually the theocratic authoritative kingdom will declare war on them for not carrying the same religion and because they don't want to give them the healing crystal plants because they consider it holy.
My problem is that, at the beginning, all humans live around the equator because they used to eat from a plant that gives them nutritious fruits that can survive indefinitely as long as it's in the equator's climate - because lore. Currently, how a group of people move from the equator up north is a massive plot hole cause I haven't gotten a reason for them to need to move from a bountiful and secure place and, despite being omnivores, haven't thought of hunting animals for food thus not knowing what they would eat would also be another hindrance to moving.
This may seem a Deus Ex Machina solution but depending on how your magic system work you could have them teleported there or being called by the plants. Or if you want to maintain realism, you could have some sort of plant that acts like a drug when burned and some person (who accidentaly drugged themself) claiming that he/she has seen the promised lands up north and thus convincing enough people to go there in search of said lands. You don't even need to have the people of the south concious of such properties of the plant but it might be interesting to tell about it in some manner (and interesting way to do it is to have prophet of multiple religions seemingly interconnected having these reveletions close to this burning plant). Of course, you could change the burning plant for some other natural way of giving inhaled drugs but that's not easy enough to see it from outsiders (so that they don't have a clear reason to discredite the prophet).
I don't know if that is possible with your lore, but maybe they were forced to move into exile, because they did something bad, either by accident or because of difference in goals and ideas. For example, maybe they found an insect that lays its eggs into the fruits and they liked the taste of the fruit filled with the eggs. So they caught more insects and started to "ruin" the fruits in the eyes of the other people.
My take on the how long ago the past should be question.
If you are asking about a people's sense of history, or series of events, consider what a history professor I had said.
For a human, history is any thing over 20-25 years ago. Any thing more resent is still in the cultures idea of "current events". Generally any thing older than a young adult just graduating collage. It's long enough for those acute lessons of active events to fade. For example. the AIDS crisis/pandemic is over 30 years ago. Many of those lessons are forgotten. They are unknown to an entire generation of adults entering their prime. The World Trade Center attacks are 19 years ago. While this event is potent, and society changed it self drastically because of them, it is still fading from the current cultural awareness. It is on the threshold of becoming history.
Think of it this way. What events over 20 years ago in your culture helped shape it today, but are not in the for front of a collective sense of the present.
Could sea people use hydrothermal vents for smelting? Or does it need to be oxidization?
that might work, but the other problem is that water is much denser that air, so it changes the temperature of things in it much quicker than air
The see people get the ores and get to trade with the so-called fire people for Pleasant trees of the land. On my world there’s actually a species that does both; they live in freshwater most of the time, but can fairly easily go on dryland the majority of the time or live at sea.
a tool using sea creature could eventually learn to build fire on the surface of the water using oil
Hydrothermal vents supposedly reach around 350 degrees C, and the melting point of lead is 327 degrees C. If an underwater civilization were to use hydrothermal vents as a forge, I'd think they would be able to extract lead from certain ores or native clusters. Any resources for lead ores?
I know this is very fantastical solution, but why not use zombies to mine net. In my world that would probably be the easiest solution since I do have a twilight zone merfolk, but they can’t reach into the very deepest parts of the ocean, like the trenches.
@@nettlesandsnakes9138 i guess you could. Sounds like a pretty good idea for you to use, but i don’t think it has much to do with what i was saying, haha
Hey, this is a bit beyond your niche but it's a bit related to climates, and it's weather phenomena like hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, etc, more in how humans dealt with (and perhaps saw) these things.
i'm planning to make my merfolk utilize underwater caves and air pockets in them (also helps in giving them arms), so they would be able to use fire in them. now this would 100% be a slow as fuck process to reach higher levels of advancement, but when they are building their civilization the world is still an ice shell, so no other species could rush them.
Where can we invest in fantastium mining?
I have another question: why is gold etc. only available in new mountains? What makes them dissapear over time?
I'm pretty sure it's just because the gold spreads out a lot more, meaning there is gold int the other places it's just so spread that it doesn't form up in big deposits?
IDK though, it's just my guess
I'd assume dissolution and redeposition via ground water.
Aren't massive asteroid impacts (e.g. Vredefort and Morokweng in South Africa) are an important considerations in bringing heavy mineral deposits closer to the surface?
everything changed when the fire people attacked
Arent there substances that can burn underwater?
I had hoped to ask a question about rare earth element deposits (or lack thereof) but alas I am too late.
To what mail should I mail to for the podcast?
I wish you had also tossed out ideas for completely fantasy minerals, like idk alloys that only occour naturally over magically-charged ley lines or something.
My Keplerian world basically has iron ore scattered all over and it is very concentrated in an area a few miles in radius from the Black Sword River, which has seasonal floods. And my Keplerians are underground dwelling humanoids. Think ant nest scaled up and you basically have your Keplerian city structure. So for them, a floor above the ground might be Floor -1, 2 floors above, -2 and so on as they tend to extend downwards and horizontally. Of course, they use things like rocks, clay, etc to reinforce their tunnels to prevent collapse, but I was wondering, could this high iron density also help, like maybe the iron ore is strongly magnetic(think magnetite and you basically have it, lodestones are magnetite that is magnetized naturally) and they use some of it to magnetically repel against the forces that would cause collapse their tunnels. It's not a big deal with like the home tunnels, but more so with the road tunnels, if you get what I'm saying, because the road tunnels tend to be more horizontal, so gravity makes it want to collapse, but maybe arranging some of the iron ore in the tunnels in a certain way would make the magnetic forces balance out gravity and thus the tunnel doesn't collapse? Of course, that would require knowing the direction of magnetism in every piece of iron ore, but that shouldn't be too hard, right as they could just put 2 pieces of iron ore close to each other and see what happens.
First video I’ve seen
Well you’ll enjoy the rest ;)
I'm making a Minecraft mod with some other people. We don't usually prioritize realism but I'm going to try to put a little logic in to it.
What would be a possible alternative to fire for use underwater?
I don't think we have any idea. The need is to be able to melt down metal ores and extract impurities. High amounts of heat does this fine. So you could use a volcano. But then you have to get it back, which would prove... harder.
To be more specific I have 2 sea folk, 3 land folk and one flying folk.
Also if the sea people had a fantastical way to make fire, like magical fire underwater, that could definitely advance a civilization. So many cultural ideas that could arise from that…
It's less "make fire" and more "figure out a way to do what fire does". The important thing is being able to melt down and purify metal ore. If you've got a magical means of doing that, then the big question is what it costs and what does it generate as a byproduct. Us non-magical land-dwellers use fire because the main fuel source is plentiful, so we can build a fire into a furnace and drop the metal in. Of course, CO2 is the byproduct of the basic chemical reaction of combustion, and it's increasingly a problem. What kinds of problems does the sea people's magical means create? Does it leech life force from the general vicinity, forcing the underwater smithies to be placed away from population centers and making its workers the untouchables? Random idea, since life force is a somewhat common cost for magic stuff.
Aquatics might be able to find copper that doesn't require them to cook it?
Well, yes native copper does exist. However copper workhardens.
So while they could have small knives and spear tips, without getting to at least red heat, you can not do anything big or complex with it.
I would like further clarification on the old mountain question. He brought up the Apalachian mountains as an example of old mountains, but I am wondering how far that extends. Those mountains are at least partially buried by sediment, and connect to the Ozarks, but only underground. Should that connecting region be considered old mountains or not?
Yes. Geologists tend to call them orogenic belts, because they don't have to be mountains any more, or even exposed at the surface. A good example is the Wopmay Orogen in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, formed about 1.88 billion years ago when the Hottah Terrane, a volcanic continental arc, slammed into the Slave Craton and formed a mountain range in the same way the Cascades formed much more recently when volcanic arcs rafted into North America. If you flew over that area today, you might charitably describe parts of it as a bit hilly, if you squint really hard, but most is, relatively speaking, pretty damn flat and much of it was covered with other rock that was scraped off due to glaciation.
There's a good amount of luck involved in prospecting. Which can be used to explain away those geopolitical worldbuilding creative choices.
Question about sea people technology, If I give them Hydrothermal vent or radioactive material, do you think them being more advanced then stone age is feasible?
No. The problem is heat. The hottest hydrothermal vents can reach 400 C, which isn't nearly enough to do anything with metal. The other problem is the heat capacity of water. Even if you could somehow create some kind of forge that somehow got hot enough to make metal able to be worked, as soon as you took it out of the forge to smith it it would immediately cool and harden, and probably shatter the first time it took a blow.
Well, if you had a REALLY hot natural reactor..... maybe.
The problem is, that while water is an excellent shielding to radiation, anything placed in the heat of something that gets to red heat by its own nuclear decay will also become fiercly radioactive.
Not to mention that a lot of radioactive particles will get into the water and if ingested or inhaled, will kill you FAST.
But it is a really cool idea tho
But everything changed when the fire people attacked 4:55
Nah, that was orchestrated by Orm.
That’s what I was thinking
If it comes from the water, then ancient inland seas would have deposits.
Last video was awesome, maybe 2 good answers here tho. Felt like a lot of the answers were just, why not take this chance to make something up. Maybe we get different things out of world building, but i care far less about culture and far more about geology and geography.
I GOT IN THE VIDEO!!! WOOOOOOO!!!
couldnt sea people just congregate around volcanic vents, and use that heat for furnaces?
You know we *like* long videos, right?
magic fire can work underwater.
0:21 "It's such a rich field" haHAhaHAha it's a great joke because we're talking about minerals, and ore deposits are a wealth source... see? rich! 😶🌫
if tis a fantasy world, who said they have to be real ores
Actually, on underwater cultures, they could get nuclear energy and use said heat instead of fire. Yes, much more uncommon and dangerous but cancer won't be showing its signs until they get post-agricultural minimum (and posibly even not before industrial) so it isn't a big setback. Furthermore, for what I understand water is great as protection of radiation so they could even get away with it more than a terrestrial culture.
the problem is that water can only be heated so much.
YOu can get it up to 500°C pretty well, but that is not enough for serious metal work.
If you have a really strong natural reactor, you could ofc place your metal on or into the core.......
But that would be sufficiently radioactive to kill you within days.
Tho prolly pretty good for cooking.
Do you have pillow buttons in your ears?
CK
"so how do I world build sea people?"
Artifexian: don't
They would have a much harder time getting to higher technology stages. But that does not mean they would be stuck in our equivalent stone age.
They might focus more on soceity building and animal husbandry over time.
Sea people would definitely have a very alien tech history.
Diamonds are not metal