Reset Proposition: Extractable Carbon (Coal)

It never made any sense that we grow plants like HCP, then burn it to make C (Carbon/Coal) that we then use to smelt Iron from ore. Shouldn’t there be some rare planets with coal on them?

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If we have coal, we should also have trees as a natural resource that can be chopped down at a lumber yard and incinerated as well.

Lore-wise, I expect coal to exist on fertile planets, or extinct previously-fertile planets.

Coal, by its nature, implies the existence of trees at some point in the past.

I agree. Its still possible to have coal on a lifeless planet if the planet was once fertile.

I think that is what HCP is in-game. But if you are saying It should be a natural resource that we can harvest/extract as well as farm then that’s a good idea.

Isn’t coal mostly ferns and algae not necessarily trees?

Most of the world’s coal deposits were formed between the period where “bark” (lignin) evolved up to the time when the fungus that could actually eat it evolved. Dead ferns and trees just piled up for thousands of years because nothing could break them down, and eventually formed large coal deposits.

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I’m imagining a planet where life formed but never evolved fungus to eat the waste lignan. An entire planet where all the life went extinct from suffocating in its own waste materials and the biomass turned into a stabilized form of carbon for me into tap millions of years later.:smile: