[themodelplumber]

Resolving overlap might be the fun part, depending on your psychology. For these types of people there's really no use for predictive anticipation as it can spoil the opportunity to solve unique problems :-)

BTW I "automatically" created a planet while sitting in a boring church meeting last Sunday. I used a kind of "dice gradient" method with the dice app on my phone. "How hospitable is this planet?" OK, so a 2. Not very. What's the temperature? 2 again. Geez, it's freezing.

Anyway after about 15 rolls the planet turned out to be used as some sort of ancient computing device, channeling surface air as a cooling method. The ~20 person exploration team was struggling to get past even the most rudimentary underground security, with indications that the past custodians of this world had significant leverage over physical objects, perhaps through technological means.

A lot of fun, working this up :-)

[ves]

You should read the short story “Glacial” in “Galactic North” by Alastair Reynolds.

[themodelplumber]

Thanks, I just skimmed the Wikipedia summary out of curiosity. It looks like an interesting and pretty intense story!

My own idea was that the planet I rolled up hosted a sort of cargo-cult experiment, where the beings that hosted the computing infrastructure were using it for really basic tasks that were easily perceptible to their sensing skills, not understanding what it was, really. Their technological skills included rudimentary large-mass manipulation, and after making a place for this equipment and securing it, they had long since died out, while their "data center" was still flourishing and had stored extremely valuable data.

[ves]

Oooh that’s real nice. I use a lot of those themes in fiction I write / blueprint (probing the limits of understanding, the interpretation of legacy by the inadequate living, etc)