>>67510490
Acidified soil which is also polluted by heavy metals on which almost nothing grows.

>>67510490
You could have the bacteria and simple organisms which can survive on such toxic fare form huge slimy "fields" of matted biofilm. If the PCs investigate further, they may see miniscule organisms crawling and slithering through the stinking slime. Give the impression that although life is recovering, the new ecosystem is not going to be one favorable for human ( If the PCs are human) colonization.

>>67510516
>>67510753
Both of these are pretty good thanks

>>67510490
A layer of radioactive graphite control rods.
For some reason, the player's geiger counters only ever read 3.6 Roentgen. Not great, but not terrible either.

Arsenic lakes. Runoff from gold refineries.

A field that is a huge neodymium magnet. Some things can float over it, some things get their memories wiped. Some things stick and can't be recovered.

The equator or polar circuit is a giant particle accelerator. The closer you get them more your armor and shielding is eaten away by neutron decay.

Stacks of old, obsolete paper currency, kept from rotting by the hostile environment.

Windblown graphene and carbon nanotube storms. If it gets into your lungs, they will be slowly shredded from the inside, but your clothing will becoming like armor, your skin will toughen into a tough-to-penetrate hide, the steel of your weapons and armor becomes stronger, and everything becomes hydrophobic.

>>67510490
Fungal forests and lichen gardens that feed on concrete and slag.

Plants that eat radiowaves, infrared, or some other wavelength of the EM-spectrum instead of light in photosynthesis. (Radiosynthesis? Microsynthesis?)

Miniature spider-like robots the size of a fingernail from a forgotten age repairing circuitry for an unknown machine. Every 2 weeks, 3 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes, and 28 seconds on the dot, a palm sized device floats over the circuitry destroying repair-spider and circuit alike. Both are the last soldiers of a long-dead war.

Hailstones that form with methane bubbles in them so that, if they fall into arc-shields or open flame, catch on fire and sometimes explode with the force of a grenade.

Miles of old cabling, pulsing with energy or information, leading to unknown areas further down or up.

A layer of broken crucibles and long dead furnaces.

A layer of personal CBRNE protective equipment, discarded from use due to being defective.

A layer of leaking dead batteries, however the leaks have caused a few of them to not be so dead and so sparks or electric shocks can sometimes happen, with fatal results.

>>67510490
Concrete would be no more likely to survive as concrete than any other limestone, which is all it really is. Acid rain (assuming carbon dioxide/methane etc in the atmosphere in high concentrations) will probably dissolve most of it. Depends on the concentration of acid, frankly.

You might see some that survived long enough to be affected by geological processes and become metamorphic rock.

Industrial slag has been a byproduct of human industry for thousands of years so we actually understand what happens to it quite well. It's often reprocessed into new forms rather than simply dumped.

Rusted metal is, er, gonna rust away. A more interesting phenomenon would be things like sheet aluminum, which doesn't really appear in a pure form in nature and is highly resistant to corrosion. The same is true of most metals - whereas iron can sometimes be found, like gold, in large clumps (though in the case of iron, it's meteoric iron that we usually find in large concentrations of non-oxide forms), those which are resistant to oxidation or other forms of corrosion in their purified forms or which are rarely found in their purified forms at all (such as the platinum group) will be the buried treasure of the future. It's worth knowing where these things are likely to be dumped because they'll be richer seams in the garbage heaps than they ever were in the original ores, and much simpler to separate and purify.

>>67510935
Arsenic concetration in bodies of water would tend over time to promote bacteria which can use it (and old paper currency) as part of their metabolic function. There are also organisms, even complex higher organisms, which actively require arsenic for metabolic function. Higher doses are fatal even to these creatures, but over time - and certainly over 10,000 years, especially with the high breeding rate of creatures like rats - we would expect to see the surviving populations with a much higher tolerance of arsenic than today.

>>67511181
>Arsenic concetration in bodies of water
Who says there's any water?

>>67511245
There's arsenic lakes, so there's water. It might be locked up in other compounds, either as a solvent medium or adsorbed into other molecules, or it could be potentially present as hydrogen and oxygen (or either - we don't really know what the composition of atmosphere is, but if it contains hydrogen or oxygen and lots of volatiles, especially if there are runaway problems with heat, radiation, even electrolysis, there will be water as long as there are fluids).

We can in fact say for certain that if there are arsenic lakes there's water, because arsenic is a fairly reactive metalloid, so in anything but water (where we'd expect it to be dissolved in solution) it's going to turn into other compounds - where the problem is less that there are "arsenic lakes" and more that these are highly corrosive lakes in which arsenic is a fairly minor hazard by comparison.

I'm a geologist, and I've thought about this quite a lot. You would likely find a planetwide stratum highly enriched in heavy metals, especially well preserved in lacustrine and coastal marine sediments, which would also contain large amounts of preserved trash; especially glass, stainless steel and some plastics, would would all still be kicking around after that time. 10ky isn't enough time to form rock, so they would all be as unconsolidated sediments and soils.

Cities would have a highly peculiar geology, consisting of geometrically arranged hummocky hills probably grassed over, with the hills consisting of concrete with the presence of iron-rich minerals and, depending on the building, trace metals like tellurium, neodymium, gold etc. from electronics and so on divided by strips of tar that are buried roads. Fragments of well-built tunnel networks would survive, those that are not caved in would be either crumbling or filled with water and sediment depending on the height of the water table, their construction and the surrounding geology. Around and especially downwind of the cities would see very high amounts of heavy metal and toxic pollutants, provided they haven't been leached out by rain. Nuclear facilities would also be very identifiable thanks to their radioactive pollution slick and concentration, and many containment structures would still survive thanks to being massive edifices. Rubbish dumps would turn into goldmines for artifacts, and many would be very well preserved thanks to the anoxic conditions inside the trash heaps.

Some structures, especially large ones of concrete and stone, would survive. I'm talking about hydro dams, bridge pillars, monuments and the sort of large edifice that would resist erosion. Pure concrete would survive better than reinforced concrete, since steel rebar has a tendency to swell as it rusts and crack the concrete.

>>67512676
Mines would also be very well preserved, with quarries appearing nearly exactly as they were left. Underground networks would also probably be still around, but crumbling supports would render many highly unstable and under the water table some may completely fill with sediment and mineral deposits (given long enough this would lithify and form a perfect underground cast of the tunnel network). This also goes for mountain transport tunnels.

>>67510490
A lot of plastic

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>>67510490

Not the geological strata, but I wouldn't mind commenting on the environmental conditions a bit:

First and foremost conditions would be arid, uncomfortable, and toxic, with much of the world desertified or otherwise turned into a kind of wasteland of harsh toxic winds, rust storms, dust devils, acid rain storms, with most freshwater available being either acidic or extremely toxic due to industrial runoff and other contaminates.

>Birds are basically extinct.
Most if not all birds would be extinct. Much like a Canary in a coal mine their delicate lungs and sensitive respiratory systems would not be able to withstand or adapt in time to the heavily polluted air of this industrial waste-world. There species most likely to persist would be the ones we're already accustomed to: Pigeons, Sparrows, Carrion Birds, but even these birds would be very rare, few in number, with their entire species' health and reproduction constantly compromised by this environment.

>Rat world
Every mammal larger than a Dog would be extinct, but the ones that did survive would carry on and if anything thrive as they've always done during such dramatic extinction events. Creatures like Rats, Mice, Shrews, Moles, Gophers, Rabbits, and other rodents & burrowing creatures would find this meager world abundant in resources and lacking in predators. They would simply be everywhere: subterranean animals can survive effortlessly in high carbon-dioxide and low oxygen environments, combined with their fast rate of reproduction would allow them to easily adapt, evolve, and overcome any obstacle this rust world threw at them.
Still, though, there would also be Canines, Goats, Hogs... Maybe Bears? Omnivorous generalists would be at an advantage, but most large animals would find it difficult to find sufficient sustenance or take too long to mature and reproduce before they succumb to pollutants.

Part 2 inc.

>>67513869
>Maybe Bears
definitely not bears. bears might be omnivores but they need to eat a lot

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>>67513869

>Spots of greenery.
Vegetation would continue to grow and the world would remain greener than most people would expect it to be as a diversity of species would be more than capable of safely growing in toxic & polluted conditions due to remediation techniques, but the arid and hostile weather conditions and the presence of acid rain would limit really abundant, rich, greenery and growth.... Most of this vegetation would be immediately toxic and inedible to people and would need to be washed and processed.
Trees would be exceedingly rare; replaced by scrubs, shrubs, bushes, succulents, grasses, lichens, moss, and other foliage that can withstand not just the lack of proper rainfall, but keep from being torn apart by the rust winds. Though, most places would often simply be too wind-swept, too hard of earth, and too 'sanitized' (lacking in rich earth) to sustain vegetation.

>Creeping things.
The vast majority of Insects would largely not give a single shit, but an overwhelming spectrum of specialized insects would go extinct from the absence of the unique resources and ecosystems they dependent upon as opposed to the polluted biosphere. I highly doubt any Bees, Butterflies, Moths, and most Wasps wouldn't make it, but certain Beetles, Flies, Roaches, Mosquitos, Worms, and the like would adapt, overcome, and carry on as usual. By the 10,000 year mark Insects would be carrying on as if nothing happened.

One more about oceans.

>>67514226
what about small bears

>>67514226
like dwarf bears underground

...drinking and forging and holding grudges in their mountain fastnesses

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>>67514293

>Muddy shallow oceans: rich with 'life'.
Despite this worlds oceans drying out to shallow seas they would still contain a rich, versatile, depth of marine life and be home to 90-97% of the polluted worlds life. To the point where people and creatures living by what remained of the muddy, polluted, plastic covered seas would still fare quite well compared to the people and creatures living in the interior wastelands. The other irony is that these shallow seas would allow for more sunlight to breach through the depths and encourage the development of more reefs, kelp forests, and 'land' for other marine organisms to flourish despite the conditions. Indeed, the only 'real' threat faced by the remaining oceans would be the suppressive, smothering, waves of plastic that would block the sun and choke creatures.
Most heavy metal pollutants and industrial run-off would give rise to algae blooms and act as vital fertilizer and nutrients to Scum, Algae, and other simple organisms. These in turn provide ample sustenance for bottom feeders and combined with the far warmer waters would give rise to increase size, fertility, and populations of shellfish: Mussels, Lobsters, Crabs, etc.. These creatures would be, again, toxic, due to pollution, but they'd still be an important food source.
Everything else in the ocean would be hit or miss depending on how many species were left untouched as no threat is greater to the ocean than overfishing. Most marine mammals & seabirds would not survive these harsh conditions (Penguins and small Baleen Whales might ironically persist?), but fish would be able to repopulate, survive, adapt, re-fill niches, and even SWELL in numbers so long as they weren't eaten before the collapse.

>>67513869
>>67514293
>>67514584

OP here, this is actually great stuff thanks

As it happens, the two top predators are wild boars and smaller black bear variants called garbage bears, and the only birds are vultures and seagulls. Most oceanic life is shellfish, jellyfish and the hardiest of small fishes. I'll be sure to incorporate more of the animals mentioned into the ecosystem though.

>>67514671
singing bears with hammers, what a time to be alive

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>>67514671

No problem, I love post-apocalyptic environments.

>>67514584
Maybe one more just for freshwater/rivers.

>Acidic rivers.
No standing or running freshwater would be safe or trustworthy: it would ALL be contaminated by the heavily polluted world's plastics, heavy metals, and various other noxious pollutants- some sources of water wouldn't even be water but horrible burning pools of acid. The only safe source of moisture would be from acid rain and even then it wouldn't be 'truly' safe; the LEAST safe source would be ground water, as it'd be completely and totally saturated in the absolute worst contaminates. This is a world devoid of wells.
Many freshwater biomes would be highly polluted, dangerous, muddy cesspools devoid of any palatable life; giving off noxious fumes that alone would dissuade other creatures from drinking from them, never mind some of them in fact being horrifying pools of flesh-melting acid. Despite such adversity there would still be Scum, Algae, and dense clouds of Microbes, all supped on by seemingly invincible and now ridiculously plentiful Minnows (progressively getting larger and larger. Pan-sized Killifish would not be uncommon). Running rivers would fare 'slightly' better, but they'd still be home to much the same- only just clean enough to house Catfish, toxic Shellfish, and fish capable of breathing air.
There would be no Frogs, no Newts; all amphibians would be extinct, with intrepid air-breathing fish aggressively taking over their now empty niche.

bumping an interesting thread

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>>67515469

Fuck it, have some more.

First and foremost: I don't think people would be living in scavenged, ugly, derelict, improvised, shanty towns, I just don't. I also don't think you're ever going to see anybody living out in the open. This polluted world is going to not just dominated by hot, arid, toxic wastelands, but it's also going to come with all the weather conditions: acidic rains that eat through and corrode most metal or wood structures, and massive, extremely powerful, noxious dust storms filled with rust, pollutants, and even radioactive debris. Most people (depending on their technological levels) are either going to be nomadic (actively fleeing from the weather), living underground, or in specific terrain that otherwise blocks the wind or keeps them secluded from the worst conditions. Imagine the dust bowl, but now it burns, it can make you sick, and it's got enough momentum to shave you.
I think people are going to recycle what's available and use it to make 'new' stuff for themselves: buildings out of clay, straw, brick, and mortar, metal melted down and reforged into higher quality tools, weapons, & armor, vehicles and technology either fixed or refurbished into 'new' devices to lengthen their lifespan. Nothing is going to be made out of wood. Wood is gone.

Technology, though, can be whatever you want it to be. I'd imagine there'd be the full spectrum: people living in technologically advanced communities, ignoring the problems outside as they live in unfathomably luxury and plot their next step into space. People living in 'fairly' developed mixed medieval-modern 'Nausicaa' style countries or kingdoms that are naturally protected from the worst weather- relying on swords, guns, and tanks to defend their highly sought after land, where you've got pick up trucks & radios, but your military still wears suits of armor. Finally, you may even have just.. straight up ooga booga not!larping, legitimately fucking ignorant tribal communities.

>>67512828
caddisflies with plastic "shells"

https://www.deviantart.com/herofan135/gallery/45327524/The-urban-future

>>67517474
>Technology, though, can be whatever you want it to be. I'd imagine there'd be the full spectrum: people living in technologically advanced communities, ignoring the problems outside as they live in unfathomably luxury and plot their next step into space. People living in 'fairly' developed mixed medieval-modern 'Nausicaa' style countries or kingdoms that are naturally protected from the worst weather- relying on swords, guns, and tanks to defend their highly sought after land, where you've got pick up trucks & radios, but your military still wears suits of armor. Finally, you may even have just.. straight up ooga booga not!larping, legitimately fucking ignorant tribal communities.

that's basically how things are in my setting, yeah. Though there are scrappy shanty towns, it's mostly because all the industry died off long ago and everyone is living in the ruins of the dead world, so there isn't quite as much pollution as if the factories were active.

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>>67517474
>>67515469
I don't know if you're still here (and this is great stuff btw), but seeing as you mention how utterly rekt the saturated ground would be in terms of contaminants, I'm wondering how that would affect the big classic response to apocalyptic catastrophes - digging a big hole and building a bunker in it. Does that plan still hold up when the earth is toxic as hell?

>>67510490
Screws, nuts, and bolts, lots of them. Lots of washers, too.

Bumping the thread while I give it a read over.

>>67524582
>Does that plan still hold up when the earth is toxic as hell?

Soft yes.
Even though the ground is just completely saturated a Bunker would still function more or less the same because a 'good' Bunker would be air-tight, lead walls, protected from outside contaminants both from above and below. The only issue here is you wouldn't have the advantage of things like ground water, but if you've got a BUNKER, Bunker than you probably already have some sort of system going on.
Even less-than-air-tight Bunkers would still be a thing in this world despite the health-risks simply because living in a dry pit of noxious materials is better than standing out in the open and getting sand-blasted down by the radioactive rust storms that blow over everything and everyone.

This is also just something to think about, but a Bunker is usually implemented for apocalyptic situations where there's an immediate 'doomsday', but conditions are 'eventually' expected to improve: the fallout settles, society rebuilds itself, you maybe crawl out after 10 years and see what's up. This isn't going to be the case for Trash World.
Our polluted world has seen 10,000 years of pollution (and industrial/technological development) and it's going to be a shit hole for functionally forever, like, we're talking longer than 30,000 years, but maybe less time than 3 million? You, your kids, your grandkids, basically everyone 'forever' would only ever know garbage.

swollen, toxic corpses of the former peoples who overdid the whole 'food preservatives' thing.

>>67526401
Wouldn't they rust into indistinguishable blobs?

>>67526376
Jurassic Park.jpg

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>>67529601
Stainless steel would remain pristine for tens of even hundreds of thousands of years, and even non-stainless materials would leave identifiable cavities in whatever materials they were emplaced into.

Also obligatory Nokia 3310 joke

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>>67510490
What about the inhabitants would allow them to truly give zero fucks about the environment? Are they biologically resistant to all forms of poisons and diseases? Do they just have no value for their own lives? Maybe they gave a shit, but then developed some sort of isolated living space for regular people to live in while the people maintaining the compounds just did what ever the hell they wanted? Maybe no environmentalist movement ever managed to gain a sizable following because the planet was desolate and shitty to begin with?

>>67510490
One of the things I didn't see was fire. Back in the 70's we had some examples of large lakes catching on fire due to pollution, such as the great lakes. I would imagine the same thing would happen here.

Considering how many of the strata being described are flammable, it would be possible that not just surface 'forest' fires might exist, but underground fires may burn as well.

"Dry Oceans" Why? The earth is more or less a closed system, so where did the water go? I can understand some areas becoming arid. I can understand large lakes being dried out. But Oceans, if we are talking about an earth analog, I don't see how that happens. Where did the water go?

Considering this we should realize that there would be rain. In fact not having it closes out some real good stuff. Acid rain for one, but real acid rain. Weather channel talking about rain warnings.

And what of the surface from that rain? No vegetation right? Suddenly huge areas become mud oceans with mud floods a thing, all toxic. The water just runs off the land of course, straight to the ocean. Hardly any of it soaking in to the land. Just a flash flood of toxic mud, that could actually catch on fire.

>>67529950

Some context: The planet was Earth at the height of its spacefaring civilization. Earth was already undergoing an ecological collapse just as commercial spaceflight started to become viable enough for mass colonization of the solar system. As the world at the time was a grim cyberpunk future the powers that be just shrugged and went "fuck it, the planet's already doomed" and went full speed into industrialization, turning earth into the heartland of a system-wide empire. The problem was as the planetary machine grew it gradually became more unstable as more corners were cut, and eventually the roiling mass of machinery couldn't keep itself stable, resulting in a massive failing of infrastructure across the globe and the fracturing of the government into countless technofeudalist enclaves ruled by immortal cyborg families who use organics like pawns. The world is growing more and more unfit for human life so the cyborgs are playing a centuries-long game where they use the mortal nations they control to build a power base for themselves that will allow them to quickly establish themselves as a dominant power unto themselves when their baseline human slaves can no longer survive. Unless, of course, human ingenuity allows us to keep surviving for longer than our cybernetic overlords suspect us too, in which case the current system may keep shambling on for a great deal longer.

>>67530148
Also good idea

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>>67530166
>the powers that be just shrugged and went "fuck it, the planet's already doomed" and went full speed into industrialization, turning earth into the heartland of a system-wide empire. The problem was as the planetary machine grew it gradually became more unstable

gee really makes you wonder why any sane person would have shrugged and went "fuck it" hmmmm

>>67530471
The idea at the time was if they just pushed hard enough they could fully colonize the system and completely divorce themselves from the environment, rendering it unnecessary to human survival. To their credit, they managed to get about halfway before catastrophic failure, which was even more catastrophic because it happened before the extraplanetary colonies could be settled, causing their inhabitants to fight their way back to earth in a mad scramble, leaving many behind, doomed to a slow death as life support failed and food supplies dwindled. It is said that the Mars colony's end was especially horrific. It is their descendants that unknowingly carry on their will, as the hereditary cyborgs (augmented humans who pass their augmentations to their children via nanomachines) are slowly evolving to be much more self-sufficient than any biological human geneline (of which there are about half a dozen, give or take) and may even retake the solar system in a few thousand years if all goes well. But that's a big if.

>>67530563
>leaving many behind, doomed to a slow death as life support failed and food supplies dwindled. It is said that the Mars colony's end was especially horrific.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/43460515/

>>67530671
Oh yes this sounds good. If I ever ran a game set in the future where space exploration was a thing again, it'd be about the new societies of posthuman cyborgs/androids exploring the ruined colonies of the first extraplanetary human empire and examining the mysteries therein.

Unless of course something survived out there in the emptiness of space, turned unrecognizeably monstrous as the survivors grew more and more desperate in their attempts to genetically engineer a generation that could survive their failing habitats, and it decides to pay earth a visit.

If the planetary inhabitants gave no fucks about the environment, then presumably they didn't give a shit about what went on in space either. If they spewed satellites and space stations everywhere, then the orbital space may have experienced Kessler syndrome (space debris + satellite = more space debris, repeat ad nauseam) and bits of debris and derelict satellites and structures may still fall out of orbit semi-regularly many millennia in the future as orbits decay, control systems go offline and stationkeeping thrusters run dry. Primitive inhabitants might have a whole new attitude to shooting stars, being fearful of them rather than reverent. With good reason, a falling space station etc. would do some nasty damage to whatever it hit if it survived re-entry.

>>67511089
>Plants that eat radiowaves, infrared, or some other wavelength of the EM-spectrum instead of light in photosynthesis. (Radiosynthesis? Microsynthesis?)
I dont know if you know about this but there is evedence for directly radiotrophic fungi. They were found as black mold living on the Chernobyl power plant. theres some decently convincing evidence to suggest that they use melanin to produce high energy electrons from gamma radiation which can then directly reduce NADPH

>>67530923
On the other hand, lost technological scraps and high-purity metal ore.

>>67530148
>But Oceans, if we are talking about an earth analog, I don't see how that happens. Where did the water go?

It's in the air.
Let me clarify that the oceans wouldn't 'dry up', but sea levels would be lower: creating hundreds of nautical miles of reefs, atolls, fertile muddy waters rich in nutrients, and dense kelp forests. It wouldn't actually be that bad as contrary to what you might think DEEP open water doesn't house much life.
Right, the point though, "where did the water go?" under these harsh, arid, polluted conditions our trash world would most likely suffer from an 'entry level' runaway greenhouse effect: where the atmosphere is dense enough and retaining enough heat that water is being evaporated and turned around at an increased rate, but due to the presence of biotic life it isn't getting 'completely' out of hand.

This would also feed into the already intense, hazardous, contaminated weather conditions because not only would it still rain, but it would rain HARD: we're talking thunder, lightning, thick oppressive cloud coverage mixed with pollutants and toxic particulate as a dense WALL of barely potable noxious water just comes pouring down in the thousands of liters- for days.
The good news is there'd be a lot of "just add water" organisms who live for this kind of shit. They get everything they need to get done in a week or so after the rain: gorging, reproducing, flowering, fruiting, etc.. Before they go dormant once more.

>>67530983
Hmmm. That gives me an idea - there could be specialised people who track down the crash sites of orbital debris to recover any surviving archaeotech inside that hasn't been subject to the ravages of the devastated ecosystem for thousands of years and scrap them for rare, albeit scorched, metals in the construction. Perhaps a major stationfall could be an event in a game's story. Hell, there might be a whole plotline concerning stopping a massive former orbital ring habitat from crashing back to not-Earth and devastating it all over again, and you have to go on a quest to find a functioning spaceship to go up and fix the stationkeeping control systems before it falls. Ah, I'm getting carried away here.

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>>67510490
I found the setting you were looking for.

It's for weebs though.

>>67530923
>>67530983
>>67531440
and waifus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KklusyBEG0Q

>>67532192
Luckily I am a weeb so it works out. I've been meaning to read the manga.

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>>67532643
>I've been meaning to read the manga.

The manga is fucking brilliant. I'm positive you'll love it: it's the only physical manga I've ever bought and I have the complete bookset.
Miyazaki had a complete crisis of morals and identity from writing the second half- it's most likely why he stopped producing films like Princess Mononoke or Porco Rosso, rip. He really did put everything he had to offer into the series.

I'd also strongly recommend you watch 'Green Legend Ran' and/or 'Now and Then, Here and There' if you're looking for more animated material to be inspired by.

>>67532759
>'Green Legend Ran'
never heard of this one

>'Now and Then, Here and There
I saw this and it was great. A decent amount of the setting is inspired by it, along with texhnolyze.

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>>67532824
>playing a setting based on texhnolyze

>>67530726
https://www.deviantart.com/damonwakes/art/Failing-That-545397506

>>67533093
oh I'm just going to rip this straight off

Old smelters full of cooled metal waiting to be harvested.

>>67532824
>>67533087

How is Texhnolyze?
It's on my list 'to watch', but I haven't gotten around to it.

>>67534012
Amazing, great, lovely, totally soul-crushing. It'll rip your heart out and shit on it.

First episode is a powerful casual filter.

>>67533842
The World at the End of Time by Frederik Pohl had an interesting twist on this. Von neumann mining robots set lose on a planet + several million years literally dismantled it into its component ores. And an absolute shitton of robots.

>Bookworms
Created during the very end of civilization as a last-ditch effort at preservation. Start with extremophile nematodes, then cram the equivalent of a STC database into their junk DNA. While they theoretically hold the knowledge to resurrect the lost pre-apocalyptic golden age of technology, good luck extracting it with a medieval techbase.
https://qz.com/1026964/scientists-used-crispr-gene-editing-to-store-images-in-the-dna-of-living-bacteria/

>>67533093
>>67533144
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7-ko2Xgg6U

>>67532759
>>Green Legend Ran
Holy shit I remember seeing this on SciFi's old Saturday morning anime. That was like 20 years ago.
I didn't realize people still knew about it.

Taking a page from NeoScav for this.

Defoliants and other harsh chemicals used to wash away plant life have all settled into a soupy, swampy mess of degrading organic matter and vile chemical sludge. Whatever water there once was is now a murky black tar like substance that ebbs through narrow mazes of partially intact infrastructure. Nothing lives here, everything dies here. Likely any sort of inland body of water might meet this sort of fate with high chemical runoff and exposure.

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>>67535082

Let's take this in the other direction. Most people assume pollution refers to greenhouse gases and would cause a warming effect, but what about if the industry belched out huge amounts of sulphates and particulates instead? These would have had a cooling effect, and if climatic changes elsewhere had the right effect then the world could be tipped into an ice age, possibly causing society to collapse in the first place. After 10,000y, the ice age would be in full swing and glaciers bulldozing everything in their path while the rest of the world gets quite nippy. It's certainly a lesser-used scenario than the hothouse and could feature contaminated snow, preserved toxic chemicals in the ice and hampering the remains of the ecosystem's ability to scrub the nasties over time. And when the ice melts, the frozen toxic legacy is released to haunt the world once more.

>>67531040
>It wouldn't actually be that bad as contrary to what you might think DEEP open water doesn't house much life.

It would probably be worse. Most of the ocean sits off of a continental shelf. Not all of it, but a lot. That means the 'shallow' part that can even BE shallow is against the coast. Then there is a drop off, and it gets deep. If water receded we would see the opposite of what you describe. Shallow areas would become land, but the deep areas would continue to be deep - even if a few meters more shallow, that wouldn't matter. There are exceptions. But for deep Pacific or Atlantic, that is closer to how it works as opposed to a uniform grade that then bottoms out.

The idea of ready made add water organisms is good. I was going to suggest that but I felt the base setting of too much toxic sludge for life was cannon. But it would certainly work that way minus the super toxic everything is death.

Super hard rain is great. It creates a hazard that we really don't see today. Not on the scale that is being suggested. Make it toxic enough, you could even have it on occasion catch on fire. You could even, if toxic enough, have clouds catch on fire. Crazy hive world stuff could be plausible.

Another option might be to go with Ice Age. You want arid? You want receding oceans? Add an ice age.

>>67510490
Any stuff on the biological waste angle, medical waste, landfills?

>>67510753
Rad idea mate.

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That's some quality thread, some time since I seen it.

>>67541003
>Not on the scale that is being suggested. Make it toxic enough, you could even have it on occasion catch on fire. You could even, if toxic enough, have clouds catch on fire
Welp. Now I'm proper terrified.
Fortune telling using the color of the skyfire.

>>67541672
"Dad, dad! What does it mean when the skyfire turns green?"

"It means that we all have cancer now, son."

>>67541672
I could see an order dedicated to that, depending of the color of the fire it would have one substance or other, knowing whats happening.

>>67541761
>The Purple Sky Fire is upon us, that means the mole tribe will be in the warpath!

>>67541672
If tech is still there, imagine the weather forcast. "Later tonight we will see the [chemical] cloud moving in from the NE at [altitude]. Unfortunately this will bring it in to contact with a [other chemical] front. Yes John, that means remember to take your acid resistant suit tomorrow to work. And if the [chemical] updraft to the South should shift in our direction it might be a lockdown situation just like last July]"

>>67510516
If waterbears can survive it, life uh, finds a way.
Probably nothing like life as we know it though, probably some proto-plasmic sludge who can burn those metals for energy.

I'm taking a few notes from this, since I've been planning (since before this thread) a /qst/ about an alien archaeologist ~10ky in the future running an operation to piece together just what the hell happened to the (very near-future) human race. It's not going to be smoggy-hellhole-grimdark, but some of the general concepts about our legacy have been a source of inspiration.

This should go into /suptg/ because it is some good shit

>>67541577
cool art

>>67542229
>Probably nothing like life as we know it though, probably some proto-plasmic sludge who can burn those metals for energy.

Going back to the suggestion above about some sort of green slime sludge stuff growing. If you wanted to go a bit more high fantasy in your toxic future some sort of semi elemental sort of thing could work. Give them network mind that allows them to work together.

Maybe they don't form up in to humanoid D&D elemental, but they could still act together as a pack to be dangerous. The stuff slowly crawling up your leg as you go, wiping it away, but every time you look it is a little further up, now your legs are getting unusually tired, almost numb...

If you want to go hard into robots and automation running without human input, the manga BLAME has some cool stuff

>>67545476
Actually I was thinking about how it's a far future setting so this goo might've already become strange aliens with a wholly non-carbon diet.
Not exactly efficient but you now have an entire ecosystem of rustmonsters.

These creatures would probably be extremely warm bodied too.

>>67545635
>Not exactly efficient but you now have an entire ecosystem of rustmonsters.
terrifying

>>67545614
>If you want to go hard into robots and automation running without human input, the manga BLAME has some cool stuff
Oh yeah I'm big on Blame. That setting is more technologically advanced than mine though.

>>67510490

The ozone layer would be ripped to shreds, so you'd have highly cancerous, destructive radiation beaming down from the sun constantly. Meaning protective equipment, a booming, cyber-sunscreen trade where the poor die young from cancer/radiation positioning (I'm not a scientist), and the rich are the only ones who can afford the precious, precious, highly inflated price of white gold (sunscreen).

Most people will be darker, due to natural selection.

Most wildlife would die off, with the exception of insects like cockroaches.

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>>67517474

This thread is still here, so lets talk about what there is to eat.

Every plant is going to be toxic or 'immediately' inedible in some way or another, lets just address that right now. EVERYTHING is going to need to be washed thoroughly and then soaked in water for days before it becomes edible as ALL the plants (I think the term is remediation?) are going to store the various hazardous materials they're exposed to on a daily basis in their leaves and roots.
Most people forced to live 'outdoors' or otherwise exposed are going to be farming a variety of starchy root vegetable. Gone are the days long growing periods and large exposed fields: conventional agriculture is going to be largely impractical or impossible due to the dust storms, the heat, and ironically not due to the pollution in the soil or the noxious atmosphere (still a problem, but being torn apart by wind is something most plants would never adapt too).
The people with access or ingenuity to build indoor greenhouses and hydroponics would generate far better table fare as our polluted world would be FILLED with the ingredients for excellent fertilizer: collect soil, seave out the plastic, rinse and mix with water, if it's too dry add human/animal waste- you now have excellent (if radioactive) fertilizer rich in all manner of minerals & nutrients. Corn, beans, peas and grapes are big on this filthy metal-infused kind of dirt, but I think thin-rooted leafy vegetables don't mind it either? Again, wash everything.

Though, algae replace grain. Algae would be 'the' food.
Algae thrives in polluted waters, algae is a complete protein/provides ample nourishment, algae has a unique chemical agent in it that bonds with heavy metals and acts as an effective long-term treatment for poisoning, algae can also be used to make -safe- cooking oil (which would be rare) as well as biofuel for machines. Roasted, dried, or raw, algae also retains most of it's nutrients no matter what you do with it.

>>67549523
>Though, algae replace grain. Algae would be 'the' food.
>Algae thrives in polluted waters, algae is a complete protein/provides ample nourishment, algae has a unique chemical agent in it that bonds with heavy metals and acts as an effective long-term treatment for poisoning, algae can also be used to make -safe- cooking oil (which would be rare) as well as biofuel for machines. Roasted, dried, or raw, algae also retains most of it's nutrients no matter what you do with it.

this is good, thanks

I guess we'll find out

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>>67549523

Algae would also be an excellent source of animal feed and a decent segway into what most, like, 80% of people would actually be eating: meat. Agriculture is impractical, but meat would be the treat to eat in trash world.
Rats, lizards, shrews, voles, moles, (admittingly) sickly deer, goats & small pigs, and a rich persistent supply of ever-present insects would all still be stubbornly persisting and therefor eatable. The great benefit of meat in this hazardous world is that it converts the paltry, inedible, hazardous, and often toxic plant life into more nutritious and far more palatable flesh. The animals that remain are going to adapt, evolve, and overcome the obstacles of this polluted world far faster than humans will: short life spans, high birth rates, and unlike plants they'll evolve ways to diffuse or 'remove' the hazardous contaminants instead of diffusing or moving them around in their bodies.... That and milk. From goats. Mostly.
Rat & worm farms, goat herds, and people heading out with a shovel to turn over rocks or dig out the burrows of some tasty gopher would be the 'norm'.

Seafood and even fish is still going to be on the menu as well.
Shellfish (including Crustaceans) would be abundant and a reliable source of food, but would have to washed and rinsed thoroughly as they'd be loaded with pollutants that don't bother 'them', but would make a human terribly sick. Saltwater fish would be fair better than land animals, but worse than shellfish. Overall some things wouldn't change and you'd still see large populations congregating in maritime communities to fish the plastic-choked waters of this garbage world.
There'd even be a scant few freshwater fish actively -thriving- because they were willing to put up with toxic environments in the first place just to survive and now their unique niche biome is EVERYWHERE. Provided people figured out a safe way to fish flammable waters, you could sup on some decent pan-sized fish.

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>>67544631
It's from a japanese artist, quite cool.

What would the terrain be like? Would there be windy flatlands? I ask because I'm dying for an excuse to run a campaign involving land-sailing.

>>67552434
I feel like there could be

>>67552434
>What would the terrain be like? Would there be windy flatlands? I ask because I'm dying for an excuse to run a campaign involving land-sailing.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't justify a few 'sand seas' here and there for you to do some land-sailing if that's what you want to do, Anon.
Point of interest: you don't even have to settle for 'sand' coloured sand as all the sand-blasted rust storms would create all manner of colourful sand banks and dunes from the various heavy metals and polluted materials it's been shaving down into fine granulate. Green, Red, Black, maybe even Blue or White- whatever you think looks cool.

Your land-sailors would have to wear cool face masks though.
Don't breath any of this shit in.

Read Blame! or anything by that author.

Plastics would mostly have degraded by 10k years. It lasting forever is a meme.

>>67552980
There was a beach in I think it was hawai than was around a glass industry, and the "sand" was rounded glass of all colors, quite beautiful.

>>67554062
https://www.elitedaily.com/p/7-sea-glass-beaches-in-the-us-that-are-totally-hidden-gems-8285818

>>67554097
nice

>>67554097
>>67555770
Now imagine the caddisflies living there.

>>67542229
>giant unkillable waterbears roam the polluted wastes

Can I steal everything from this thread?

>>67556074
It's why it's here.

>>67532192
It's very tolerable for non-weebs (tested on my anime-hating friend).

>>67533087
>texhnolyze
NowThisIsANameIHaventHeardInALongTime.jpg

>>67532192
The best Ghibli film easily, not really saying much as most of them are massively overrated imo

>>67556065
>If you piss them off enough they'll follow you up on land too
Basically a more robust version of the hippo

>>67532759
Can you tell us more about your opinion on why Miyazaki stopped producing masterpieces such as Mononoke? I want to know more, can you please elaborate? I love that movie.

>>67556893
The Wind Rises was good

>>67543379
done

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>>67510490
Great thread, tg, thanks for reminding me why I come here.

On a separate note, what sort of creatures would be wandering this wreck of a planet besides the surviving fauna, and how deep into "fantasy" is this setting going? No magic, I imagine, but what level of soft science is acceptable? >>67545476 brought up pollution elemental things, what sort of mutant wildlife would be around? Maybe "undead" being puppeted around by barely functioning augments and equipment, malfunctioning to the point of rampancy? Or badly malfunctioning medical nanobots, like from the "are you my mummy?" Dr. Who episode. Except they have a much more degraded sense of what a person is supposed to look like, or maybe some unfortunate creature is afflicted by two sets of nanoswarms with different interpretations of their degraded code, resulting in a horrid mess of agony that is in constant warp, but prevented from dying by the swarms.

Alternatively, what sort of hostile life could have evolved in place of most of Earth's large predators to fill the niche, if any?

>>67511245
Water would be useful for a lot of industrial processes.

>>67558893
OP here, people are welcome to do what they like, but this is the stuff that's a problem in my setting.

>Venusian war robots brought in during the invasion that eat both flesh and metal to survive
>Elephant-sized cybernetic mecha that have grown feral and hunt on their own
>Wild boars and bears in the rare enclaves where they can live
>Giant tardigrades and arthropods in the water
>genetically engineered housecats the size of tigers in preserved artificial gardens
>rats the size of large dogs that swarm in packs
>nanomachine-powered "undead" controlled by a nanotechnist
>Feral cyborg bioweapons
>malfunctioning terran war robots
>massive predatory jellyfish

Really though, the biggest problem is other people and intelligent cyborgs. Whereas normal organics struggle to survive, cyborgs (which in this setting are not augmented people but seamless combinations of flesh and tech) can take a stroll in the wilderness wearing just casual clothing and have a pretty good chance of coming out on top. They break all the rules people follow to survive and generally have the same attitude towards baselines as the more capricious Olympian gods had towards their subjects (though the power gap isn't nearly as wide). Lots of communities view them as wandering natural disasters than actual people, a view which isn't helped by the most prolific of the breed, an ancient breed of now fully-synthetic technobarbarians, follow a philosophy of what they call enlightened tribalism, where they deliberately lead primitive, savage lifestyles in the hopes of training themselves to become the ultimate warriors and survivalists. They've modded themselves so that meat tastes better when filled with all those stress hormones that humans find unpalatable, to incentivize eating what you kill and killing things that can put up a fight.

>>67558893
>what sort of hostile life could have evolved in place of most of Earth's large predators to fill the niche, if any?
Humans. There's good eating on a hippo-sized tardigrade.

>>67559103
>They've modded themselves so that meat tastes better when filled with all those stress hormones that humans find unpalatable, to incentivize eating what you kill and killing things that can put up a fight.
that's terrifying

>>67559103
>an ancient breed of now fully-synthetic technobarbarians, follow a philosophy of what they call enlightened tribalism, where they deliberately lead primitive, savage lifestyles in the hopes of training themselves to become the ultimate warriors and survivalists. They've modded themselves so that meat tastes better when filled with all those stress hormones that humans find unpalatable, to incentivize eating what you kill and killing things that can put up a fight.
So the Nietzscheans from Andromeda?

>>67565700
Not quite. While they share some similarities there are a few key differences. One of the biggest would probably be the differing psychology. As far as I can tell, Nietzscheans are for the most part psychologically human and more culturally indoctrinated. The cyborgs are markedly different from human baseline psychology and have evolved a much more predatory mindset. They share instinctual behaviors with organic predators such as a desire to chase down and maul anything that runs away, territoriality and violence, situational cannibalism, and general viciousness, giving the impression of an organism that evolved out of purely predatory stock rather than mankind's actual ancestors. As sapients, these instincts can be suppressed, but they do exist. In addition, while Nietzscheans are orderly and regimented, the technobarbarians are, well, barbaric. They revel in their savagery and do things most would find wholly unnecessary, like decorating their armor in the bones and skin of their defeated foes and anointing their guns and tanks with their blood, and take great pleasure in intimidating the civilized folk they consider to be weak (but secretly are plagued by weakness themselves, unable to fully commit to viciousness. All the corpses on their tanks were killed humanely beforehand, and the human flesh they devour was harvested from slain enemies rather than the result of hunting humans for sport. They're basically LARPing in order to strengthen their species for when the world goes further down the shitter.) The end goal of the species as a whole is a sort of inverted nirvana, where each entity is totally self-reliant and divorced from the system of nature, beholden to no one.

Emergency bump

So what does trade and industry look like in this world? I feel like the abundance of easily refined raw material in ancient scrapheaps makes a lot of things way easier

>>67569735
read Anathem by Neal Stephenson for some ideas on junk mining

>>67556065
Waterbears have strong survival traits for dealing with extreme conditions like heat, cold, lack of water or oxygen etc. but are very easily killable from something like being shot or stabbed

>>67569900
Thanks for the tip anon, but unfortunately I can't find much online. Care to provide some highlights to keep the thread going?

Would usable fuel be easy to come by?

>>67572652
Well, that sort of depends on what level of fuel using tech you can maintain. The old standbys of wind and water are always there, even if they're now toxic. Having a working combustion or steam engine would require more fuel than most human settlements could provide, unless they were fortunate enough to be sitting on a fuel depot that hasn't yet run dry, and then they have to have the parts and know-how to keep them up and running.

Batteries, especially rechargeable ones, would be worth their weight in gold. Some of those and a working turbine and genetator would be the best possible outcome. Failing that, what with our established lack of wood, burning things like fat, grease and shit would be the poorman's only real option.

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>>67510935

>>67573275


>>67572652
https://www.thelocal.de/20190705/trash-to-cash-how-an-east-germany-company-is-turning-plastic-into-fuel

Plamining is as much an occupation as a way of life.

>>67520250
>caddisflies with plastic "shells"
Imagine them covered in plastic bottlecaps

>>67573966
Or broken glass spikes.

>>67573275
Batteries would have become useless within decades, much less millennia, and any fuel storage would have long since leaked away, evaporated or solidified. Hydrocarbon mixtures like petroleum and diesel are unstable, and will separate out and chemically degrade into uselessness within a few years. Fuel generators contain enough delicate components and polymers that after 10ky they would be completely inoperable, even if preserved perfectly.

More robust generators like certain dynamos and turbines that are big, solid metal things with no fragile parts or short-lived materials might still work, but they would need to be stored very carefully to not corrode away quite quickly. Still, underground complexes in the spirit of Cheyenne Mountain that have sealed, underground generating plants might be able to be restored to working order with some component replacements.

>>67575266
Very true for the modern world, but since OP's world seems to have gotten a couple of centuries further along than us, I was imagining material tech having progressed on the degradation front. There certainly seems to be enough war robots wandering around.

Could be an idea for a settlement. Their generator, called The Choir, is a mangled hodgepodge of partial robots and androids, their powercores and dynomos wired together and keeping the lights on and the air filters running. Though their power systems have been slaved to the facility's old overseer system, now called the Choirmaster, many still have cognitive function, and are displeased about this.

Also
>a few foolhardy souls have taken to herding giant waterbears. They are slow and dumb, but nearly impossible to kill and can weather even this most vicious rad storms. This comes in handy right up until slaughtering day comes.

>>67576319
>but since OP's world seems to have gotten a couple of centuries further along than us, I was imagining material tech having progressed on the degradation front. There certainly seems to be enough war robots wandering around.

War robots do exist but the majority of "wandering technological horrors" are actually cyborgs. Thanks to nanomachines, cybernetic organisms can pass on their augmentations as well as their DNA, allowing things like steel-armored hounds and predatory mecha to reproduce and thrive like any animal.

>>67510490
A hell of a lot of animals and plants that have adapted to this hellish environment. And so their defenses would mirror this environment.

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>>67510753
Nice one anon

>>67574255
>used needles