History WebOriginal / Sagan4

* SciFiWritersHave/NoSenseOfTime: Especially prevalent in Alpha, where plate tectonics didn't match the actual timescale and new kingdoms of animals would evolve from scratch in just a few million years. The latter is also seen in Beta, but was quickly snuffed out by the addition of a specific rule against doing so.
** In both Alpha and Beta, it can take tens of millions of years for a lineage to spread across an entire continent due to the timescale system being disconnected from the per-species habitat rules. However, this is somewhat mitigated in Beta with the addition of wildcard species, which can be in as many habitats as can be justified.
** Not all lacking senses of time are equal, however. In Alpha, the rules about size increases were so restrictive that plants would take too long to grow large and only reach the size of large shrubs before the next extinction event, sometimes as much as 100 million years later, would kill them off--resulting in there never being any realistically large flora. In Beta, this is addressed and averted with new rules allowing flora to grow large much faster than fauna, and when Alpha was revived these rules were added there as well.

Sagan 4 is a collaborative SpeculativeBiology WorldBuilding project originally created by Hydromancerx in 2006, which was rebooted in August 2019. In both the original (Alpha) and the reboot (Beta), all life on the planet is "evolved" by its contributing artists from a single cell. It was originally hosted on its own website, but lacking funds led to the website being taken down in 2017 and the project being transferred to the [[https://specevo.jcink.net/index.php?showforum=19 Speculative Evolution Forum]]. Although a backup was made, the data was presumed corrupted and apparently unrecoverable; after 2 years of failed attempts to recover or repair the lost data, some members decided to continue with a reboot, [[ResetButton reverting to the state it was in just 7 days after it began]]. Not long afterwards, however, all data for the original version was recovered, and members wanted to continue both, so there are 2 timelines now.

* PandaingToTheAudience: The Planda, which, as its name suggests, was just a panda.

* PteroSoarer: The Skysnappers are sometimes treated as pterosaur expies, which better resemble inaccurate movie monster pterosaurs than actual pterosaurs.

* EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs: Alpha has a myriad of dinosaur-like animals from unrelated lineages--some of which, such as the Saucebacks, even evolved feathers. Other examples include the Tasertongues, which resemble pachycephalosaurus, and Glowtails, which resembled outdated interpretations of raptors, ankylosaurs, sauropods, and even one looking like a somewhat-accurate take on an Allosaurus.

* YouDirtyRat: Heavily averted with the Norats, which were depicted as being just like actual rats, except evolving from [[{{Planimal}} planimals]] [[RecycledInSpace from space]].

* EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs: Alpha has a myriad of dinosaur-like animals from unrelated lineages--some of which, such as the Saucebacks, even evolved feathers. Other examples include the Tasertongues, which resembled pachycephalosaurus, and Glowtails, which resembled outdated interpretations of raptors, ankylosaurs, sauropods, and even one looking like a somewhat-accurate take on an Allosaurus.

* LivingGasbag: Prior to the sky sickness plague wiping out the sky ecosystem, Alpha's skies were filled with plants and animals that floated with hydrogen sacs.

* RubberForeheadAliens: Not present in any of the sapient races, but in many of the animals. Most infamous are the shrews and the nodents, which respectively look like mammals with 6 eyes and [[{{Planimal}} rodents made of plant material]]. Members of the kingdom Carpozoa make up the majority of examples, also including clones of many different types of reptile and amphibian with extra eyes as their only "alien" trait.

* EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs: Alpha has a myriad of dinosaur-like animals from unrelated lineages--some of which, such as the Saucebacks, even evolved feathers. Other examples include the Tasertongues, which resembled pachycephalosaurus.

** In Alpha, a missing link was eventually created between the Binucleusdetritivorus Worm and the Binucleusphotoedo dodecaedrum, as they were both the result of symbiosis of the same two microbial ancestors. This missing link is absent in Beta, as information on it was lost with the original website.

* NotSoExtinct: 8 species native to Coolsteph Island were marked as extinct at the beginning of Week 26 due to the island sinking. However, later on during the week surviving populations were found on the nearby Ramul Island.

* AmazingTechnicolorWildlife: Many species are of vivid, "unnatural" colors such as purple, pink, blue, and red. This is more prevalent in Alpha, but present in Beta as well. Possibly justified, as the flora are also quite colorful and being just as colorful can serve as camouflage.

!!Sagan 4 demonstrates the following tropes:
* AlienAnimals: A common trope on Sagan 4 Alpha, where some species are inexplicably almost identical to common Earth animals.
* AllFlyersAreBirds: In Alpha, both the Skysnappers and the Flying Plents, despite not being much like birds originally, both inexplicably evolved to become increasingly bird-like.
* AlternateTimeline: Beta is an alternate timeline in which the results of the first extinction event were different. In Alpha, the founding members each got to choose a species they wanted to spare; in Beta, although more species actually survived the event (15 instead of only 10), most of the additional survivors were microbes and, more notably, the ancestors of the iconic purple flora and plents of Alpha were among the casualties this time around. Although purple plants evolved again, it wasn't until millions of years later, by which point evolution had already taken an unrecognizable turn compared to Alpha.

* ArmlessBiped: Several examples in Alpha, seen in some species of "neosiluro" in Beta. A handful of them in Alpha actually walked with their arms and instead lost their legs.
** Tasertongues and their closest relatives are bipedal and lack arms--instead manipulating objects with their long prehensile tongues.
* ArtisticLicenseBiology: Several examples in Alpha, a few in Beta as well.
** The [[https://sagan4alpha.miraheze.org/wiki/Orbit_Voltflora Orbit Voltflora]] from Alpha, which is a 2-km long plant made of iron which is powered by lightning, lives in volcanoes, and uses biological rocket fuel to fire its seeds into orbit to reproduce.
** Radiodurans Maximae, a microbe from Alpha which somehow performs nuclear fusion.
** "Fatty lumps", a recurring integumentary feature in Alpha for coping with the cold in place of fur which would actually have the exact opposite effect in real life.
** Animals evolved from cells at least 7 times in Alpha, and at least 4 times in Beta. For reference, on Earth animals only evolved from cells once.
** Similarly, vertebrates also evolved several times across multiple kingdoms in Alpha, including in sessile plants. Multiple arthropod-like lineages even lost their exoskeletons to replace them with backbones.
** The Devorator from Beta is described as needing to swim constantly to survive, yet it has lumpy spiky armor, a stiff body, and a C-shaped tail fin which together would make it nearly incapable of swimming at all. When this error was noticed by other contributors later, it was quickly replaced with far more streamlined descendants.
* BizarreSexualDimorphism: The Prickle Gill of Beta, which has 49 genders--21 of which are brightly colored and venomous.
* BizarreAlienLimbs
** In Alpha, many of the terrestrial carpozoan species are tripods or pentapeds. One lineage modified its fingers into five pairs of limbs.
** In Beta, Lagnodactyls have four limbs--left and right in a pair, a single front limb, and a single hind limb. Despite usually resembling a tail, the single hind limb also contains the anus is further called an "anal arm", and the digits at the end are called "anal fingers".
*** The "vertebrate" lagnodactyls further have multiple "backbones" inside their limbs and digits in place of conventional limb bones.
* BizarreAlienLocomotion: A number of species in Alpha were bipeds which walked with their forelimbs. In Beta, a handful of species such as the Goblati and the Hedgestar are "quadrupeds" which have left and right legs and a single front and single hind leg.
* BizarreAlienSexes: The Twilight Gill in Beta has a grand total of 77 mating types.
* CallARabbitASmeerp: A common theme in Alpha, and generally obvious from name alone ("planda" and "nodent" being a few examples). Subverted by the Shrews, which were called exactly what they are. There is a single case in Beta, the "cish" -- which, as their name suggests, are just fish.
* CrystalLandscape: The crystal flora commonly resemble crystals, as their name would suggest, though they usually coexist with other flora. Crystal-only landscapes were occasionally seen in Alpha, but became far more common early on in Beta as a result of all plants except for the crystal flora going extinct.
* DependingOnTheWriter: Early on, Alpha had a lot of consistency issues caused by the large number of creators involved and the fact that they only had a single day to finish each species. As a result, strange things happened such as Plents seemingly gaining and losing full-body skeletons depending on who made a particular species, and in some cases the intention of one creator was completely ignored--for example, Segmentocauda primus was intended to be a unique animal-like organism made up of a small number of large specialized cells, but when Yokto took over the lineage in week 2, he interpreted it as a normal arthropod-like organism, and so the unique cellular nature was ignored and permanently lost.

* EverythingsBetterWithDinosaurs: Alpha had a myriad of dinosaur-like animals from unrelated lineages--some of which, such as the Saucebacks, even evolved feathers. Other examples include the Tasertongues, which resembled pachycephalosaurus.
* ExposedExtraterrestrials: Out of the 3 sapient species to evolve in Alpha, not a single one wore clothes.

* FlyingSeafoodSpecial: In Alpha, a branch of flying plents became flying whales, known as Plentwhales, which were also somehow capable of filter-feeding in the sky.
* GoalOrientedEvolution: Present early on in Alpha, but fairly rare in Beta.
** In Alpha, nearly everything living on land inexplicably evolved mammalian ears under the justification that they were the most "advanced".
** Also in Alpha, the shrews were a very explicit attempt to evolve mammals, and the unrelated Nodents were an explicit attempt to evolve rodents specifically.
** In Beta, Cish may have also been an example of this, as their evolution directly mirrored that of Earth vertebrates--even including an understandably rejected, non-canon submission which evolved directly from a fish-like creature into a salamander. This is hinted at further by descriptions of early species, such as the Algae Cish, which state that their "future looks very bright indeed"--which never came to be, as [[{{Irony}} that particular species went extinct without leaving any descendants]].
* HeadButtingPachy: While not technically real pachycephalosaurs, the Tasertongues of Alpha are clear pachycephalosaur expies and fall under this trope.

* MechanicalLifeforms: The iron fauna of Alpha often resembled robots.
* MorePredatorsThanPrey: A prevalent issue in Alpha, to the point that there was even an extinction event specifically to wipe out an excessive number of large predators in an environment with comparatively few herbivores.
* MultipleTailedBeast: The two-tailed saucebacks of Alpha.

* PandaingToTheAudience: The Planda of Alpha, which, as its name suggests, was just a panda.
* {{Panspermia}}: Life first arrived on the planet because it was seeded there by the Nauceans (another creature concept by Hydromancerx, made in anticipation of ''{{VideoGame/Spore}}''). In Alpha, panspermia occurred again later as microbes hitched a ride on the seeds of the orbit voltflora and were shot directly to Mason, Sagan 4's moon.

* PteroSoarer: The Skysnappers of Alpha are sometimes treated as pterosaur expies, which better resemble inaccurate movie monster pterosaurs than actual pterosaurs.
* ResetButton: The reboot literally reverted the project to an earlier state.

* RubberForeheadAliens: Not present in any of the sapient races, but in many of the animals in Alpha. Most infamous are the shrews and the nodents, which respectively look like mammals with 6 eyes and [[{{Planimal}} rodents made of plant material]]. Members of the kingdom Carpozoa make up the majority of examples, also including clones of many different types of reptile and amphibian with extra eyes as their only "alien" trait.
* SolarFlareDisaster: The first mass extinction event of the project, which is also the point of divergence between Alpha and Beta, was caused by a solar flare.

* ThePlague: In Alpha, it was not uncommon for there to be extinction events targeting specific species or lineages with a plague. This was generally done to eliminate implausible or extremely earth-like species (Shrew Plague, Nodent Plague, Sky Sickness), though one, the Sauceback Plague, was done to solve the problem of there being MorePredatorsThanPrey. The first extinction event of Beta was also a plague, which similarly wiped out extremely earth-like species--the cish.

* UseYourHead: In Alpha, many of the Gulpers, especially dome-headed Gulpers such as the Tasertongues, battle one another through headbutting.

* MorePopularSpinoff: Sagan 4 Beta is significantly more active than Sagan 4 Alpha, despite Alpha's nearly 15 year history prior to Beta coming into existence. Despite efforts to advertise Alpha on Beta, some of Beta's contributors continue to be unaware of Alpha's existence when they join.