If you had a garden in a virtual world, how do you imagine you could do stuff in your garden, that you could then use to influence a living virtual world outside your garden?

@zatnosk to be hyper-synthetic: perhaps 1.insects (selectively inserted as part of the ecosystem) & 2. energy production potential? :)

@lichen hmm. Insects is an interesting avenue. I'm thinking pollinators and dirt-improvers (if that's a word) for the garden.

Can you elaborate on the energy production thing? I'm not sure I get where you're going with it.

@zatnosk yeah pollination definitely, and compost maybe?

for the energy I was half-jokingly speculating about harvesting electricity from plants, something like this but you know, massively efficient: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130509104358.htm

@lichen @zatnosk I'm currently working on a really powerful energy option via solar-cracked hydrogen from seawater, which produces (as a side effect) usable amounts of mineral salt for use in the thermal transfer subsection of the systems design to link up with it.

It's highly modular, and adjusts to the needs of whatever is pulling power, so if the fuel cell enough, the supercapacitors get charged, and then the batteries, otherwise the hydrogen burner kicks in.

@lichen @zatnosk it's the physical portion of a game that will allow people to cultivate intangible skills and earn in-game currency for completing quests associated with releasing the tech I'm building as open source.

So, it's all...linked together, there's a game in late alpha dev and an auth backend shared by the online minigames, and we've got Square integration almost ready to go, so it's got IRL benefits for people playing.