Trivia / Sagan 4

• Official Fan-Submitted Content: Nearly all of Sagan 4's content is submitted by fans to be reviewed before being added to canon, rather than being created only by an "official" crew. Although all contributors are considered a part of the "Sagan 4 team", this only signifies that a given person has contributed to canon at least once, and there is actually no restriction on who can participate nor is there any obligation for any member to continue submitting content.
• Promoted Fanboy: Apart from the original 5 founding members, all higher-up Sagan 4 staff members responsible for maps, extinction events, and other features not controlled by Official Fan-Submitted Content were once just fans themselves.
• Science Marches On: Seen occasionally in Alpha, and surprisingly less often than one might expect from a project with so many young contributors. Beta is so new that there are no examples from it yet, but they will inevitably happen eventually.
  • Though later retconned to have bones, Plents originally walked on thick muscular tentacles. Since then, such limbs working on land has been questioned and proven to not be possible.
  • The gamma-ray burst which happened at the end of Generation 100. Although a gamma-ray burst could certainly be bad news, research since then has indicated that a planet with a decent atmosphere and magnetic field would not, in fact, be instantly irradiated to oblivion by a short burst.
  • The locomotion transition rules stated that a species must glide before it can evolve flight. Since then, scientific study into the origins of flight have suggested that flight does not come from gliding—it comes from parachuting. To reflect this, in the reboot the rule has been revised to require parachuting instead.
• Series Hiatus: In 2017, Sagan 4 Alpha, then only known as Sagan 4, went on an unplanned hiatus due to the loss of the wiki and the apparent corruption of its most recent backup. This hiatus lasted until early 2020, when all the data was miraculously recovered after all hope had been lost, but Sagan 4 Alpha's popularity has not recovered and even its creator has seemingly abandoned it.
• Teasing Creator: Sometimes, especially on Sagan 4 Beta, moderators will mess with contributors using intentionally vague details about new maps and upcoming mass extinction events. This especially became prominent with Sagan 4 Beta's upcoming mass extinction event taking place between Weeks 3 and 4, which was advertised as coming in two parts sharing a theme—one which has happened on Earth, and one that has never even been theorized before. Hints included the fates of specific species, screenshots of discussions between moderators about the event with spoilers blacked out, and an acronym, EBAD, which stands for an unrevealed phrase summarizing the event. The half which had happened on Earth was eventually revealed to be an oxygen crash, while the other half will remain a mystery until submissions close for Week 3.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Due to its collaborative nature, Sagan 4's contributors often have no idea what will happen in the future and they can even get in the way of one another's plans and ideas. Although extinction events and plate tectonics are planned ahead by the moderators, these can sometimes be influenced and even changed in unpredictable ways by the actions of contributors as well, though this is much rarer.
  • Among extinction events, the death of Mason in particular, despite being planned from the start, actually could have been prevented if the right organisms had been submitted, which would have forced Hydromancerx to continue updating the map and ecosystem for the moon.