YMMV / I Was a Teenage Exocolonist

• Adorkable: Nomi-Nomi is the most exuberant among Sol's peers. They're almost always happy to see Sol and even flap their arms to greet them, they gush about their fandoms without stopping for breath, and they certainly enjoy Vertumnalia's pop culture trivia contests. Nomi also squees as they ship their avatar with Sol's in Legends of Avamar and gets adorably flustered if Sol dates them in real life.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The game is quite open about the sexuality, gender, and neurodivergence of its characters, but that doesn't stop fans form speculating. Popular ones include Tang, Marz, and Rex being aromantic, Nomi having ADHD, and Vace, Tang, and Dys all suffering from PTSD.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: During the wormhole alarm, Sol can comfort the other children by playing a game of "Rambutan", where they try to name as many fruits as they can. Cal claims that corn is a fruit, prompting a huge argument between them, when in fact, he's right.
• Fan Nickname: Since Geranium is one of the few colonists who never goes by a nickname, he's usually called "Ger" in fan works.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Vintage Focus Device (obtainable with the second Engineering perk) is a quick way of turning off the card games' difficulty. Every blue card is wild when it's equipped, allowing for easy five-of-a-kind flushes that will net you a super-goal.
  • Maxing out Perception before Sol's thirteenth birthday, upon which they are old enough to go to areas other than the immediate outskirts of the colony. The final Perception perk allows Sol to run right through the minor events that sometimes seem to exist only as stamina-draining roadblocks and straight to the major ones (called "Boss Events"). This makes storylines that require Sol to find something specific while exploring areas much larger than the colony outskirts much easier to complete.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The reason "Solanaceae" is the first name the game offers for Sol. Solanaceae are a plant family that includes all crop-based nicknames Geranium calls them.
  • Some of the exchanges that can be had with Tangent, especially those that are only available to players who have invested in academic knowledge, are about little-known concerns a relatively small population settling on an entirely new planet would have.
  • Rex, who has dog ears as his augment, has heterochromia, which is much more frequent in dogs than in humans.
• Good Bad Bugs: Until the November 15, 2022 patch update fixed them, Status Effects that reduced skill gains such as Mourning and Injured did not reduce them as expected, meaning that your skill gains weren't negatively affected, as if you didn't have them. Despite that, the Starving status still had this bug until the March 16, 2023 patch update fixed it.
• Moe: Sol and their Strato peers look adorable as kids, but Tammy takes the cake (and not just because she likes it). She's such a cute child who looks like a princess and is equally endearing to Sol, Cal and the babies at the Creche, and her kindness only grows with her through the years. This makes her unavoidable death early on in the first run more tragic, as Cal mourns her loss for a long time.
• Narm:
  • Professor Hal's full name is "Halitosis", meaning "bad breath", and if he dies, his name makes Eudicot's eulogy for him unintentionally funny since she delivers it somberly and no one in the audience snickers at his name.
  • Noctilucent looks appropriately terrifying for an alien hell-bent on eradicating humanity, but their sonic emitter, which resembles a flower gun, in their image looks a bit too silly to be taken seriously.
• Player Punch:
  • First-time players who make Tammy, the sweetest and kindest one among their peers, their childhood best friend and bond with her for the first few months may get caught-off guard when she suddenly gets electrocuted when she turns off the creche's holoprojector while the other kids get candy. If Sol decides to get cotton candy, too, they get overrun by grief because it reminds them of Tammy's pink hair, and they and their friends get angry over how pointless and unfair her death is. Thankfully, she can be saved in subsequent runs thanks to Sol's Past-Life Memories.
  • Players who take the time to build up Sol's Relationship Values with Anemone and flirt with her — with Anemone reciprocating their feelings — can get blindsided by her hooking up with Vace on Sol's 17th birthday, with one of the scenes revealing their relationship coming in the form of Sol catching them having sex in public when Anemone should have been helping Sol on guard duty. It gets worse due to Vace's toxic, abusive attitude towards Anemone, which she puts up with due to her trauma over her brother's death. While she ultimately comes to her senses and breaks up with Vace, her relationship with Sol can be destroyed as well.
• Realism-Induced Horror:
  • Vace is somehow more terrifying than the alien creatures he fights on patrol, even the Faceless. He's an arrogant alpha male who intimidates and manipulates more vulnerable people such as Anemone into submission, and their relationship becomes worse when he starts physically abusing her. Rex, an innocent, laid-back man, is afraid of him and his troop because Vace broke Rex's arm in a hazing session as children, and Rex believes that they're only putting up with his toxic attitude and stroking his ego in his militaristic endeavors. Things then come to a head when Vace publicly beats up Rex for becoming "too soft", and Sol can further enable Vace's bullying by cheering for him and letting him get away with it. It's no wonder that many people are reluctant to romance Vace, let alone complete his character arc and add him on the title screen.
  • While Lum is often portrayed as an incompetent nitwit, he is still chilling in how quickly he takes over the colony and militarizes it, including giving power to people like Vace, trying to forcibly move people from important areas like food production to guard duty, and ordering Tang and Instance to create a virus that will wipe out all native life with no consideration for the long-term consequences. Then there's the fact the entire bridge crew of the Helios died, conveniently making him the de-facto leader of the ship by the time they land. He shows what happens when someone who is utterly incompetent or has bad intentions can make a situation worse if left unchecked.
• That One Achievement: Among the achievements for collecting the romanceable characters on the title screen, the one for Vace has the lowest percentage of players who have it. Why? Because he arrives during Early Pollen of Year 6, giving you less the half the time to max out his friendship meter, and his only favorite gifts are cake and Strange Devices, the latter which can only be found in the Western Wresting Ridge. Also, Defense Training, Guard Duty, and Hunting in the Swamps are the only regular ways to bond with him, and even then, the last one is only unlocked by passing a Combat or Animals skill check at Expeditions. Not helping matters is that bonding with Vace by doing any of these jobs only increases his friendship by 1 point, and choices that increase it by 2 are often the cruel options, which might turn people off if they're trying for a "heroic" run. And finally, Sol must call Vace out for his abusive attitude and convince him to get therapy in order to get his final card upgrade, the very thing that unlocks the achievement.
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion:
  • Dys is officially pronounced "diss" for "Dysthymia", otherwise, the "Who, Dys?" joke when Tang first asks you about him wouldn't work. However, some players pronounce his name as "dice" or "deez".
  • Tang is officially pronounced like the brand of orange juice, but some players pronounce it like the abbreviation of her full name, Tangent — with a soft "G" instead of a hard one.

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