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Commission for @disgustedorite

[sagan-4]

Sagan 4 is not dead, Sagan 4 is not lost media, and Sagan 4 was never "rebooted".

Sagan 4, with no changes from how it was before 2017 apart from hundreds of new species being added in more recent generations, is right here and people are making new species for it all the time. And yet, these myths have apparently prevailed throughout the speculative evolution community. I'll go over my understanding of where these myths came from, and why they are only myths.

The myth that Sagan 4 is dead

This likely stems from the fears of the Sagan 4 community during The Limbo, a period spanning about 2.5 years from 2017 to late 2019. During this time, Sagan 4 did not have a website and its community was in shambles due to the web host they'd been using shutting down and the only person who knew how to set up a new website leaving the project.

Some have said that Sagan 4 was at least temporarily "dead" during that time, but it's more accurate (and honestly nicer) to say that it was on hiatus while the website situation was being figured out. This was resolved at the beginning of 2020 just in time for the pandemic to give everyone a shitton of free time, allowing it to resume pretty much at full swing.

This myth likely persists in part because we lost sagan4.com. It's currently being held by some company that snaps up brand names to keep them from being taken by randos, and we don't have the money to buy it from them yet. Also, don't visit it because it's being used for ad space and usually redirects to random shady websites for some reason.

The myth that Sagan 4 is lost media

It's literally right here. Sagan 4 was briefly considered lost media during the limbo due to a miscommunication and misplacement of wiki data, which was part of what caused it to take so long for the website situation to be figured out. If it can be said that it was lost media at any point, then today, it is found media.

However, the contents of the original Sagan 4 forum is considered lost media (well, technically, as some threads are intact on the Wayback Machine and Common Crawl, it's officially classified as partially found). The forum contained no canon project content, though it did contain numerous discussions, a whole thread of fanart, and the now-lost losing entries into the sapient contest.

This myth probably persists in part because we lost sagan4.com (see above).

The myth that Sagan 4 was "rebooted"

This myth is perhaps the most understandable of the three, as this was real misleading phrasing used by a handful of Sagan 4 members.

There are two events that are sometimes described as "reboots" when they are not:

The creation of Sagan 4 Beta, a fan project with an early point of divergence that later got made official

The transition into week 27

Sagan 4 Beta is not a reboot because it was always a fan project, at least before it was made official. The original Sagan 4 returned within a few months, but during that time some of Beta's staff members, misinformed about the project's status and their rights over the property (which were none), touted it as an "official reboot". It wasn't, and never was.

The beginning of Week 27, sometimes called a "soft reboot", was not a reboot. I have no idea why Mnidjm called it that; all we did was...make the map not suck anymore by getting a new map artist and adding more climate zones, and make a few changes to the rules (mostly affecting the system for submitting whole genera). We did make some internal changes to stuff like plate tectonics and the space surrounding the solar system, but this wasn't really changing anything so much as filling holes in canon. This also isn't the first time we've even done any of these things including at once (weeks 2, 5, and 20 come to mind), it's really not a big deal.

This myth likely persists because of old threads and lingering use of misleading terminology.

I hope this post clears things up.

[sagan-4]

A million years or so before their descendants would live together as hunting partners and companions, a group of pygmypodians is threatened by a pack of imperial leathershelled tuskents.

Both species were created by Nergali, I made this art. Inspired by Charles R. Knight's Neanderthal Man Defending Family Against Wolves.

(psst, check out Sagan 4, there's so many creatures and you can even make your own)

[sagan-4]

[sagan-4]

So I heard about this newfangled thing called posting your art ??? Let’s see how this goes.

(Thang for Sagan 4, description isn’t finished yet…)

[sagan-4]

A strange noise draws the attention of a migrating falsequill sauceback to the beach. Staggering unsteadily from a mass of unfamiliar plant matter is a completely different kind of sauceback--a cleaner sauceback, which has rafted across the ocean following a freak flooding of the Ittiz river. The seawater killed the groveglobes it had managed to balance on for its entire 9-day journey, and no others of its kind had made the trip--so its arrival was little more than a fleeting oddity. However, for just this moment, two saucebacks from completely different worlds which would not touch for tens of millions of years met face to face.

[sagan-4]

(Unreleased) The ametrine citta is a species of citta--that is, a chattering biat or a 'saucejay'--which lives in southeastern Wallace. Its vibrant coloration helps it blend in with purple tree leaves over summer, while in winter it would seem to stick out like a sore thumb--but it's also very good at not getting caught.

Like all cittas, it's remarkably good at vocal mimicry using a complex stridulation system within its oral cavity, which is quite spacious even for a sauceback--its head is literally empty. Despite that, it's also quite intelligent and even capable of tool use thanks to the anatomy of its central nervous system.

@sagan-4

[sagan-4]

Does anyone know who drew this? It's the only remaining Sagan 4 species without a creator / artist credit (we lost track of the creator during the 2017 community migration), and we'd like to make it right.

Even if you don't know the artist, please share this around! We're hoping that if it spreads far enough, the original creator themself will see it and come forward. And if you think you might know something, please feel free to report any information you might have on our discord server.

[sagan-4]

Homepage | Forum | Discord

[sagan-4]

A sauceback that I call the "Creekree"

Lineart by me

Colors by @oviraptorfan

[sagan-4]

Sagan 4 looks really fun and I want to add my own species, but I'm a bit lost. How do I join?

Thank you for your question, anon!

New members may join using the new member submission thread, or by using the creator application on Discord. Both of these will direct you to the rules, which all submissions are required to follow, as well.

If you have not already come up with a species, we recommend either browsing the wiki to find inspiration or requesting a species assignment. New species may be descended from any "extant" species created before the current generation (168 at the time of posting).

We hope to see your submission soon :)

[sagan-4]

New contributors can post their first species without waiting for submissions to open for everyone else. Join Sagan 4 today.

Homepage | Forum | Discord

[sagan-4]

Merry Christmas, I made this creature for @mnidjm as part of Sagan 4's Secret Santa event!

The Secret Santa event is coming to a close for this year, but Sagan 4 has more events in store for all contributors in the near future. If you have an interest in creature design, speculative biology, alien life, or even just really like funny critters, consider joining Sagan 4 today:

Discord

Forum

Wiki

[sagan-4]

Sagan 4 Secret Santa Signups

This December, we're holding a Secret Santa event. The way it works is that every participant sends in a species submission prompt, and receives one from another applicant on December 1st to complete in secret in time for Christmas.

To apply, please fill out this form:

Homepage | Forum | Discord

[sagan-4]

Clade of the Day: Crustaphyta

Welcome to Clade of the Day, where we cover different groups of organisms on the collaborative project Sagan 4. Today's clade is the kingdom Crustaphyta, which includes crusts, jorns, and their relatives.

(sources: x/x/x/x/x)

Most species in this lineage are small and tough, making use of a chitinous shell or exoskeleton to protect them from most predators. This is why many of them form "crusts". However, yet more species are much larger, existing as succulent-like organisms adapted to life in deserts.

This group is by and large extant with few extinct variants. 24 entries are recorded on the wiki. Like many other obscure flora lineages, crusts and jorns are generally restricted to certain climates, mostly those with a lot of sand or rock. There are exceptions, however.

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Homepage | Forum | Discord

[sagan-4]

Clade of the Day: Luminophilia

Welcome to Clade of the Day, where we cover different groups of organisms on the collaborative project Sagan 4. Today's clade is the kingdom Luminophilia, which includes boneflora, redmosses, and their unicellular algae relatives.

(sources: x/x/x/x/x/x/x)

In the spirit of Halloween, why not cover a group known for its resemblance to bones? Luminuses were ancestrally green, but a certain successful group acquired red pigments which makes most macroscopic forms therefore more comparable to Earth's red algae. The boneflora, as their name implies, have calcified shells and are in that way somewhat similar to Earth's coralline algae. And much like certain coralline algae, they typically have a segmented growth form, which causes them to resemble either vertebrae or phalanges. Other luminuses resemble slimes or microbial films, when they are visible to the naked eye at all.

As one of the more recent algae groups and having so many microbial members, luminuses have a fairly short history in spite of the relatively whopping 45 entries recorded on the wiki. Most types of luminuses, both micro and macroscopic and both red and green, are extant.

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Homepage | Forum | Discord

[sagan-4]

We are not behind the anonymous inbox advertisements for Sagan 4.

We've received reports that a large number of bloggers have received asks advertising Sagan 4. While we don't condemn plugging the project, this has been causing annoyance and driving away potential members, which is the exact opposite of the goal of advertising. Thus, to whoever has been doing this, please stop.

Marketing via inbox spam is not among our official methods of advertising the project, and we would like to recommend against it. If you really want to tell your friend about the project, you should do it off-anon. A more preferential method of spreading the word more broadly over Tumblr would be to reblog posts about the project and share your own species and fanart on your own blog.