Click here: sponsr.is/bootdev_daryltalksgames and use my code DARYLTALKSGAMES to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev! That’s 25% your first month or your first year, depending on the subscription you choose. What Megastructure did I miss? What is your favorite example? Let me know below!

bro i was like "eh its just architecture can't be that interesting" and now 36 minutes later im contemplating my existence and inevitable death

The undercity of Coruscant is terrifying. Typically in Star Wars, the further away you get from Coruscant, the more uncivilized and crime-ridden the galaxy gets. Yet on Coruscant itself, the further down you go, the closer you get to the actual surface and humanity's original home, you see the same thing. What on the surface is a beautiful, luxurious city, is a metal hell of anarchy and filth. Many residents of the lower levels never see the sky, and long for a day they can ride up the elevator just once and experience the sun on their face. The very lowest levels are all but forgotten, and nobody knows if anything even lives down there. There could be entire nations down there, in the darkness, completely unknown to the galactic government above.

The best part of Blame! is the moment when the main character wanders into a huge open space, and an annotation on the page says that it's the room _Jupiter_ was used to be in. As in, _the planet._ The City of Blame! is so much worse than just being a mere uninspired planetary-scale building, it's an entire solar system filled up to the brim with endless corridors, rooms and utility closets, build with no sense, rhyth, function or even purpose, because the humans are long gone and the building robots just continue at random.

I’m a civil engineer, so seeing infrastructure in games that actually looks structurally sound, constructable (soneone could actually build it), and appears functional is very cool to me. Anyone can draw up a massive structure, but when you see aspects of actual civil design (trusses, load bearing columns, soil anchors, erosion control, etc) it really adds to it.

This may sound weird but I’m not afraid of dark futures like that depicted in Blame!, because I have faith in birds, and rats, and bugs. If the world became only cities a lot of animals would go extinct, but not all of them. Do you know that in very urban areas there is a type of squirrel that has evolved to have black fur, so that people driving cars can more easily see it and it doesn’t get run over as much. Life finds a way, because surviving is the definition of what life does. Even in giant megastructures life would find a way that humans could never have planned for.

Rainworld to me is the definitive superstructure game, the ecosystem that flourished in the desolate machinery makes everything seem so enormous, while playing the game you learn that every little crevice and pipe is the home of a dozen or so creatures, so when you see the scale of the world with thousands of components not only does it make these structures seem endless, but it also makes you feel like a simple rodent, crawling at random gods.

The existential question that confounds all philosophers for ages to come. “Does it have an Arby’s”?

There's one more megastructure that had me in awe ever since I was a kid: the "moon" from Disney's Treasure Planet. Particularly the way it is shot, closing in from a distant scene of a gaze at the sky and slowly showing a moon made out of buildings, streets and people boarding ships. It's breathtaking to watch the first time and still refreshing nowadays. I miss that kind of animation.

This is maybe not quite a megastructure, but the massive, sprawling structure of Aperture Laboratories in Portal 2 always got me. Falling all the way down to what felt like the centre of the earth, seeunf the massive caverns filled with gigantic metal spheres, each one given exact measurements, everything felt so real and so horrific. The main imagery that sticks with me to this fay is the last thing you do before you make it into "Wheatley Laboratories", you have opened the gate, ascended up an elevator and theres just one staircase leading you up to the next area. All that surrounds you is spring scaffolds, each is at least 20 metres wide and 10 metres tall, and they all hold up a metal plate. And those scaffolds don't end in any direction. You know this is just one area of the undefinable modern Aperture Labs, but there is STILL no end. Then you walk up the ladder and that scale is once again hidden by walls, doors, and elevators.

I love the world of Stray because it's a (moderately sized) megastructure, its former inhabitants are long gone and it's somewhat derelict. But also robots are now living there and have built a home in that place.

Hey Daryl! Thanks for mentioning my Megastructure book, I really appreciate it!

I love how this video is about megastructures and the vastness of us as humans, but the most touching/meaningful moments in the video for me were the small human moments like the "what is land" quote or the summary of Ghost Story

Armored Core 6's Rubicon is fascinating on every level.

I think a great way to get perspective on these megastructures is taking a close look at skycrapers. I remember visiting London back in 2014 and standing right in front of one of the skyscrapers and looking up. On pictures they always look so... normal I guess, but standing there, knowing how big I am and how high this tower goes just feels so unreal. I'd also like to mention a favorite example of a megastructure in gaming for me, though I guess it's not that big compared to many of the examples in the video, it just stuck with me since I've known about it since I was a kid: The Haven City Palace in Jak 2. You wander around the city, completing mission on foot or on a vehicle, for quite a while, often with a view of the massive palace, until you get to actually climb one of the support cables in a later mission. You ride the elevator and once you are up and walking on that massive cable, you take a peek at the city below. The slums, the harbor, the bazaar and the gardens suddenly seem so tiny, you can barely recognize the layout from that high up. Even the massive wall of the city, which was always blocking the view of the outside, suddenly becomes small. You are even able to see past it slightly. I loved it and still do, that mission has a special place in my heart for sure. Anyways, great video. The effort really shows and I also really hope it gets a lot of traction, lord knows you've earned it!

Hi Daryl, small correction, gravity doesn't get "a little lazy" above 100km of altitude, around the ISS, the gravity is actually around 90% the one on the surface. The difference is that because the ISS is moving very fast it remains in free fall and therefore you don't experience gravity as you and the station are falling at the same speed in the same direction. Both are linked.

my favourite tidbit from Blame! is there's a giant empty chamber that's where Jupiter used to be before the builders harvested it for resources until it was gone. This isn't a plot point, this is just a thing that happens. It's not even explicitly stated iirc.

Humans have built megastructures before, we just don't recognize them as such. Think of road network infrastructure that spans continents or sprawling internet cables which connect the planet. We even create megastructures unintentionally, the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch for example, which is twice the size of Texas; or Earth Orbital Debris Field, which envelops the planet and contains 10,000 tons of man-made detritus. Most megastructures are built out of a very specific humanitarian need, or as a consequence of those needs.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="349">05:49</a> Doggy was like *"what the fuck dude?"* 😂

I feel like the sheer scale of the BLAME! mega-structure isn't properly conveyed in this. At one point he gets on an elevator and the computer on-board tells him he will arrive at his destination in 33 DAYS, he encounters a room that is revealed to be the size of Jupiter, I don't recall is its actually stated but it's implied that the structure has fully enveloped the solar system and is perpetually being built further and further out by automatons with nobody left to give them orders. In fact the entire premise of BLAME! is Killy (the MC) searching for someone still carrying the net terminal gene so the robots can be brought back under human control, though it is unclear whether such a person even exists for Killy to find

Shoutouts to the Vascular plant from Armored Core 6, a giant funnel sticking out of the side of the planet meant to suck up all the coral energy from within the planet's core. Zullie The Witch made a really good video showcasing it's scale.

I would like to add rain world to this list you basically explore a natural environment that grew out of a long abandoned but still functioning megastructure that's essentially a big computer, so massive it uses entire lakes as cooling

The free indie game Naissancee also has this feel I think. The entire game (heavily inspired by Blame!) Is basically you walking through different levels of a massive megastructure/city and it captures that feeling of being a minute speck in the middle of eternity

There's another beautifully tragic layer to the truly absurd megastructures, that not only will we never see them, but the people who start building them will never see them finished. A dyson sphere, even for a VERY advanced civilisation, could easily take several generations of dedication and unimpeded work to complete. What would the first generation of architects, engineers, and supply teams think of this marvel, one even their grandkids may not see finished? A complete megastructure that required many generations of coordinated and uninterrupted or at least unsabotaged work to complete, is not just a wonder of ingenuity and resourcefulness, but a wonder of collaboration across generations. Some might take so long to complete, that the society that drafted the initial plans would be completely unrecognisable and alien to the society living in the finished product. That, I think, is as haunting as it is enchanting.

Rain World has this but in 2D and it's so well done. After finding out about the megastructure you realize that many of the game's locations that you traveled through were actually parts of it and the environment, it's ecosystems and thus the gameplay are greatly affected by it's existence. Then the DLC expanded upon it exponentially. Rain World is such an amazing game

BLAME! is the definition of MEGASTRUCTURES. Its world always creeps me out and makes me feel existentially minuscule.

Only Daryl can make me and my wife tear up thinking about architecture (and the existentialism of a life that lives beyond us, but mainly the architecture)

I think my favorite thing about Blame! Is all the empty space. There are tight hallways that look almost organic, but there are also city sized spaces in between them, with skyscraper hight drops to an unseen floor. It shows how big the structure is, that they could be so careless with space or that most likely this is where two structures became one is awe inspiring. Blame! Is a masterpiece.

I’ll go for the obvious one. The Halo rings are a great example of the splendor of fictional megastructures. Every single time I boot up a Halo game and see the see the ring in the skybox, I get chills. There’s something so magical in the implementation that Bungie nailed as early as CE. I think the Citadel from Half-Life gets a close second, especially in Alyx, where Valve gives you as long as you want right at the start to adjust to their VR environment design.

Fun fact, in a 0G environment, if both you and the object are moving along the same vector, in your perspective both are stationary. Not to mention the near zero resistance in that environment would not produce the effect of traveling at high speeds as it would on earth. Its Einstein's elevator thought experiement, but just that you have a massive satellite inside with you xD

Your description of Ghost Story reminds me of a picture book I read a lot as a child - 'The Little House', it's similar in themes with a small home being swallowed by a city over time as the world moves on without it, but told from the house's perspective instead. It does have a happy ending, where it gets moved back out to the countryside, but I always wondered as a kid if that wasn't just the start of another cycle.

I recently played a game called Bleak Faith: Forsaken. The game didn't do super well on release on account of being rather clunky and janky and unpolished, but I had been looking forward to it for so long that I pushed through until I was able to get used to it, and the 3 dev team that's been making it has been adding improvements constantly and making it far better than it was on launch. That aside, the game is heavily inspired by Blame!, specifically the imagery. And there was something so special about wandering through this colossal space. Seeing the imagery in Blame! Is one thing, but actually controlling the act of wandering was something entirely different. At one point, I found a monorail with nothing on it and no way to call for a train or anything, so I started walking across it. It reached out over an abyss below and an abyss above, the sight of steel in the distance the only thing to tell me that I was still moving. I spent several minutes walking across this monorail until eventually I reached a space with skyscrapers and cars, that were completely abandoned. The monorail kept going but was blocked by a broken down train, and the cityscape I was in was completely ruined and empty. There wasn't even an item or reward for my making this journey. But instead of being disappointed by the lack of reward, I was just in awe. The game wasn't perfect and had many flaws, but there were still moments like this, where my wandering was so endless and yet completely fruitless, that really hit the mark of what this game was meant to accomplish. In later parts of the game, you can be walking in what looks like a sort of Nier Automata city ruins type landscape, but if you looked down at a crack in the ground there was nothing below, and if you looked up, it was just an abyss, but through the fog in the far distance, occasionally you could see some giant structure that was moving, it was bone chilling to imagine what it might be. And the last moment from playing this game I wanted to highlight was one many people complained about on launch. I was exploring an area that was rich with structures and enemies and whatnot, it was super dense and felt populated, with many structures stretching up into the sky. I came across an elevator with no markings or anything, and I stepped on it to bring me up or maybe down. The elevator started moving upwards and I sat in that closed off space for a few minutes, which is a long time to sit in a videogame elevator (hence many people's complaints). The thing is, the elevator was moving fast, and when it finally reached the top, I was standing at the top of a massive tower, looking around me there was absolutely nothing but the abyss, and other towers of similar height. Some connected by bridges, others had to be jumped to. In any other game, jumping between towers in the sky would be a normal feat, because if I fell I'd get a quick death animation and respawn to try it again. And while the same thing would happen here, I was terrified to jump out over that void. The looooong elevator ride had conveyed to me just how high up I was, and just how long I would fall for. Many people complained that the elevator was too long, but I believe that it lead me to experience the most vertigo I've ever felt in a game, where I was already feeling so much dread. I highly recommend this game, despite its issues it has some of the greatest world design, environment art (all of that done by 1 single guy btw!), and exploration ever. Not to mention they've made several improvements since release.

Blame!, Kowloon, and Midgar are all huge inspirations for my work-in-progress project Urban Jungle. The idea of a world where humans have created an ecumenopolis so expansive that it becomes alien and uninhabitable to humans, only for it to be reclaimed by nature and force us to live and survive in a hostile world that we built for ourselves... it's beautiful and haunting and it drives me every day to share that vision.

Darryl is low key becoming a sci Fi nerd

That thumbnail is so perfect. I was literally about to start playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition as this was uploaded.

theres a page turn in blame where hundreds of years pass, and its just the main character travelling a small section of the mega structure. That's how insanely large the megacity is in blame

I love the superstructures in armored core VI, it's such an incredible world and the sense of scale truly makes you speechless, if you haven't I really suggest checking it out!

Just started the video and your obsession is so validating to me. I have always been star struck in awe with fictional megastructures for as long as I can remember. Put a bright big smile on my face to hear someone else express this as well.

Hatey jokes aside, I can tell you worked super hard on this video. The extra subtleties in your narration, all the outside media you sourced, and just the sheer length. Excellent job, it’s a banger

Armored Core, and other mech games, explore this idea too, as they usually end up using mechs to build even taller, bigger structures. You could also check out the Wandering Earth movies!

I love the way you can eloquently describe these feelings I've had for years and never quite clocked.

You have no idea how many times I play these videos in the background during work. Your narration is so soothing and always leaving a sentimental note despite the darkest of stories

Great video! The existential feelings i got when you talked about "A ghost story", combined with the topic of megastructures really reminded me of the manga "Girls' Last Tour". It's about two girls wandering a massive megacity. It's a fairly slow, more laid back manga/show, but it touches on some of the things you bring up in the video. It's a very good manga that I can't recommend enough.

I love how Outer Wilds manages to be adorably miniaturized but still captures the vibe of impossibly large superstructures. The way that game toys with your sense of scale is so unique.

I'm so glad you mentioned Blame! It's a great manga, and I was thinking about it while watching the beginning of the video :) One thing that people don't often mention about the manga though, there is a scene in I don't remember which volume, where our protagonist comes upon structures being actively built. In this world, there is still active machinery building more and more structures. Why? For whom? We see maybe a few hundred, maybe a few thousands living people throughout the immensity of the mechanical word depicted in the manga, and yet giant machines are building more, building still, building, building, building. This is one of the most fascinating aspect of the book for me. Machines programmed to build ever more, because we need to keep building, even if there are no longer people who need those new structures. And this has seemingly been going on for a looong time. Are those the same machines that were when humanity was at its most populous? Are the machines still following the original building plans, or are they following new, or corrupted plans? Some of these structures are clearly not fit for human society. Enormous walkways next to bottomless pits with no rail are a huge safety risk for people. But they're not building for people anymore. Right? Fascinating book, I highly recommend it.

Stellar Blade and that ascent up the orbit elevator actually got me looking into space videos, type 1 civilizations, and exo planets. Something about this game really sparked my curiosity and then this video comes out...LETS FREAKIN GO! Great content as always SIr Daryl- stay chadley my dude.

So glad you brought up Blame. That manga is haunting in its beauty and terrifying in its presentation of an artificial world that has outgrown humanity. I've always been fond of megastructures. A very obscure one that I love is called Gearworld, it's a series of art pieces and a fictional blog by Ursula Vernon (and recently a choose-your-own-adventure series on Tumblr), depicting an ancient labyrinth of concrete and gears with no apparent purpose, inhabited by strange beings who keep their goals to themselves.

Honestly - I went into this video not expecting much, just looking to fill time while I had my morning coffee. But your conclusion at the end left me silent and thinking. It's such an amazing way of looking at the - usually very philosophical and not very physical - 'hope for the future' that is often needed to continue living in this day and age. It's no longer some meme about the indomitable human spirit or the wish to leave the world a bit happier or better for others - but the knowledge that, inevitably, the world _will_ move on without us, and it will be bigger and brighter than we could ever experience in our own lifetimes. Thanks for putting this together - great video as always.

[Just a rant] For some reason, the game superliminal has been on my mind for quite a while now , playing is was very therapeutic. finishing the game, I had a very cold and calm feeling, and the urge to scream, wiggle my hands, say something and at the same time the inability to make out words in my brain , the urge to get something out of me while absolutely nothing forming , your videos keeps putting me in the same spot, the feeling is both good and infuriating and sad Thank you for your efforts daryl

The megastructures in Armored Core 6 always blew me away. Very cool backdrop of a world that used to be, but is no more, only to be fought over for scraps by warring factions from another star system….

My favourite (fictional) megastructure is Babylon 5. Five miles long, 2,500,000 tons of spinning metal, holds about 250,000, located in neutral territory. A shining beacon in space. All alone in the night. And our last best hope for peace.

I unironically jumped with joy the moment you've mentioned Stellaris and Alderson Disk which were the only two reasons I opened this video. I am so happy :)

I’ve had this EXACT existential crisis watching Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. GOT takes place two centuries after HOTD, and it really got me thinking about permanence, legacy, and how much a space can change in the span of generations. Will Westeros ever get an Arby’s? Who’s to say.

The most depressing thing about this video is that even after all this time passes, all this technological innovation and progress comes to pass, the flow of time stretching on until we don't even know what land is anymore, and Arby's will still be revolting.

Oh- so, if you’re interested in the duality of megastructures, wonder and loss, then I recommend Girls’ Last Tour. It’s a slice of life manga set in the copse of a megacity. It also has a sort of . . . Inverse? The author’s next work is called Shimeji Simulation and is set in, well, a simulation. It’s quite fun as well.

Man, I just finished watching the video, and this one thing has been on my mind ever since I discovered Daryl Talks Games back during Covid. Daryl just has a way with words. This man can make me feel emotions in ways no other thing ever can. Not music. Not movies. Not games. Nothing. The way he can put such complex thoughts into words almost seems inhuman. If this man was a poet a good two hundred years ago people would be looking back on his works, confidently proclaiming him to be one of the smartest minds to ever grace the planet. It is out of this world how he can make people feel such otherworldly emotions with nothing more than words and video game backdrops. And the craziest part is that it’s not just this video. Far from it. Nearly every video has a conclusion that summarizes such complex emotions with mere words. It honestly really motivates me whenever I watch a video of his cause the emotions I feel by the end are always so otherworldly. I don’t even care that he doesn’t post super consistently. With how well his scripts are I’m shocked he can even put out more than one video a year. These scripts read as something that the smartest minds took months meticulously crafting. This man deserves way more recognition for that in my opinion. TLDR: If I were to bet on one person from all of history being able to describe colors to a blind person, I’d pick Daryl in a heartbeat.

A Daryl video appears in my notifs and suddenly I’m watching. There’s no thought process in between

Megastructures are absolutely fascinating and I think it's also interesting to note that a lot of this awe is particularly attached to vertical megastructures. Like... a horizontal megastructure that fills the horizon is impressive, but one could also consider suburbia by that definition, a network of houses, roads and underground utilities stretching beyond the horizon. It's staggering when you think about every piece, but it doesn't generate the same immediate awe as when you put verticality into it. Things that go *up* can be seen, can be appreciated in their scale so much more, and the higher they go, the more they defy gravity, the more boundless they seem. Coruscant is a great example of this combined because it's not just vertical, stretching up into the original planet's atmosphere, it covers the *entire* planet. It's a megalith housing quadrillions. You can live your whole lives in an area of thirty square kilometers, with a massive city pressing down on you. I also want to shout-out Rain World, as it's also a game that thrives on scale. Whether it's all that looms backgrounds or getting lost in the iterator's superstructure - climbing around on their surface like a bacteria on skin - the iterators are things that alter the environment so fundamentally so as to give the game it's name, things last for so long the mind can't even fathom it. It's a game that, by design, makes it very clear you are passing through a world that exists without you. And there are these moments where the world just yawns beneath you, but at the same time you come back to the crowded rooms bustling with life that persist despite the iterator's impact. (It's a good game and I think you'd enjoy it, if not playing, then watching.) Fantastic video, thanks for sharing!

bro keeps finding new and unique ways to make me cry

that moment towards the end where you damn near pull us to tears only to create an organic laugh man you're writing is phenomenal.

Blame is not about humanity overreaching with their construction. It's about their construction slipping away from them. They lose control and the builders just keep on going without sense or reason for who knows how long. The megastructure is a result of a drive without will and thought.

Stellar Blade was a fantastic game. It was like the devs specifically made a game that players asked for down to the last detail. An awesome female protagonist, engaging combat, amazing OST, tons of customization, over 50 outfits that you earn IN GAME, NO micro transactions, regular updates, a boss rush mode, a fun and interesting world to explore, great level design. The list goes on and on. An absolutely phenomenal game, 10/10

The way you play with visuals, your tone and the background music is so good, I cant put it in words What a great video!

This is exactly why I loved the environments and structures of Armored Core 6. Every structure was so ridiculously massive and imposing that I'd always ask myself "how did they build that?!" and "how much did this cost?!"

My hunch is that any civilization that still has Arby's is not one capable of completing these types of megastructures

This reminds me of a Fanfic I read recently. The fic was based on Medieval times with the corresponding technology. No Electricity, no radio, no guns or skyscrapers, just swords and magic and stone buildings. However the cast eventually end up fighting these bad guys which are much more technologically advanced. Despite this, the technology they encounter is quite limited, they don't even encounter guns, just giant mechs, which they barely have the means to defeat. Eventually, the cast fight those bad guys and win, allowing them to discover what those villains had been working on, a portal to another time, aka Time Travel. By an accident of one of their allies, they go through that portal and at first, everything seems normal. It seems like they are in a large empty cavern (really a warehouse for those Mechs they fought). They go through a doorway, exploring this new area... and promptly experience existential dread... because the sky doesn't exist... because the ground is upside down above them. The characters literally fall to the ground and clutch the grass expecting themselves to fly down to the ground above them, despite there being ground below. In fact, they try and warn additional allies from coming through because of how horrifying the experience is for them, and most of them promptly stumble back into the warehouse where they puke and have a mental breakdown. The scene was written in a way where even I didn't know what was going on at first because the character's couldn't rationalize the scope they were experiencing. It was only when 1 character pointed out that the ground in the distance was not Hills, but CURVED that I realized they were on a Ringworld, a megastructure functioning as both a planet and a spaceship. I think the scene accurately portrays the majesty and dread that Megastructures like those provoke, how incredibly fascinating and equally horrifying a concept.

Man I'm so happy you had so much fun making this because it really bled through and I had a fantastic time watching this. :)

Really enjoy how you bring together such mixed media threads here - manga, film, and video games, melded with a little reality. Fab stuff, and love the A Ghost Story representation!

Great Video, I'm definitely going to look into Stellar Blade after this, as well as watching Ghost Story. I will say Rain World incorporates superstructures pretty well. If you have the time, it would be nice to take a look back. It's a slow burn, but really gets going mid-late game once you figure out the game. The game is like Outer Wilds if there wasn't Nomai text to read, and you figured everything out through experimentation. The ecosystem is a lot more complex than the predator-prey dynamic that you can differentiate with observation, that the tutorial doesn't explain because the game trusts the player to figure those aspects out and learn on their own. This kind of turns into an issue for players on a time crunch. This is why reviewers (especially in 2016 with all the other games coming out like BotW) rushed the game for 6 hours, only stayed in the starting area gave the game a mediocre review, where general player review are a lot higher when you can take your time to learn, you actual go through faster. It's a lot like piloting the ship in Outer Wilds, it will be clucky and confusing at first, but once you figure out small things like using back thrusters halfway between your target, you won't crash. Honestly up to you to decide, just explaining why it was a bit unfortunate to play in a backlog challenge like last year when a lot of the games themes and philosophy shows up half way through. And also because I'd be explaining spoilers to the game relating to your video. Once you get to Shaded Citadel / Exterior and you realize that everything you were in is parts of a giant superstructure that goes all the way up past the clouds, and seeing the cycle end without any rain was so bizarre and amazing, the sunset and night cycle you never get to see at that moment is so nice. Then when you get inside Five Pebbles and see that what you climbed was actually a giant supercomputer with dozens of rooms dedicated to just specific operations for Five Pebbles and the soft drone of synthetics as you get closer to his chamber that grows in intensity with LED's lighting up the entire background is so incredible. The rooms are 4-6 screens sometimes with just empty space the slugcat is so small compared. The area you leave from it also something that amazes me: a city caked with a meter of dust, no other creatures up there but you, and then... looking out you see dozens of more structures in the distance, the same ones as the one you took hours just to climb up. The Downpour DLC also reminds me of Ghost Story in terms that each campaign takes place nearly decades from each other showing how the building of superstructures impacted the environment, and what happens centuries out from the base game.

Been a while since I've watched anything about Rainworld lore (I am checking the wiki though, also big spoilers), but there are massive metal partially organic sapient supercomputers called Iterators in Rain World, and it is implied that the water vapor produced by these machines are what causes the heavy rain that can literally kill you. The ancient civilization that made these supercomputers built cities on top of these Iterators, probably because they couldn't exactly live with the rain. These Iterators were built to figure out how to escape the cycle of rebirth. The ancient civilization found a way anyways by using something called void fluid, however some ended up becoming these permanently non existing yet also alive entities at the same time called Echoes. In the campaign in the Downpour DLC that takes place at the end of Downpour's timeline, you can encounter an Echo by Frigid Coast which directly connects to the wreck of one Iterator. What's interesting though is part of the dialogue. "I toiled away until my final breath. As did many of us, through countless generations. | Research, shipments, architecture, computation, politics, worship, revolutions! | All for a heap of rusted metal steeped in a puddle of frozen water." Another of these Echoes isn't near an Iterator who states "Something still draws me here. Even after all this time. | The weather is so different now, but the fields... | I do not need eyes to know that the grasses still sway gently in the winds." (Outer Wilds spoilers) In Outer Wilds: Echoes Of The Eye an unnamed alien race has slides depicting them tearing apart resources from their own planet to build a massive space ship. The greenery and clear sky turn murky and brown, you see them tear down their houses and the trees. They end up creating a simulation which you can go into, and it is clearly meant to be a replica of their home planet. Even still, you can see one watching a slideshow of their home planet. The contrast between both of these examples is that unlike "A Ghost Story", what once was isn't torn down once the people who once used or lived in that place move out, but by the hands of the people who lived there. And in both cases, clearly at least a few of people who did so yearn for their old homes. (Ultrakill spoilers) I don't have a neat way to tie it in but in Ultrakill, there are the partially solar and blood powered Earthmovers made during the great war that people had to live on due to the Earthmovers making what little on the Earth's surface that was still habitable uninhabitable and people had to live on the Earthmovers. The one that you face has a book you can find with some very interesting dialogue ultrakill.fandom.com/wiki/7-4:_...LIKE_ANTENNAS_TO_HEAVEN#Unique_Passage .

Daryl, I love your content, you have this way of describing things that makes them feel both so ethereal yet so real. I just wish that I didn't end up feeling super depressed every time I watch one of them. That was a beautiful ending this time though. I wish there were more people who would talk about Megastructures and things like you did here.

I'll never stop loving the way you look at games and media in general. You give me such a bliss in indulging in details

I half expected dams to be mentioned for real-life megastructures. They don't have mesmerizing views compared to tall buildings but it always surprises me when I know the amount of water they hold. I also think about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by CERN just because I'm a nerd.

The Stellaris mod mentioned is Gigastructural Engineering, one of the best mods for Stellaris in my opinion, very in depth and provides so many awesome ideas and bring so many others to life, really expands the game and provides great endgame options (and crisises).

This is your best one yet. I am a writer and the worldbuilding aspect of this, combined with you phenomenal writing really did it for me. thank you so much for all the time you spent on this. It was well worth it!

I was so excited when I saw this upload, because I’ve been obsessed with megastructures, and I really enjoyed how in depth you went with the concept. You even made me more interested, so now I have some resources to go and find.

Not quite the Analemma Tower, but Battle Angel Alita had something similar with its Jeru-Salem structure - basically a barbell held in place by equally gravitational pull and centrifugal force. I loved the concept (especially since almost nobody on earth knew about it). My personal favorite is BLAME! though. If you haven't, read NOiSE; it's the prequel to BLAME! and tells how the Megastructure came to be.

As always, the best big structurre in games is from Metal Gear Rising. In the bad guy HQ, The internal express elevator will take many many minutes to reach not even the top of the building. Inside one of the floors, there's a multi-stories tall pagoda.

amazing video, I really enjoyed the philosophical concepts you went into. there's lots of videos about superstructures but this has by far been my favorite one. I don't even have to watch another one of your videos to know I'm subscribing lmao

Amazing video. I’ve been obsessed with similar things as discussed in this video. As someone from a small town in Eeastern Europe, I’m not used to seeing big complex buildings. But from when I was 1 up to 4 years old, I lived in Shenzhen, China with my parents. The look and feel of that city with hundreds of skysrapers captivated my kid mind. Ever since then, I’ve been amazed and drawn to the idea megastructures

Gonna need you to share some of that talent with the class here, Daryl. Also, that megastructure book looks dope af!!

Let's turn it back from sci-fi to ancient times: Prince of Persia The Sands of Time: climbing the Tower of Dawn. That was my first experience in this vein. And they doubled down in The Two Thrones with THE Tower of Babel.

Blame! is so good. The size of the "city" is on such a different scale it's litterally impossible to imagine. It's super cool to see Blame! being talked about, it doesn't have nearly the following it deserves.

When I watched Cowboy Bebop I thought about how cool some aspects of megastructures seem (like the upside down cities built in a huge ring of grass, these look absolutely insane) but didn't think that much about it, this video was so thoughtful and well written congrats fot the work 🙌 Also the hopeful perspective in the last was beautiful damn

That tower in the beginning is definitely inspired by Zalem from Gunnm !

so many "places that take chunks of your life to explore" and so little life!

One megastructure that I think encapsulates all of this perfectly are the earthmovers in ultrakill, which are gargantuan war robots of which a single one is enough to level entire cities. As more and more earthmovers were deployed to fight in the war the entire planet started to become uninhabitable, forcing people to start building cities on top of the earthmovers themselves to survive, and it was this that made everyone realize how they had gone way too far

Thanks for an amazing video! The first megastructure I learned of was Larry Niven's Ringworld. The idea that there could be something artificial that would have taken the entire mass of a solar system to create captured my imagination. All the continents of the Earth would be a series of tiny island on something that huge. I'm so glad movies, books, and games allow us to experience megastructures that we won't ever be able to experience in person. I think you really captures the mix of emotions that they bring out in people, and why they fascinate us.♥

this channel is going places

"WHY AREN'T PEOPLE ASTOUNDED BY THIS?" Well, i have 100 hours in KSP.

I would like to vaguely gesture at House of Leaves for something which does technically count as a megastructure and fascinates me greatly. I don't think it would've worked for this video but - it's there! I would also like to point out something that is tangential to the video but still worth the mention: we do not currently have an overpopulation problem, only a resource distribution one!

Another banger video once again! I love the feeling of sublime, when it feels like my existence is too small to even compare to huge towering structures and environment. I thought I can only get this feeling from standing on top of a mountain, or looking at the view of an endless night sky in pitch black darkness. You now put the idea of megastructures in my mind, and I feel an obsession about to bubble up. Thank you for dunking me head first into a new endless abyss of researching this topic and grappling the science around these structures

Can someone tell in what video did Daryl talked about whalefall?

I think the biggest issue I have with megastructures is the logistical nightmare you justly mentioned. Going further, Ecumenopolis is quite impossible due to the resources needed, you cannot cover the surface of the planet with more resources than we can even access from said planet. And the more resources you grab from space, the bigger said planet becomes, requiring more resources in turn. There is also a scale where structures just stop working, the moment when science catches back and says no, it's not feasible. Fantasy most often stays fantasy. And at the same time, there are things we simply can't imagine yet, we didn't get flying cars, but we have magnetic trains and the internet, arguably more magical.

Oh my god you just introduced me to a new emotion of nostalgia, existential dread, melancholy and solace by that end ghost film- Amazing, incredible video and I want you to know that if it’s enough to us viewers if you had fun and a real passion because it really shines through :))

Man, this channel gotta be the best discovery of the last 2 years, after a year and something more, you entered officially in my god tier channel. Every video is just...so fucking interesting, I missed a channel like that, thank you very much, you are very inspirational even just for the creativity. Wow

Spoilers for Stellar Blade... and the Horizon series The fact that the man that owned and financed that massive sky elevator is still alive and affecting the world is fucking haunting to me, but not in the way that I feel like was intentional by the devs... or maybe I'm wrong, maybe all the soda cans with NFTs, the anachronistic architecture in what's supposed to be an advanced city for androids, and Raphael's entire creed is supposed to be a hollow commentary. The scope of that tower alone is daunting and terrifying, but they lead to a orbiting space colony that likely MORE ridiculous, and there used to be more, but yet another testament to Raphael's hubris destroyed all of them, Mother Sphere. And even still, the infestation and rot consuming the elevator is ALSO Raphael, his bid to restore humanity corrupted all of us... and yet despite its supposed failure it still came out with him being the prime subject, THE human that would survive with his humanity intact and THE human who would ascend to humanity's next stage of evolution after fusing with androeidos... If Raphael is supposed to be a grim reflection of all of humanity I don't want him... because he feels more like hes constantly TRYING to insert himself as the icon of humanity, or at least its savior, and dooming us every time. I WANT him to be an icon of hubris, he is not humanity, HE is Ozymandias, but he refuses to die. But the game... it really doesn't feel like its criticizing him, it doesn't feel like it understands the weight of who this character they made is and what he has done... it really wants us to accept him as Adam and it really wants us to accept that he's the solution. Its why I question the intention and direction of the game. Its not like Horizon, which portrays a beautiful caricature of a vicious entrepreneur and accelerationist, who despite actively dooming the world, refuses to let someone else become a savior and nearly dooms us again, and when given the respite to die in piece in his tomb, decides he's not satisfied not seeing the end, and desperately tried to make himself immortal so that he can greet the new humanity as a god... See Adam already IS basically a god, the boss fight with him all but confirms it, and the fact that Eve seems to be unchanged should she fuse with him indicates he wants to be human, and he wants to be mortal... its... honestly it really muddies the already surface level allegory of Adam and Eve the game tries to portray. But still, in Horizon Ted Farro is an obstacle to progress, his aggressive self insertion leads to turmoil and Aloy uses a mix of cunning and scifi birthright to overcome the mess he'd created. But Eve... well Eve is just an ant on the side of Raphael's massive, compensating tower... she's led around on a string by him the entire game, she rarely questions information given to her and doesn't dig deeper, and in the end the best choice is to side with him. Its funny, because there was all this debate about if the character design was sexist before anything was known about the actual character. But after playing the game, its not the costumes that bum me out, its that any sense of autonomy Eve might have felt like she had gets crushed by the end... and like regardless if that's intentional commentary or they just seriously thought Adam was a more redeeming character, it really just validates my opinion that the stellar art design of the game, pieces that are all amazing on their own, don't really come together in a compelling way the same as Neir, Horizon, or Xenoblade. That all being said, that entire level, including the area leading up to the elevator, is THE high point of the game for me. And that's because at this point, despite Eve and Lily just weirdly still not getting that Naytibas were the original humans, we as the viewer understand that both the egregious technology AND the corruption consuming it are the same thing. And man is it just... freaking effective.

Made in abyss

This ended far from where I expected it would and yet I can see and understand how we got there. Well done.

This video was beautiful, in every layer and level. From concepts tangling in the sky to metal choked corridors spanning distance in meters to eons, it was a heartbeat amidst the engineering.