EVE Fiction

Lol jumping the shark is what I'm trying to avoid. Whole point of this thread in the first place.

Here's a good rule of thumb:

If the life form or plant was domesticated and integral to human life (wheat, barely, rice, pigs, cows - tobacco!), you can assume the colonists brought it with them, and you can assume some of it survived. There is references in the lore to wheat and corn (Minmatar slaves in Empyrean Age are depicted farming wheat), "tobacco" exists as an item in-game, and we have "livestock" which resembles cows. So assume wheat, cows, tobacco, corn, possibly rice, and of course some trees and insects (terraforming would need these, unless they used cluster-native species, but I don't see why they would).

Did anyone made up some animals in New Eden? Other than the lore ones? I look here sometimes with hope that there will be images with stories or something. I have to look in "My EVE" part of forum I suppose...

Meanwhile, look at my pet "Bezu".
Omnivorous, scaly, bear sized creature.

Think forward by 30,000 years. The fauna would have developed as much then as the ice-age creatures would have developed to now.

A lot of what would be introduced into New Eden would likely be domesticated stock that had gone wild. The dragon you mentioned? A genetically engineared savanna monitor with the body-form of a flying squirrel. Tiny pink ponies who eat their young, it could be anything!

As you noted Caldari Prime is only temperate in the Tropic regions (who must be very small if the planet has a negligible axis rotation) & the rest of the planet is tundra to frozen. So yes, there's a more hospitable place: the equoatorial regions.

The few times I've seen the abundant food production, it tended to be in correlation with the ocean eco system. Hypothesis: It might be it lacks (top?) predators, allowing fish to flourish to the point of them overcrowding the ocean if the Caldari prime Settlers didn't catch them en masse.
Alternativly, ocean collapse was maximal, allowing only plants to thrive greatly, so settlers got tons & tons of seaweed & algae to harvest, up to the point they have to to keep the ocean from suffocating under too wild plant growth.

Landside, there's very few mention of life, albeit the Kresh Trees are native to the planet (mentioned in cold wind) Regarding the autumn mention there, keep in mind, Cold wind is a tale, a fable referencing to things past. It's likely autumn has a different meaning for Caldari then us, regarding their lack of seasons(minimal axial tilt). Could be it refers to some other periodic (weather) event.
All in all, it seems that the Caldari prime Ecosystem is unstable, missing a variety of essential life, filled in by humans to keep it going.

Describing local flora & fauna for Caldari Prime won't be easy, as for most references that can be found, the planet's fairly barren, save for the equatorial regions who enjoy a temperate climate (with lack of seasons) & lots of Caldari roleplayers have strong feelings to anything that happens to Caldari Prime (this is for all prime lore planets).
Considering the planet was a barren inhospitable world prior to the terraforming, it's likely all life was imported from elsewhere. Note, most life is hence probably from Earth origin, but what suvrived the ecosystem collapse evolved to adapt to a much colder climate with thinner atmosphere

To reconcile the freezing temperatures with a temperate climate, it's important to remember they're averages. Further, the Caldari prime atmosphere is usually referred to thin, allowing large temperature-differences between day/night (thinner atmospheres have trouble trapping heat).
So a -3 to -15 average temp, yet a temperate region, it can be explained that the planet has a slow rotation on its axis (long days) allowing for a nice temperature on dayside (longer explosure means higher temperatures, but only to an upper limit, and it is mentioned that Caldari prime is at the edge of habitability, so I theorize it's day temperateure probably never gets high) but freezing cold at night. This can explain the temperate conditions, yet freezing averages.
Life can survive this by having adapted a night hibernal cycle or using deep burrows. Plant life could be restricted to needles or something that we don't have on earth (heavy wax small leafs?)

On the Kresh Tree, it could be an imported tree from earth, genetically engineered for better growth under cold conditions. Can't find mention of its size, but considering that Tundra trees are usually stunted in their growth, it could be that the reference huge kresh trees' is just compared to the ordinary tundra runts, making even a small tree a giant compared to it.
In all likelyhood, most life-forms imported would probably be genetically engineered to survive the initial cold conditions, in order to built up a more stable warm ecosystem later- obviously this warmer period never came to be, albeit the 'thicker' atmosphere helped in creating a more agreeable day temperature.

On liquid water for Caldari prime, despite freezing temperatures: some things might help: High salt content & strong ocean currents under the ice (as it's likely most of the north & south hemisphere is frozen on top) It's theorized Earth actually went through a period like this (Snowball Earth) in it's early history

The ingame planet info is quatch. Anyone with even a slight astronomic background would start twitching when he saw that data.
In short: ingame planetary details are not a good indicator for lore.

I would mainly use it as a guidance for Lore. In Kor-Azor example, don't take the planet info at face value, but as guidance, treat the data as indicating that Kor Azor Prime is a larger planet with higher then normal gravity.
For rotational periods, lets not go there... because there's alot more wrong then just rotational periods (temperate planets nearly kissing their star or in the frozen edge of the system etc)

The information I used is taken from Eve Source and the EVE wiki, not the in game planet info popups, which is why I noted the discrepancies as puzzling. My understanding of 'temperate' in terms of weather is that it is characterised by moderate/mild temperatures. Am I confusing definitions of geographical zones with climate?

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I think Jandice is probably correct in advising to stay away from Caldari Prime to try this project and I'm not comfortable with what I see as differences in the two sources of lore about the same planet. Perhaps some unknown, non-descript planet to begin with?

Those are accurate based on the ingame planet information but not typically considered accurate lore-wise as the ingame descriptions seem somewhat random and would create conditions rendering human habitation impossible. You can tell from the image that Caldari Prime and Gallente Prime would have lethally high gravity while Matar and Amarr Prime probably couldn't hold an atmosphere more than a hundredth or a tenth that of Earth. Barring exotic planetary compositions the conditions are going to be sufficiently hostile that nobody is going to survive long enough to make a sandwich let alone a spaceship.

It's a neat picture but the game information it draws upon isn't helpful.