It’s 2spooky even though it doesn’t make much sense in the game’s universe?
Honestly I think sporefall would be downright terrifying. Spores fall and cover nearly everything, like what happened to that military squad in the lore. You either evacuate immediately, taking what you can, before the spores… well, effect the locals.
Idk, maybe a nether portal collects the blood of the nearby fallen creatures and disperses it every once in a while. Collecting blood rain with the funnel method might be a way for thirsty, sustainable vampires to live. Didn’t even know it was a reference to dwartress because I don’t play DF much.
Maybe something could go haywire and make it rain the black goo, too - something to do with those crazy slime pits. Going outside would make the character slimed and a bit pissed off they’re covered in sticky black goo. The blob droplets aren’t big enough to create actual blobs though; would probably be way too hard to code anyway.
Some kind of medical lab that’s all about cloning, artificial organs and artificial blood?
Create bacteria that can create human blood from basic components.
Cataclysm hits.
Bacteria starts multiplying in the wild.
Ends setting up colonies in the clouds.
RAINING BLOOD FROM A LASCERATED SKY!
I’m getting hungry now. Anyone got crackers?
I’m getting hungry now. Anyone got crackers?[/quote]
Sorry, AllisonW, your crackers are in another neither-realm.
I’m getting hungry now. Anyone got crackers?[/quote]
Sorry, AllisonW, your crackers are in another neither-realm.[/quote]
What? They are neither here nor there!
It was meant to be a nod towards DF when I suggested it, but yeah, its just for an element of the bizarre.
As for how and why? I guess it could be a side effect of the Nether Portals, realities getting intermixed and reality freaking the fuck out because its just not something that’s meant to occur. It really drives home of how BAD opening a portal to another world should be, its not what your meant to do, and the laws of nature, physics, ergo reality itself just doesnt agree with it. And thus a Cataclysmic event/season/radius triggers where everything just distorts and things just go absolutely up shit creek with no paddle.
That’s just a take on the ‘why’ it happens. I’m sure others could come up with better.
Perhaphs in theory, something that doesn’t belong in a different dimension via ideas, thoughts, elements, and technology. and even perhaphs physics could cause issues for matter could follow different rules… and then the more you pull from a side of a dimension say through the wall, the wall would probably be keeping the objects in dimensions seperated… now something in the wrong dimension heading into the right diminsion would probably take significantly less energy and cause less or even no damage. but with sciency guys and their sciency ways put a metaphorical flame to the wall to bash it open with a sledge hammer, that causes holes which as tears in reality letting things inbetween the wall to leak through… just a theory
Sporefall would be the fungal equivalent of a nuke launch.
But if it would unescapeably happen after some time since fungal tower spawning - it would provide player with good incentive to do something about them.
To expand on that angle: the physics involved to breach the barrier between two dimensions might actually be the cause of the distortions. Our world is relatively stable, though the math ceases to make sense past up and down quarks (smallest bits of atoms we can find afaik). The other reality might be foreign and hostile, but it’s probably similarly quite self-contained and semi-stable in that sense.
Then you have this massive hole where we’ve played cat’s cradle with string theory(? I don’t know what theories would better describe dimensions normally accessible to us) and made a tangled mess of it called a portal. I suppose the closest working comparison irl would be the black hole - though this ‘working comparison’ is inaccurate, it demonstrates the idea: imagine the black hole on the other side has an opposite-world that is accessible (far as we know, not true but let’s pretend anyway). The distance between the event horizon and the gravitational singularity to get to it is literally too fucked up spacetime-wise because black holes effectively take gravity to broken levels. So getting to the other dimension involves passing this spacetime wringer.
I like to imagine portals must be wringing reality in some fashion, though given things are coming through, clearly not as 100% destructive as the black hole comparison. So perhaps anything horribly distorting would be more like a threat to overcome for eventual nether-world adventures.
Except then you’re stuck with the original problems proposed: the nether world isn’t a world we evolved in and it is very, very hostile. But now just getting to it hurts harder too. Yes? No? Good idea? Awful as hell? Helpful to lore or just wrong? I’m spittin’ thoughts to kill some time before going out today.
Well, if I remember my Lovecraftian lore correct, that’s pretty much it.
You have these other realms that are like our world, just different. And as utterly horrifying to us as ours is to them.
The issue also isn’t the things from the other planes.
The issue is all the jolly men that happily pass from one plane to another for shit and giggles without breaking a sweat. The kind of people that make Shoggoths and Mi-go cower in fear.
I’m still more concerned with how lethal the door is than either room on either side of it. My room is full of npc @'s who fucking shoot my kidneys out, and theirs is full of Mi-Go’s. I know how lethal that is. Do I WANNA use the portal? Is it inherently dangerous too?
YES! FOR !!!SCIENCE!!!
Sporefall would be the fungal equivalent of a nuke launch.[/quote]
Mycus soft endgame is a spire large enough to get spores into the jet stream. Soft because 1) I don’t like to have my character taken from me for “winning”, 2) Our progress will be sped greatly by additional colossi, spread in other areas.
You’re just getting more ‘hardcore’ as the message count piles up on the thread.
Lovecraftian heritage perhaps has a lot to do with nether monsters and portals, but the whole “seasonal” idea is profoundly roguelike-ish and echoes on its Elona counterpart.
“I love it! I LOVE it!” 
Even if you embrace the Etherwind’s sheer love of all things growing and witing, you would have to recalibrate the almighty CataDDA lore to understand exactly what you’re doing with the Sun and the Moon, and all things eternal. Going all nuclear-fallout on everybody’s ass is like watching moths rushing towards the flame, ending themselves in the process. On the other hand, all the introduced species are abrasive and contrasting from one another - the Vines extending the forest’s hand, the one that never grabs the dead before the Goo does, which shares a weird undeath-symbiotic with the Fungs. Even rebirth is compromised with exceptional abominations from the Nether realm, so even the perfect circle has its spikes.
One another lore-ish, yet fantastic example is one of the Sign and Stars so many roleplaying games use. You can go all HOMM and call the whole bunch a “dwellings item”, so your creatures gain strength in numbers and perhaps some favor from the gods. Since Magicka isn’t an issue with CataDDA, you could call TES portion of this a sort of a buff, a sort of a blessing that happens every now and then; that is, if you introduce a grand-mix of faith and piety before understanding how it works over the climate, and what it yields to creatures other than yourself who also “live” inside this game.
I dunno if the whole thing is a trapdoor to “the underworld of Lovecraftian belief system” but it sure would be nice if someone explained why it’s suddenly raining apricots the next time I attempt to play the latest CataDDA build.
giant tree made by the triffids that just happens to drop apricots every now and then in a large area
I’m already a fan. 
Corrosive gas could check for item’s acid resistance to determine how well it protects (something like environmental protection * acid resistance / 10), but having gas actually damage items would be pure bother and tedium - currently all items are easy to repair, it just takes player action to do so.[/quote]
Perhaps we could say it’s an ammonia based fog? It’'s mildly caustic, quite irritating, and in significant quantities, suitably lethal.
I’ve generally considered the ‘acid rains’ to be some manner of dilute, yet pain stimulating organic agent (formic acid or some other carboxylic relative) as they wouldn’t completely obliterate our environment or rust away metals in a single shower, while still being a notable hazard.
An ammonium fog of some sort would follow the same logic in being another common organic material that could reasonably form a significant component of an alien ecosystem, while ALSO providing players with yet another useful resource to be harvested (using refrigeration units to build vapor distilleries.)
[quote=“vultures, post:76, topic:8560”]You’re just getting more ‘hardcore’ as the message count piles up on the thread.
…
but it sure would be nice if someone explained why it’s suddenly raining apricots the next time I attempt to play the latest CataDDA build.[/quote]
As for ‘blood rain’ specifically, that seems a bit too Dwarf Fortress. Too thematically HELL DIMENSION OF LOST SOULS! It ‘could’ be quite feasible for some of the alien portals to be connected to an unimaginably huge creature that also happens to use an iron based circulatory fluid… but it’s not the first impression that would be made by a Blood Shower.
If it was going to rain any sort of bloodied mist, I’d… nah. I mean if this were an aquatic environment, a LOT of sedentiary species send their children (fertilized or otherwise) out into the world via dispersion.
Maybe not spores, but imagine something venting a nasty bloody mist into the air to make wee ones (or like… whatever bloodied waste those alien ships expelled in the newer War of the Worlds movie. That shit was morale-crushing and grotesque). Maybe this stuff wouldn’t work unless it settled into an environment that suited it like its’ homeworld, I would be against something that blanket-infected the player like a spore bomb.