I remember a few builds back, there was a bug where frozen liquids in containers would “explode” dropping it’s contents.
But, it started me thinking about cataclysms scenarios that have been portrayed in modern doomsday documentaries even to classic Twilight Zone episodes.
What if the portals caused the Earth to change orbit? Or spin faster? Or stop spinning? Or plunged in the sun or thrown from the solar system? Where you are truly screwed.
One scenario that intrigued me in particular is the highly elliptical orbit scenario. Where the Earth at close approach reaches near the orbit of Venus but goes outward to around Jupiter. Where the year would be longer and new seasons like years of winter worse than Antarctica would occur along with years of hellishly hot weather.
Of course this would be configurable in world set up.
What would need to happen game wise to emulate these scenarios? And, how would this effect the Zs, Mycus, Triffids, and other assorted characters. Maybe that Mi-go tower would be a good place for when it’s -100 F outside.
If you were to get winters as bad as Antarctica for years on end than nothing would survive. No mutants, no zombies, no mycus and no triffids. These creatures are only wide spread because they found earth hospitable enough and have similar enough bio chemistry. If everything where to freeze over than everything would die. Earth would than likely get colonized by a variety of truly alien nether creatures that come though the portals and suddenly find earth a lot more hospitable to them.
The zombies could/would freeze solid, as XOE37 still seems to work best in a fluid medium and very few of the zeds are bone dry. The Mi-go would have no trouble, though, as they can take hard vacuum with no distress. They’d be the only ones to do alright in this scenario.
For anything like this, you’d need ‘the Blob’ or a similar entity to keep feeding power sufficient to alter the environment just enough to make life harsh but barely survivable. It’s possible if there were a LOT of portals going to the right places, this might happen naturally, but it’s unlikely. At that point we’re talking fantasy physics that aren’t well defined, otherwise any of the above alterations to Earth’s position would result in global death of everything but the hardiest extremophiles.
Though, once someone gets the ability to get through portals implemented, that’d be a GREAT alternative world. Ice, tardigrades (PKs has them, I think?), and Mi-go everywhere. It’d make an ice lab look cozy.
Zombies get energy send over from another dimention by the blob. But otherwise they seem to work with the same biochemistry and biomechanics earth life does. (If you discount the blob reinterpreting genes and messing with metabolism to keep the body functioning)
That’s a tough thing to argue, as one of our core points in design is that the blob isn’t looking necessarily for something like a biochemically pleasant and habitable world. What it wants from our planet is by design not supposed to be fathomable (though mlangsdorf has commented that it could be thought of as “looking for a good fifth dimensional tactical spot in a chess match spanning unmeasurable amounts of time” - I like this not because of accuracy, but because it helps as a working model for why you can’t assume things).
The blob doesn’t care if zombies struggle to find food on CDDA-Earth. The blob is not ‘zombies’.
Given that earth is to the blob what a single cell is to us. I doubt that it would notice a gradual change in earths climate. So even if all of the zombies where to die off do to being deep frozen. It probably wouldn’t notice and I doubt that any nethercreature that came throught the remaining protals to colonize earth would be hospitable to the blob that inhabits earth life. (it seems to be tailor made to infect and mutate earth life and these creatures would need complete different bio-chemistry to survive a frozen earth). Than again we know that the blob takes other formes/infects different creatures in other dimentions so maybe the creatures coming through the portals to colonize earth is just a different version of the blob.