Fungal missionary NPCs

[kevin.granade]

Yea totally, there’s no such thing as nuance or varying motivations and goals. Everyone falls into extremely specific categories and never acts contrary to the way you expect them to act.

Or mayyyybe, people are playing the game the way they want to, there’s an incredible variance in playstyles and therefore in the reputation of the PC, and “civic mindedness” of a particular player isn’t going to have much to do with their current reputation, but rather their own personal inclinations and goals.

Maybe a murder hobo type player will just bug out if they spot fungal infiltration, or maybe this is their favourite settlement and they like the bar here. Not even considering how the scenario would work except for the specific player archetypes you have in mind is extremely problematic.

[nameless_survivor]

Well what do you propose then? You have so far ruled out:

• Player warning a settlement because they happened to discover the truth: Won’t be believed.
• Player warning a settlement with physical or digital evidence: Won’t be believed.
• Player warning a settlement because they know the truth, and are respected and well known: Players won’t be “savior of the wasteland”.

Since you can’t convince people on your own, or even with evidence apparently, that kind of restricts you to being someone else’s messenger or something similar. Whether the player’s motivation is mercenary, civic mindedness, or arbitrary is immaterial in that case.

[Wayticus]

I didn’t see him rule out any of those reasons, he just pointed out issues that might arise if the player was the new comer to the settlement, and started accusing people who were established as trusted. Or started poisoning people in the settlement, the settlement of people who might know nothing about the fungal infections that can happen.

[kevin.granade]

I didn’t “rule out” approaches, I pointed out that you’re making some very restrictive assumptions about the player’s reputation and standing with the community, and that it’s a much more complicated interaction than you’re making it out to be.

Dismantling an apparently benign cult would be a complicated and multi-step process that it would take a long time to sort out. The very first thing I keep coming back to is you need to convince people that the cult isn’t benign, but instead of engaging with that you just keep glossing over it.

Basically you’re over-simplifying the hell out of a very complicated scenario.

[nameless_survivor]

Evidence IS how you would demonstrate they are not benign. You show up, warn the settlement (having found out previously about the fungus by any number of ways), they are skeptical and ask for proof, you go out and find it. Could be photographs of a nearby settlement that already succumbed & overgrown with fungus, lab data, or saving an NPC from that settlement from being infested by the creepy fungus preacher during a “go find this guy hes been gone too long” style quest. There are plenty of options for that.

After that, I suspect its time to break out the torches and pitchforks to storm the local fungus church, perhaps followed by a paul revere ride to warn nearby settlements. Quest chains to locate nearby fungal outbreaks and eliminate them, burn cultist compounds, find a vaccine or cure for fungal infestation, etc after that.

[Wayticus]

Not sure how finding another settlement that was infected shows the person you accused of being infected is infected and has malicious intentions, but if you can write up a quest chain like you described, that works, might be a nice thing.

[nameless_survivor]

I don’t think Kevin would want some sci-fi tricorder bullshit to scan people, so it would have to be physical evidence unless you can spike a drink with anti-fungal medication or something, and then that problem would likely solve itself. The suspected infiltrator would be preaching about the fungus, have marloss berries or fungal cult literature in their house, have obvious fungal mutations, etc. that proves their connection to the fungal cult, after that its only a matter of proving they are dangerous.

[Wayticus]

Okay so they are obviously fungus then, not trying to deceive the people into eating the berries and getting infected, but trying to convince them it is benign. In that case you should add into your mod, some settlements that know about it, and want to become part of the fungus so as to survive the new world order and things that are to come, and the player is then the bad guy and must fight their way out.

Spiking the drink with anti-fungal drugs is poisoning one of the trusted inhabitants, and would imply they were not openly fungus. Cause of course anti-fungal drugs would be bad for fungus.

[nameless_survivor]

In that case you should add into your mod,

My knowledge of c++ and lua is almost nonexistent, so if I was going to make this I’d need a LOT of help to do anything really good or sophisticated. About the only thing I can do right now is write dialogue for missions in JSON. I’m just starting to learn how to make things for the game, so something of this scale is out of my league for the moment. Plus it would necessitate having features which are currently non-existent, like random NPC settlements.

[Wayticus]

Well the settlements can be added like other buildings with json files, as for learning how to do the rest, learning new things is fun.

[nameless_survivor]

Can you make them procedurally generated in JSON? I thought they could only be static like that.

Learning new things IS fun, and I do plan to learn, its just that this stuff is not going to be happening quickly if you want me to do it.

[Wayticus]

I don’t think any of the buildings are procedurally generated, there are just different layouts designed that are pulled from. Take mansions there are only so many layouts for them, and the mechanics garages used to all be the same till the new types were added.
Designing the camps could be the first step in this addition, adding the quest would come after.

[nameless_survivor]

Yeah but every settlement would need to be a little different, you wouldnt want to have a dozen identical or nearly identical ones.

[kevin.granade]

after that its only a matter of proving they are dangerous.

Which is why this is literally the first thing I asked about, because its difficult and the whole thing hinges on that.

Basically, if a player has some kind of conviction that the fungal missionary is dangerous, they’re going to either have to do some digging (backtracking to the missionaries previous settlement if any seems like a good starting point), or expose something about the missionary (I’m not clear what there would be to expose), convince enough other survivors, perhaps with rhetoric and discussion, or go vigilante and take them out personally. A number of these approaches could bacfire though.

[Wayticus]

Every other building only has so many different layouts. Why would/should the camps be different? If you made enough different layouts, and the camps were rare it would be unlikely for a player to see the same camp layout twice in one game, with RNG it could happen.

The new labs seem the be very different, might just not of seen the same twice, cause those are also rare, not like houses, but it might be able to build the camp from different layouts spread over the different over map tiles, not sure how that is handled, but it looks like their layouts are in json files.

Maybe look over those see if you can grasp the code, if not pop on discord and ask for some help.

[TheZoneWizard]

If you want some realism added to a method of finding the individual or their infected party. Believe it or not a tricorder idea is not all that far off from what could be used. I know it was dismissed. But believe it or not they exist in real life. Just not magical in what they can do.

Radiation sampling and detection. Pressure measurements. Temperature ambient and specific distance via laser. Air sampling.

A device that can sample the air is uncommon. But they do exist. So if we fudge that for the game. We could hamfist a device with enough skill level or randomly find such a commercial device to take a reading of an NPC and determine if they have excessive mold emanating from them.

[nameless_survivor]

Hmm. You might be right. I do recall reading about air sampling tech used to monitor for bio-terrorism attacks in large cities.

BioWatch

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/terror/RL32152.html#_1_3

It would not be something you could construct, but you COULD find one in a lab, hospital, or maybe a military base.

Could be used to see if someone is emitting fungal spores or other bio-indicators of a fungal infestation. But it wouldn’t be something you would find and use initially, because I doubt a piece of pre-cataclysm biohazard detection gear would work on the mycus by design. Maybe have it be an item you go find for him so he can make adjustments to turn it into a mycus-detector.

[redxlaser15]

My thoughts are that this is an awesome idea. I’ve noticed that you seem to be filled to the brim with them! Although my favorite part is simply the ‘religious lumatics’ part

[redxlaser15]

Is there really this much ‘thought’ in mycus? I thought it had the intelligence of a regular plant/fungus and simply spread out of natural instincts and all that. Not spread due to some ‘join usssss’ idea.

[nameless_survivor]

Well, here’s the thing thing: These people aren’t actually crazy, because they aren’t really people anymore. Once someone is infested, their free will is overridden and they become meat puppets for the Mycus. The fungal religion is just a tactic to suck people in. Shortly after someone is converted, everything that made them who they were is gone. There is no faith or independent thought, they have simply become organic machinery to do the bidding of the fungus.

My understanding is that the fungus is a distributed entity with intelligence and processing capabilities proportional to its biomass. It is both one mind and many, working in concert, and gains the knowledge and experience of all it infests. I kind of think of it as being a cross between the Gravemind from Halo, Jain-Tech from The Polity novel series., with just a hint of The Borg from Star Trek.