How To (Theoretically) Combat The Cataclysm

Game Talk The Bunker
1

I’m aware this isn’t an option as far as the game is concerned, but I still find myself wondering what it would take to, if nothing else, salvage what’s left of the planet after the cataclysm inevitably spreads across the globe.

So here is the situation from what I have gathered.

The US is ground zero and got the shit beat of it. What’s left is the Old Guard hanging out around the east coast. 99% of civilians are dead and what’s left is people like the player. So basically nothing.

Don’t know about the rest of the world. Assuming most (or even some) of the major powers of Europe and Asia are intact and functioning, that means there are several human military powers still on the field. I don’t imagine their combat capabilities are too much beyond what we have today, with the inclusion of powered armor, bionics, and maybe more than their fair share of nuclear weaponry.

That is, of course, assuming EVERYWHERE isn’t ground zero for the Cataclysm. If that’s the case, then everywhere is like the US and humanity is in much deeper doodoo…and the doodoo was pretty deep to start.

The blob’s, y’know, the zombies, and let’s make the assumption here that survivors want to maintain their individuality and aren’t too keen on becoming one with the Shroom (cuz I sure wouldn’t be). The blob and the fungus are the two biggest concerns, in my opinion - neither can be reasoned with and both are constantly spreading and infecting the environment all the time. These are more or less what we’re trying to beat back to save the planet, or at least maintain control of it. Triffids are generally hostile but can be reasoned with…theoretically. Everything else is just sort of milling around or its own variety of baddie.

Controlling the spread of the fungus is going to be monumentally difficult. One spore could restart the entire process all over again. Honestly I don’t know how you could ever truly be rid of the fungus from the ecosystem.

Same with the blob. If the main collective ever realized it was being genuinely challenged or that it was losing control, it’d respond, and…we’d lose. Like…that’d be it. It’s not all-powerful but compared to even a fully functioning earth, it might as well be. If the blob phones home, we’re done. Game over. Probably literally, too.

I don’t see much in the way of allies. The Triffid hearts have the potential to be reasoned with, but honestly they’re more like governors on the forefront of a massive Triffid colonial effort, so even if we did find a few that were willing to play nice, they wouldn’t be all that much use to us. The odds of getting help from anyone from the Triffid home dimension is probably zero, so that’s not an option either.

Apparently Mi-go are a civilization, but they’re A: slavers, and B: I don’t know if they’re much more powerful than any human civilization. I doubt they’d be much of an “ally” anyway.

Looks pretty bleak. Do we have any real options to work with I’m not aware of? How do we salvage earth?

2

We may not be able to eradicate the enemy (“Shroom”, heh) but we could manage or neutralize it. A toxin or a micro-organism that kills over 99% of them would severely restrict their ability to function, and they would just blend into the Earth’s ecosystem as another dangerous species - a species that propagates aggressively but also dies fast, thus staying in check, ceasing to be a total threat. They tried to mutate all of us, but instead we killed or mutated their asses (or butt-equivalents) to adapt to our world.

3

Burn everything down, and rebuild from the ashes.

It’s one of our strengths as humans.

We aren’t the biggest, strongest, we can’t fly, our night vision is poor, etc.

But we still thrived, we still conquered the planet as the main “apex predator” - for lack of a better term.

As a species, our prime traits is: extraordinary intelligence, and endurance. We can use tools, communicate, co-ordinate with teamwork and a whole bunch of other qualities attributing to our intelligence. Our endurance is another quality. We can walk and run for days without stopping (our early ancestors hunted by chasing an animal to exhaustion), any injuries done can take days and weeks as opposed to years (or never healing at all), we can create items and work as a community to aid in our survival.

We are the only species that you can find in basically every part of the globe, we are the only species that can use abstract reasoning, thought, and problem solving, the only one to use complex tools, etc.

We don’t have to overpower you, all we have to do is outlast you.
And outlast we sure will.

I’m pretty confident in a scenario like this, humans can pull through. All the monsters and extraterrestrial species shown have little more than basic or a hive-mind mentality. The species with the superior intelligence trumps all.

Even gameplay wise, it’s shown. A capable survivor, with careful planning and a myriad of useful, learned skills, can and will survive.

As long as the human race joins forces, we can make the Earth great again. We can salvage what is left and rebuild. It’s what we’ve been doing for the past thousands of years, and I’m sure ass hell it won’t grind to a stop now.

4

I like the hung-ho enthusiasm, but I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

The blob is intelligent, just not on an individual level. Think of the many blobs as cells of a body. It, too, is capable of action. They’re also always changing all the time.

Containing the fungus would be easier comparatively, but it’d still be a lot of work - work that we might not be able to complete in time to save entire countries. Fortunately the fungus appears passive, even while multiplying, so gratuitous chemical application will shut them down in large areas. Again, though, it’s a matter of manpower, and there could be as many as millions or as few as thousands of humans left on earth. I also am pretty sure we don’t have enough fungicide to cover entire continents just laying around.

I still don’t know how to deal with the blob. Their constant evolution puts a wrench in the works and if we ever pushed them too hard they’d just kill us.

5

Sorry to kill your Humanity Fuck Yeah, but the blob has contaminated the ocean. That means there’s a little bit of blob in every gallon of seawater, all over the ocean, which makes for a lot of blob - and it’s all connected. The best we can do is work with it. We might be able to push back triffids, fungus, and the other nether creatures, but the blob is here to stay.

EDIT: We’ll probably have the easiest time with the other nether creatures. There aren’t very many of them and according to lore, they can’t stray far from the portals. Ten men with guns can kill any nether creature save maybe a few. They’ll be gone soon.

6

I’m not completely convinced the Triffids need to be beat down. Some of them will, but we could do with some neighborhood plant people as neighbors and they’d definitely appreciate the breathing room to expand borders of their own. We both want to keep the land secure and un-tainted and we could learn a lot from them.

If nothing else, they’d be a great tag-team buddy to kill the fungus with.

7

The fungus is willing to work with humanity, so far the triffids have done nothing but try to kill people.

8

The MYCHUS is willing. I have a hard time telling where the shrooms stop and the Mychus starts, and I think they scare people enough to be by and large considered an enemy. We can’t comprehend the kind of future they want for us, being a piece of a collective. We can’t tell if we’d be assimilated or overwritten, or if there’s a difference.

I’m sure people would be willing to listen to what they had to say, though.

The Triffids haven’t been communicated with yet, so they treat us like part of the environment. If talk is possible we’ll have to figure it out and force them to listen. Cooperation would benefit both of us but it depends on a lot of things.

9

Isn’t it in lore that the blob is present in small quantities in humans?
I’m not sure about the amount of blob in mutants, but I assume there’s an assload of it in zombies.

Mycus seems to evolve, yeah. But if action is taken early on, it’s nothing a flamethrower or some molotovs and a rifle can’t fix.

Triffids follow the same rule.

Actually, scratch that - if it’s a problem: burn it.

10

At the moment “man is the real monster” as all the biggest threats in the game are either humans (“DROP THAT ROCK OR I’LL SHOOT”) or made by humans (tank drones).

Only the meanest of zombies can stand up to an unskilled survivor willing to get their hands dirty. Triffids are weaker than zombies and also edible. Fungals burn well and their infections can be cured with known medicine.
Out of the “wild” threats, only jabberwocks and shoggoths are really, really dangerous. And both of those go down to pre-cataclysm firearms or even just a band of spear-wielding militia.

The biggest mid-term danger comes from bandits and mutated bandits. That’s the only thing that can stand up against a band of organized humans so far in the setting.

Then there may be new threats, like mutant diseases, low life expectancy (child born with rot mutation is as good as dead), evolved versions of current enemies, nether invasions, oceans of blob, cataclysmic weather effects, but those aren’t expanded upon at the moment.
So at the moment it looks like Africa on steroids, where you die to malaria or conflict rather than to tigers.

11

i’d think the blob-ocean could be solved with the right chemical compound, to be honest.

12

keep-calm-and-call-for-exterminatus.png600×700

13

Hm I might be mis-remembering but I recall some lore snippet from some time ago that while the blob indeed started in North America (specifically New England where we are), but when the government started bombing the labs to try to stop it, it triggered cataclysmic (ha) failures of the portal containment fields. Causing inter-dimensional portals to show up all over the globe.

The US and Canada may well be ground zero for the blob, but the whole world is dealing with mycus, trifflids, and mi-go. And the blob can easily spread to other areas of the world if it hasn’t already. Other countries will fare better I imagine, by the time the blob reaches them they would probably have enough info from the states to know ‘this stuff makes zombies, do not imbibe’. But they are going to be busy for awhile dealing with the invaders on their own soil before they can even start thinking of working together to unfuck the rest of the world.

Speculation Edit:
I’m guessing the EU and most of Asia would probably be among the first countries to get their problems under control to start looking to making permanent progress. Mexico would probably also fare better than the rest of North America… Especially if trump built the wall. If I understand correctly Mexico has been getting their shit together pretty well in recent years, I imagine that would continue into the near future. The third world is probably fucked without easy access to anti-fungal medicines and the like.

14

Anti-fungal medicine and pesticide is not some rare superduper first world exclusive drug -_-.

Next you’ll tell me the rest of the world is fucked because they don’t have penicilin.

I could understand it if it were nanomachines, radiation bullshit or something similarly fancy, but not something that basic.

15

Does any single country have enough fungicide and fungal drugs stocked to deal with a sudden massive threat popping up randomly across the countryside? I doubt it. It needs to be manufactured en masse rapidly, and then transported to where it’s needed.

Maybe I’m just being a ignorant American, but it does not seem like the majority of the third world has the chemical manufacturing output to produce a large amount of the stuff at the drop of a hat, nor the means to easily distribute it.

16

It instantly gets rid of arm-shattering limb-replacing full-body infestations of extradimensional alien motile fungus. It’s overpowered as fuck.

Truthfully, by the time the infestation gets that bad, you should be dead. You’re a fungus now. Like…drugs shouldn’t help you. But that’s another thread.

I don’t. You know how big the ocean is? It’s huge. And it’s connected to everything. You’ll never purge the blob from the water, no matter how much poison you dump into it.

Third world countries are more or less equivalent to the survivor’s situation, but without as many cars or huge buildings and cities to pick from. Still rough, plus less than ideal terrain to deal with. Safe to write them off as dead, or otherwise not very useful to the rest of the world anymore.

If anyone has a chance of surviving and functioning, it’s Europe and Asia. Pretty much all boils down to if the other half of the planet got pockets of dimensional critters spewing out of them and if they tried to bomb them. Their government might not react the same way, and there’s no telling how much information they had access to before they skipped to the bombing phase, cuz as soon as they realized stuff is getting supernatural they’d look for the nearest payload to dump on that shit. Hopefully they had warning.

If they didn’t…well. Guess we’re all up this creek together now, huh?

Even if other countries did lose 99% of their population, they have nukes. Odds are they’d start using them. Liberally, if they can’t produce enough fungicide, which they probably can’t. Fungus and Triffids are the only viable targets.

I don’t know about the blob; the zombies are all milling around in areas of dense infrastructure, which may contain resources that governments may want to get their hands on. I guess you could nuke their slime pits, but I’d be scared of pissing the blob off too much. Go nuking their nurseries and eventually they’ll decide to turn the heat up.

I think we really are forced to live with the blob. So zombies will never really go away, and all funerals are via bullet and-or cremation for the foreseeable future.

It’s really down to how many humans are left. We can brute force a lot of the problems we’re seeing with technology available, but if there isn’t enough manpower then there’s going to be problems.

17

[quote=“Greiger, post:15, topic:13033”]Does any single country have enough fungicide and fungal drugs stocked to deal with a sudden massive threat popping up randomly across the countryside? I doubt it. It needs to be manufactured en masse rapidly, and then transported to where it’s needed.[/quote]Drugs? remember it’s over-the-counter stuff, and 99% of the population is gone. If anything, everyone has too many drugs.

Fungicide? this is stuff produced for farm work much like pesticides, to be sprayed over large areas. Just about every country that produces food has stockpiles and may have production. And it’s not like fungicides are all that complex to make en-masse, particularly if you don’t give two fucks about toxicity or killing the plants/animals.

If all else fails, just about every country in the world has access to helicopters and gasoline. Fuel air bomb / napalm the fungus.

[quote=“Wally-kun, post:16, topic:13033”]It instantly gets rid of arm-shattering limb-replacing full-body infestations of extradimensional alien motile fungus. It’s overpowered as fuck.[/quote]That could be said of just about every medicine in the game, including the ones that are generic ones. It’s more of a function of the fungus being weak as fuck in order for the survivors to have a chance of getting rid of those infections than of the strength of the medicine.

[quote=“Wally-kun, post:16, topic:13033”]Third world countries are more or less equivalent to the survivor’s situation, but without as many cars or huge buildings and cities to pick from. Still rough, plus less than ideal terrain to deal with. Safe to write them off as dead, or otherwise not very useful to the rest of the world anymore.[/quote]-_-
because everyone knows third world countries don’t have cities and everyone travels around in donkeys, and it’s all breaknecking hills that goats look at in fear, and deserts.

Cities and cars are pretty fucking common. Go to the poorest country in the world and you’ll find them, hell, you’ll find trafic jams everywhere. Nevermind in a few decades from now. Terrain is not all that different across the globe.

Now, you’ll see a difference in electronics (which are either dead due cataclysm, or if not, a far cry better than the USA’s situation in the game, and survivors there can deal with the local threats), high tech medical equipment (ditto), electric/communications/internet infrastructure (same), you’ll see some variance on the breadth and depth of skill/knowledge specialization (99% useless).

The military would have fancier toys, but the military are kinda out of the fight in the USA, and the older guns aren’t that far behind. It also means you won’t see turrets, drones and robopolice killing survivors, or tank drones. Nukes are only going to make things worse for the countries that use them, not better, the blob thrives on that stuff.

You may see more gasoline/diesel vehicles than electric, but then again, they’re still more than serviceable and you can make diesel.

You won’t see CBMs, but you won’t see shocker/scientist zombies either.

Gun proliferation would affect things dramatically, but it isn’t too tied to the country’s wealth. Plenty first world countries have stringent gun laws, plenty poor countries have significant gun proliferation.

Presence of industrial infrastructure also varies, plenty poor countries have a lot of industry that takes advantage of cheaper professionals and manual labour.

They also won’t have radiation boosting the enemy, or bombs destroying things and altering portals, or as many portals as the US.

Even if other countries didn't lose 99% of their population, they have nukes. Odds are they'd start using them. Liberally.
Most countries are happy [i]not[/i] using them. And since it makes things worse, most countries that did the sensible thing and tested before trying would not use them.
18

The world population is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Assuming a worst case scenario and everywhere was as fucked by the Cataclysm as New England we’re left with a 1% total global population after the first five days of 97 million people. Obviously it couldn’t have been that bad everywhere, so the potential survivor population could easily jump upwards dramatically. The biggest limiting factor would probably be how many people in relatively unaffected countries and regions starve due to the global economy collapsing in short order and before things stabilize.

Edit: Like Coolthulhu mentioned, something like an acid rain front, fungal spores launched into the upper atmosphere, or other temporal weather effect could cover vast distances in a short amount of time and effectively sabotage an entire country that might’ve gotten through the Cataclysm otherwise unaffected.

19

Hey man, I don’t live in a third world country. For all I know they look like medieval villages with paved roads.

The idea of hyper-advanced, insanely fast-growing yet physically frail super-fungus seems contradictory to me. Then again, it’s totally alien to us - maybe our fungicide has properties that don’t exist wherever the fungus evolved. Maybe it really is super powerful, we just happen to have something it never had to stand up to. Lucky us.

People do have a lot of fungicide, but not enough to potentially dump over thousands of miles of huge fungal fields and forests expanding like wildfire. And it has the potential to spread that far, because no one is going to have their act together for quite a while. Organized response will be clumsy until then.

Are there any plans to include aquatic varieties of fungus in the game later on? If we have to fight over our water supply with the fungus I think things will get a lot harder.

God the ecosystem is so fucked. I wonder what the acid rain did to the forests and farms.

20

Just a question: what part of the lore implies this “the blob is SO much stronger and SO much smarter than us that there’s basically no hope of pushing it back because if we did that, it would push back harder and kill us all, and basically we’re only continue to hang on by a thread because the blob doesn’t think we’re important enough to finish off” concept? I get that the fungus is dangerous as fuck, and rapidly evolving, and inundated literally everywhere on Earth, but I didn’t think it was THAT powerful.