Honestly I think humanity will survive, afterall we are one of the most adaptable species that exist, we don’t have to evolve to survive in different climates/situations we CRAFT stuff that makes us able to do that.
It may be problematic if only one “big bad” came through the portals (slime or triffids or mycus) and could just run wild on their own, but as it stands now they will bash eachothers heads in giving humans the chance and time to adapt (and maybe even play em against eachother)
Now I’m far more worried about the oceans, who knows what lurks in there due to the portals feels like he is watched by Cthulhu and Dagon
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Surprisingly its just with random breeding. From what I’ve been reading the number of people alone can provide enough diversity to prevent too many issues from arising. no genetic screening, eugenics or breeding programs required. Though those would definitely be beneficial to such a population. But strictly speaking, more people is always better.
https://genetics.thetech.org/ask/ask113
Besides, I don’t think it would be necessary even if I had much fewer people, and no access to more, and here is why:
Genetically speaking, the only problem with inbreeding is that it can make harmful mutations and recessive traits become dominant in the offspring, reducing the viability of the population. If everyone is genetically sound, the problem is simply the social stigma. I have read in game documents stating Purifier Serum will cure harmful mutations and even remove pre-existing genetic defects. As long as everyone takes a hit of Purifier Serum before having children (I usually dose everyone I recruit, to give them a blank slate), then the issue of harmful recessive traits evaporates. You would eventually end up with a population whose appearances are rather homogenous, but in the very long run natural mutation/adaptation should remedy that. Humanity, as well as other species have experienced some pretty nasty genetic bottlenecks in the past and survived. We could do it again, and having something like Purifier Serum available would make survival even more likely.
On that note, regarding my game in particular, I already made a bunch of purifier serum to cure any survivors I find who have unpleasant mutations. IIRC I have a steel jerrycan full of it atm, or at least partially filled, and I definitely have the resources to make it in bulk if I wanted more. Making a 200L drum of it would not be out of the question for me. On top of that I’m also not actually finished recruiting yet, and never will be; I’m planning to recruit practically every single person I find. For all these reasons, I don’t think genetic diversity is going to be an issue for my particular group of survivors.
I’m also building my underground vault city like a fortress. The entire city’s architecture is being designed and constructed with redundancy and defense in mind. Defensive points, combination civil defense shelter/armories, turrets everwhere, steel security doors/airlocks, distributed storage of utilities and supplies, everything I can think of. Also, in addition to every single person being armed/armored to the teeth my army of military robots will be on guard and on constant patrol (if commanding them ever gets implemented). I am unconcerned with exterior threats other than something that could just outright destroy the planet or just immediately destroy everything. If a portal opened up in my city, or some other subterranian threat pops in for a visit, I have ten suits of power armor I’m saving for an emergency response team. They, along with the militia and defense systems, will kill any unwanted guests, or worst case keep it isolated until the area can be sealed off, likely with a controlled tunnel collapse of the section. Since my city is going to be more like a bunch of small self sufficient cities crammed together than a single big one, the loss of any given section will not compromise the survival of the whole.
Just because our old cities and towns were vulnerable to the phenomena of the cataclysm does not mean new ones need to be. You just need to build and plan carefully.
Also, in the very long term, this city will only be the first. Once the poulation hits about 600, I’m going to build another city in either another bunker or the necropolis I secured. And then I will build another, and another. One bastion may fall, but two shall take its place.
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I have no idea, but if someone knows how I would LOVE to try. It would be nice to stress test my defenses and see if there are areas that need improvement. But I suspect the answer to how long my fort could hold out will be for practical purposes “forever”.
See, I’ve got a vortex generator, and materials for three more so I have a large infinite power supply. Even without that, I still have a truly massive number of salvaged solar panels/arrays, storage batteries, plutonium cells, and like ten spare minireactors for power. If I used them to power a bunch of laser cannons at the walls, between them and the barbed wire and spike pits, I’m not sure if any number of enemies would be enough to cause a breach.
If I pulled back to the underground, I could definitely bottleneck any force to a two wide corridor and hold them off indefinitely. I’ve got chickens for food, and water extraction CBM, and I think you can make protein powder out of tainted meat.
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Classic RTFA.
“It would not be a significant factor as long as the space travellers come home or interact with other humans at the end of the 200 year period.”
“O’Rourke believes that a more serious concern would be the presence of potentially damaging genotypes in the initial space pioneers. Genetic screening might well be needed”
That 150 number is the population size necessary to make a generation ship viable for ~70 generations, and is more focused on the viability of the workforce and social interactions than genetic diversity.
The accepted number for whole-species population seems to be about 500 according to Space colonization - Wikipedia
You’ve been misled, purifier does not reverse existing genetic defects, only mutations.
On a more general note, the details of your setup are irrelevant to the discussion. For one thing, if you have a vortex generator, you aren’t even playing dda, you’re playing blazemod. For another, theres a gap between the setting and the current implementation, so some things you can do in the game are not representative of what is intended to be possible in the setting.
Well shit. Inbreeding would still be a problem then.
I have read it, thank you. Perhaps I should have been more clear. A population of 150 buys at least two centuries of time for a community to build, stabilize, and make contact with or absorb other groups of survivors. Every new person found adds more time to the timer. Sounds like good odds of species survival to me, since there are a number of enclaves out there.
For my group in particular, I like the odds even more since I found almost that many in less than a year. Assuming default static/dynamic npc spawn rates are finalized or at least a decent representation of what you want to see. I don’t think blazemod or any others I’m using messes with that.
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If purifier doesn’t cleanse bad genes, can we go the other way and use mutagenic serums to write over the problems? A person born with a disease that makes them fragile and hampers their ability to recover from injury could be given troglobite mutagen and medical mutagen, and the intolerance to sun could be removed with smart shots. A person with a mental disability that brought their int down to 1 could have 9 with the application of alpha serum.
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Not reliably. Also have fun with all the genetic damage that the game doesn’t portray because it’s not going to kill you immediately. It’s kind of funny that people think that heavily mutated individuals are going to be able to breed with anything resembling normal outcomes.
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But what about cloning? Oh yeah, misshapen fetus. vomits
Mutations can happen in real life as they often do. But in drastic terms as we have in the game. Not so often. Thankfully so too. When things go awry, we see people with flippers and mostly useless mutations. I imagine something like this happening in the game as well. Much like Kevin would be concerned about.
Most folks seem to like to fantasize about things going well. But reality bites. Bites hard and often.
Cloning would lead to a problem just as quick. The same thing was given as example in Season 2 Episode 18 (Up the Long Ladder) of Star Trek TNG. While science fiction. It also details a rather realistic dilemma. Making a copy of a copy and so on will eventually be just as bad as inbreeding past 6+ generations. Assuming you didn’t mind screwing your relatives(literally). You could produce at least 5-6 generations of sister luvin without to much genetic mishap. Then again…it is a gamble.
Another interesting thing to consider when discussing genetics. How humans break down the barrier to cross breed species(look up genetic tampering in food). I forgot the exact agent used(Tetrotodotoxin?). But I think it is something like a virus strain that breaks the barrier of the host organism. Then the scientist removes certain genes and replaces the sequence they want with another gene sequence. Put it either in a womb or a petri dish. Whichever. Then see what happens.
What is my point here? It is pretty darn specific. Even then. People don’t always know what they will get. So randomly chugging cocktails to get a mutation willy nilly is perhaps a…bad idea.
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I smell an infertility trait
We might need to talk to Tarn Adams on that one. Guy should be writing books
His brother Zach writes all the lore, though.
Why would there be a long-term limit of less than 150 people in the breeding pool? While settlements of 50 - 100 people might not be able to maintain the gene pool on their own, they are not completely isolated. There are likely other settlements of similar size around, along with other smaller hamlets. It would only take occasional contact and intermarriage with other settlements (or even random wanderers) to keep the gene pool at a healthy level, so unless settlements are completely isolated the number of people per settlement isn’t really much of a limit.
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Yeah, the situation in Cataclysym is bad, but even in Lore the way things are portrayed makes complete human extinction laughable unless everyone has a int of like 3 or lower. Life would never be the same, and I guess if you don’t count Mutants as Humans then I guess you can say Humanity will go extinct, but as is given time Humanity will just recover and adapt, especially since none of the major threats actually make use of technology beyond stuff that was already stuck inside them.
Though exact chances would probably vary from Player World to Player World, “No NPC” worlds for instances are by default fucked.
The remnant population of humanity is scavenging from the ruins of our technology base. The next generation of technological advancement is never going to happen, because the networks of researchers, engineers, designers, and manufacturers have been completely and irrevocably disrupted.
In the meantime, the Blob is evolving its zombies to become more and more of a threat to the remaining humans, and the Mycus is overwhelming the world just by breeding.
How do you figure that humanity is going to come out on top of this? The technology we had didn’t stop the Blob invasion, and there will be no future technological revolutions.
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I’ve always argued that if it wasn’t for humanities automated defence systems going haywire, humanity would of been able to weather the initial storm relatively well and it’s hard to argue that the automated defences aren’t still the dealiest things around regardless of if you agree on the first point.
The technology isn’t completely lost either, there are still working computers with stored information, books and working examples that can be reverse engineered. People wouldn’t have to be rediscoving everything from a stone age level of understanding, it would quickly become a priority to anyone in power with a vision for the future that as much of this information is retained as possible and people with working knowledge of it held in relatively high esteem. It would probably be the single job catagory you’d find yourself in that wouldn’t require you fighting at some point or another, pretty much anyone else would be considered a combatant and required to act as such.
For humanity to survive would require some quite drastic changes in how things are done and how people live their lives, society would by necessity be far more militant and regimented with little person freedom. Practicallity would be valued above all, peoples lives would be very demanding and harsh by modern westen standards and individuals would be considered far less important then the collective.
Fortress cities and settlements, either above or underground, would probably become the norm. Think great walled cities with heavy artillery, sharp shooters and search lights on the walls and towers. Priority would be given to training up combatants, food, ammo, weapon production, the refinement of these four things and their improvement.
People would be indoctrinated from a young age that humanities survival is the highest priority and that their ultimate goal is to retake the planet from the invading outsiders, dissenters, I imagine, wouldn’t be tolerated in the slightest.
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I never said the technology was completely lost. I said there will be no next generation of technology. There will never be an iPhone to replace the iPhone X; there will never be a release of iOs 1.13, nor an Apple A11 microprocessor nor any ARM v8.4 cores or an ARM v9 specification. And the same applies for everything else: no next generation Boeing airliners, no new spacecraft, no improved GPS receivers, or anything else. Humanity can scavenge and repurpose existing technology, but won’t be able to improve past what existed before the Blob.
Great walled cities require huge amounts of farmland - roughly 1 square mile per 2000 inhabitants. You can reduce the farm footprint some with more labor intensive cultivation and a blander diet, but people working as farmers are people who aren’t working as guards or researchers.
I just don’t see how humanity is supposed to overcome the Blob.
you are forgetting insects got bigger, giant cockroache farms, they breed quick, are not very dangerous, and can eat our waste.
Roof tops devoted to growing food, window baskets etc would elevate some of that. hydroponics if decent renewable energy can be achieved. As for the tech, most of the examples you just gave are largely frivolous only the last three really have arguably military application.
Space travel would simply have to take a backseat to more immediate concerns, modern aircraft are potentially a liablity considering all the crash sites and GPS can be done without. Faster computers and better phones simply wouldn’t be a priority, they are an unnecessary luxury when you get down to it.
Dealing with outsiders, innovating on food, weapon and ammo production, streamlining training, developing new tactics etc would be where people would be expected to focus.
Also this:
Like I said, harsher and more demanding. Anything that wasn’t going to benefit in the survival of humanity and fighting back against the invaders would get put so far on the back burner you’d need to install an extra stove behind your main one.
Edit: @mlangsdorf (not sure If I posted this as a reply to you but it should of been)
Anyone who thinks humanity is going to survive this, let alone easily, hasn’t been paying close enough attention.
The blob evolves over time, but the number of survivors remaining are insufficient to push further human advancements in any meaningful way. Skeletal juggernauts and zombie masters are the very beginning. Just because we haven’t programmed further stages yet doesn’t mean they won’t happen. They are alluded to in the lore.
The ecosystem is utterly ruined. Even if the surviving humans could somehow resist the zombie threat, the decimation and reanimation of wildlife, plus the presence of giant insects, will lead to complete biosphere collapse in a few years. Over quite a short time as giant locusts and similar creatures consume the appropriate amount of plant matter for their body size, deforestation will advance soil degradation and large swathes of land become desert.
The oceans are now full of giant undead predators as well. It’s hard to even predict what the zombification of whales and sharks, and the mutation of molluscs and crustaceans, is going to do, but likely we’ll see rising BOD from rotting meat and algal blooms as sea life continues to die off.
The planet is dead, its muscles are just still twitching. Remaining humans might be able to eke out an existence for maybe a couple decades, but eventually it’s going to become a barren waste and the only things moving will be undead.
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