Short story:
Midgame survivor engages a group of about dozen fungaloids in perfectly open field with rm42 combat knife and full evioromental protection after sleeping one day near a lab. After killing about half of them, he dies. He explodes. But its not just his arms exploding, its whole body, torso included.
Reason? Fungaloid teleported into me. And there was no portal in sight. Probably one undergroud, in room full of fungal menace. This means that everytime you spend some more time in or near labs, you risk very very small chance to be instantly killed by invisible danger. Heavy power armor wont help. Nothing will help.
While dying because of teleporting into a wall seems reasonable, telefraging makes no sense balancewise. Maybe it should be deadly to that fungal, not survivor in this case? Any thoughts?
I do not think anything needs to be changed with the randomness of portals. They are anomolies, after all.
However, I think there needs to be a way to alter the portals in a way so that the player can use them for fast travel or eliminate them entirely if the player wants to not have the above mentioned risk looming over their head. Is the teleportation cbm a thing in the base game? I can’t remember anymore, but anyway, I very highly doubt a cbm specifically designed to teleport the user would be as random as the anomolies. It is a designed technology, it should have at least some degree of reliability of tunneling you in the direction you last moved into. It’s obscenely more likely for a tunneling to occur in the direction the object is moving into than in the opposite direction of its momentum. Some variance is to be expected so you could go a little to the left or right of your intended direction but the chances of your going in a completely different direction is simply infeasible. Nevertheless, a less than a percentage’s chance of going the other way is still a possibility.
Same goes for artifacts. They are a technology, their teleport effects if they have them shouldn’t be entirely random direction.
Portals can stay random, but i am ranting about telefraging things. Stepping into portals or teleporting yourself should be dangerous, but thats you willing to take the risk.
Some possible solutions out of my head:
Teleported crature dies instead of the one teleported into. After all, if you teleport into a wall, its you who are destroyed, not a wall being destroyed.
Push creature one tile if there is enough space.
Maybe bigger creature allways survives and smaller dies regardles which one was teleported? But this still is unfair.
Normally portals arent that dangerous. BUT hidden undergroud portals in small, closed rooms full of endlessny replicating enemies are telefraging, slow-firing machineguns.
If 2 creatures share same tile then Both creatures knocked back in random direction with damage from the concussion of the teleportation
OR
If creature is @ location of teleportation then it is knocked back in random direction with concussion damage
Extra space has been forced into your immediate vicinity! Your thrown off your feet by the concussive arrival of additional matter!
you try to get back up!
your ears are ringing!
you try to move but are too shell shocked!
The triffid hits you
you get back on your feet
…etc…
seems like a much more fun way to make this kind of thing play out.
I could actually get behind a weird physics explosion from the instant arrival of new mass, even as much as telefragging will have a special place in my heart.
is everyone sure is not a bug?, i swear i have seen some mobs teleporting some tiles, i was aiming a zombie recently behind a wire fence, and after 2 or 3 turns, it teleported 4 tiles south, no portal, no roof, no other zombies to push him around
Did it “teleport” or just “jump”? I can confirm there’s a bug (since more than a year now, not sure if a bug report exists yet), where creatures can/do jump a few tiles if they are near a wall or other structure (however, they can’t jump into the same tile as you are and it will/would not end in the player’s death).
It’s possible to easily replicate this bug by setting the speed to the lowest possible value (1%), start a new world and chase around some wildlife (it’s visible on some of the still moving Zombies too, but it’s harder to pin down what actually happens). If you chase (for example) a squirrel in a straight line towards a tree, it will jump diagonally a few blocks, more than its walkspeed would allow.
Settings: Circular distances activated, z-levels deactivated (might work with other settings too).
Anyway, back to the topic: I agree, it’s a bit too harsh. If I was in that situation, I guess I would savescum (shame on me )… I quite like the idea of Litppunk, maybe add a weak explosion on top too or something along these lines…
Definitely sounds too harsh to me. Death being somewhat unforeseeable is fine (e.g. they might teach you to peer round corners, or not go to certain places unless you are super strong), death being literally unavoidable is not.
but tiles are a relatively large area, there would be a good chance for the creatures “entry point” to be very near but not inside the player, and if we assume non euclidean geometry is in place through the wormhole (portal) then all that matter is coming out from a central point which then shoves all mater out of the way in a shockwave exactly like an actual explosion but with minimal heat created
Which makes me think of coming out of a portal sucker punching someone along crest of the shockwave (without breaking own hand with the stupid fast momentum of white-holing and having fist hit something at the speed of a shockwave)
However if we are assuming a sudden placement of matter in an already occupied location (somehow without EVER allowing atoms to place inside one another) in a Manhattan Project kind of way, that also somehow avoids having air placed throughout solid objects (exactly as it was before a solid object arrived on top of it)
then…
hmm I guess everything essentially becomes mush upon teleporting into another solid object like a steins; gate banana. Which would definitely be instant death.
Yea, if we talk realism, as far as talking realism about teleportation goes, then most realistic outcome would be both creatures dying. But whats the point? I believe in this case romoving random unavoidable death > strict realism.
I know its a niche case, and most players wont ever get chance to play with portals, artifacts, CBMs etc. And probably less that 1/1000 players will die this way. But video games are better when they stay fair no matter the scale. And there are some good ideas in this topic that are realistic enough, yet do not cause instant RIP.
The problem is less likely to occur in normal circumstances, standard creatures are very unlikely to walk into portals and telefrag you. But this combined with broken nature of fungi… And the fact that most labs have at least one fungal room, allways with portal, some fungaloids, often enclosed. Sleep one day near and that room is 100% full of mobs, that still want to replicate. Hell, even one sporecloud can telefrag you. And they are spewed out of this anomally quite fast
Well in the case of of white hole INSIDE another creature the creature the original is spattered around the arriving creature. Lore could claim that the formation of a white hole, while fast causes extreme discomfort that any intelligent creature would move its body out of - before proper formation.
This would give humans and other non-robot/non-zombie creatures dodge wormhole making them suffer from concussion from being next to, rather than splatter death from formation inside.
walls would operate the same with understanding that they have no give I guess, alternatively they could get replaced by a half destroyed wall or something? while still killing the arriving creature.
)… I quite like the idea of Litppunk, maybe add a weak explosion on top too or something along these lines…