The current rework of insects and spiders got me thinking. How else can we make arthropods more interesting? And then I realized that while they are supposed to be cold-blooded both in real life and lore wise (can’t be seen in infrared) it doesn’t seem to effect their behavior.
Wouldn’t it be an interesting addition to make giant arthropods slower or faster depending on the ambient temperature. Something similar to a cold-blooded player with between either a 20% decrease or increase of their total speed depending on the temperature. This would simulate the insects getting slower and lethargic during the winter or at night and the getting faster and more active (and dangerous) during the summer and day.
do zombies freeze during winter? no. then why should zombie spiders(bees, lobsters, flies, frogs, whatever) be affected by temperature? they just get all the warmth they need from the blob because blob is magic.
No, we know for a fact that zombies are warm blooded but insecten aren’t (zombies can be seen in the infrared spectrum while insect can’t). There is also a big difference between the undead who get all of their energy from the blob and living creatures that still need to find their own food, water and nutrition. Insects becease of their heavy mutation get a free pass om certain bio-mechanical limitation to allow them to reach such a great size. But they are not zombies that get energy from blob voodoo.
animals very much are affected by the blob, not just mutations, you only have to look as far as woodland wights, but theres a whole list of em: zombees~ (… well mabye not zom-bees… but.)|
plague nymphs and flesh raptors for examples of arthropod zombies… well mabye not flesh raptors… cause they’re made of human parts? they’re described as being relatively insect-like though.
All of the examples you named are of zombies not mutated but living animals. Living animals even if mutated still need food. The best example of this is the player since no matter how much you mutate you still need food, water and oxygen unlike zombies who need non of this. It is also the case that arthropods can’t be made into zombie’s as any gaint insects killed won’t revive but rot away instead.
plague nymphs being classed as zombies seems to be a oversight since their adult forms aren’t considered zombie’s and they lack all of the universal zombie traits: They don’t revive after death, they eat food that is on the ground, they can drown and they are totally non-aggressive and will run away instead. The explenation given is that they are roaches that feed to much on zombie corpses and got run away mutations as a result.
I certainly know that insects aren’t warm blooded (nor are fish…). In the game world it’s a different matter, however. The game’s giant insects aren’t visible in IR, while its fish are (I haven’t checked the tags for giant insects, but the fish has a tag that marks them as warm blooded).
In the real world there are “cold blooded” animals that actually maintain a constant core temperature (white shark, tuna, and large marine turtles [or possibly tortoises: I don’t know what differentiates them] for instance).
Thus, there are three different sources of info:
The real world
The game lore
The game implementation (largely in JSON files in this case)
I just think it would be interesting to have insect be more or less dangerous depending on the temperature. This would mean that insects would be far more dangerous in summer and during the day. While you might want to wait till winter to clear out a bee hive.
You’re asking the wrong person, as I don’t know the lore (if there is any), nor anything behind the decision process for the game design/implementation.
However, since you ask I’ll provide an uninformed guess: Shark are scary creatures living in water, the game is about dangerous scary stuff, and so shark were put into fresh water even though they’re ocean creatures because fresh water is close enough (or something along those lines).
What kind of Sharks? Bull sharks can live in both fresh and salt water and can transition between them - as in they swim up rivers. They are also one of the most aggressive species of shark and are quite large.