I’ve made a long list of craftable armors like bone gauntlets and boiled leather armor.
Materials range from leather to metal and bone to chitin. But while I was busy clearing out a fungal bloom and butchering corpses, I noticed that I can’t seem to find any kind of material that ties with the fungal creatures in the game.
From frogs you get leather, from bees and wasps I get chitin, and from almost everything else I get bone. But from fungal creatures I don’t get what I think should be in the game which are fungal plates.
If you didn’t know, plants and fungi are separated kingdoms in the “tree of life”, a couple of the differences being that fungi cannot produce their own food while plants can, and that plants are made of cellulose while fungi are made of chitin.
Yes, Chitin.
The material found in insect exoskeletons and bird beaks. That tough material that makes mushrooms hard to bite into
I believe the material would be easier to acquire and is obtainable in greater quantities then regular chitin, and that it would be slightly stronger than insect exoskeleton. However the downsides would be a large increase in weight and encumbrance and it to be very susceptible to fire.
So in conclusion fungal plates need to be a thing, it should be a valid material for crafting, and I want to add mushroom armor to my collection.
Tl;dr - Fungal plates need to be an item that you can butcher off fungal enemies and it should be a valid crafting material for armor.
It does sound like a good idea, maybe to make it more appealing for use would a PC could harvest spores from the plates and effectively grow the plates in their basement?
Or it could be used for trading; if NPC’s are enabled.
[quote=“Rot, post:3, topic:9624”]It does sound like a good idea, maybe to make it more appealing for use would a PC could harvest spores from the plates and effectively grow the plates in their basement?
Or it could be used for trading; if NPC’s are enabled.[/quote]
If it’s possible (and I don’t know if it is), fungal armor plate’s schtick could be self-repair. No need to break out the welder, just wait a bit.
not sure about harvesting “plates” maybe “chunks” which can be turned into fungal vehicle plating?
seems like a really bad idea, but not necessarily something you should be prevented from doing… seems to be on the same vein as: you can put a pot of magma under your bed if you really want to…
Yeah, it seems like there wouldn’t be many options between “turn my vehicle into a giant fungal brick while I’m sleeping” and “kill all the fungal stuff with fungicide”. I mean coating it with fungicide wouldn’t be that good for it (it’s like coating you in cyanide, and then expecting you to live and grow; not gonna happen :P). And if you don’t coat it then it is going to try to spread, so yeah.
triffid bark would make more sense for that purpose, though there could be a harvestable ground cover species of fungus that was not quite so invasive, that self repaired. it could spread in the world by a central stalk that bloomed yearly and floated seeds out ~15 squares. the ground cover could extend ~3-4 tiles from center at max?
it’d be neat atmospheric area.
I’m all for condensed and concentrated mushroom chitin, but the self-repairing is a bit much. I also assume that given the fleshy consistency of mushrooms that their chitin is not particularly dense, and thus would have to be compressed or purified from other materials in some manner. This would, naturally, kill the actual living fungus and also leave no room for self-inflicted fungal infestation.
So maybe it’s just a way to generate chitin (which, by the way, is actually rather laborious to do from hunting and skinning insects, even with an absurdly high survival skill). It takes a fair lump of fungus to get a plate of chitin, but that’s the lovely thing about the fungus: it spreads at almost uncontrollable rates. Boil it down after its spread a bit and compress what’s left into a paste and let it harder, or something of the like; boom, actual chitin plate.
Other than that, fungal armor only sounds like a good idea for someone already infested with the Mycus, which WOULD be self-repairing because it’s actually alive. Chitin from the fungal matter would certainly be fatal to the fungus involved.
a self-repairing mushroom based covering would most certainly be very weak, but if it was very thick (6"-12") then it could have enough HP to withstand some attacks from normal-ish things. It would make your vehicle sooooo heavy though.