I’ve been toying with the chemical thrower lately for dealing with fungal beds. It kind of works, but it’s hard to justify doing it instead of just waiting for the rain to stop and burning things at the moment, because of time, cost and various problems.
The big thing is that while reload times are better than they used to be, they’re still pretty bad. It takes my guy 7 minutes to fill the thrower with launchers 4, about 7500 moves. At launchers 0 you’re looking at a whopping 10280 moves to basically pour a liquid into a hole. Honestly, it probably should take the same amount of time to reload a chemical thrower regardless of how good you are with a grenade launcher - it’s really just filling a fuel tank, what’s to learn?
As a (semi cheesy) workaround, you can (U)nload the 2l tank of fungicide into the thrower to cut it down to almost instant, which is good because otherwise I’m giving the shrooms 7 minutes to spread while I swap out tanks, which is just plain frustrating.
Another issue is the amount of gas you can make. The 1000 units of fungicide the thrower holds is only good for 20 shots, or about a third of a fungal bed tile. It used to be a laughable 10 shots, but I think it could still use some improvement. That’s 500 fungicide, 100 sulfur, and about an hour and a half to cook up. provided you’re finding fungicide rather than crafting it, which will add another time sink on top. That’s for one tank, you need about three of those for one fungal bed.
If it’s a fungal flower blossom thing, you’d better bring four or five because that crap spreads fast, and the fungal haze field seems to fight your fungicide cloud.
Another minor thing I noticed while trying some things in my test world is that there’s no container set for sprayable fungicide, so you can’t wish it up in a usable form, you have to craft it or you wind up with a puddle.
Yeah, given how trival and brutally effective fire is on fungal beds, the chemical thrower would have to be both ammo cheap and have a pretty nice area of effect to be a worthwhile alternative.
Overall I feel that the fungal stuff currently just spreads too quickly. If you accidentally sleep for a couple hours with a fungal bed in active range you wake up in a completely alien world. For a foreign life form that is supposed to ‘have difficulty’ surviving in earth’s environment, it appears to be way happier than any earth plant with our environment…
Of course, that entire massive fungal growth and everything that spawned in it is exactly one click of a lighter and about 10 minutes away from total annihilation, so… meh.
I’d say that the fungal thing kind of wants to be re-balanced overall, with fungal beds spreading far, far more slowly, but being essentially fireproof - requiring a player to get to the chemical tech to make inroads against them - and with the fungal monsters themselves having some considerably more dangerous variants that start to pop up as fungal beds grow too large, or in close proximity to the towers.
Right now the only threat they pose at all is through fungal infection, which is either super deadly if you don’t yet have survivor-level environmental protection and anti-fungal drugs, or is a complete non-issue if you do.
Sounds like the fungicide itself could use a boost.
Based on the fact that the fungus spreads through spores, we could assume that the various fungal creatures would make an effort to blow said spores around and spread the fungus. If airborne fungicide were introduced to a fungal area, the creatures might disperse it and spread it around like their spores, causing even more damage. It could be treated like fire or a disease, automatically spreading a certain distance and between already fungicided creatures. To a degree at least.
You could also make an advanced fungicide that actually is a bacteria/disease/what have you. Sufficiently high cooking could produce an “advanced fungicide” that is extra effective and powerful. If it were a bacteria you could also make more just by feeding it, which would make acquiring more a breeze.