Pathing out Mutants and Mutating Wildlife Arcs

[Croooow]

Make Monstrosities that are like the clowns from Dwarf Fortress. Random assemblages of animal parts all mashed together, and their attacks would be derived from the body parts they have. Heh.

[MrQwerty]

Perhaps some mutated forms of farm animals? They were left alone with no humans to take care of them so the only way for them to survive would be to rely on the power of BLOB!
They don’t need to be agressive or super-ugly or anything - they would just kind of revert to their undomesticated forms - pigs might turn into something resembling a boar, cattle will turn into something similar to Aurochs(long-dead species of wild cattle), etc.
The actually wild wildlife should get fungal forms(i am not sure if all of them have such forms), late-game netherium forms, some mid-game “weird mutant forms” and (as a mod) antrophomorphic forms.
The “weird mutant forms” would be things like double headed bears, eight legged moose(Sleipmoose?), giant wolves with three rows of teeth, etc.
The anthrophomorphic forms would be near-late game and should be something that can be easily turned on and off. Basically it would be something like werewolves, who occasionally say weird sentences(kind of like mi-go, just less inteligent - “me hunt now.”, “hungry… smell blood.”) and are implied to be caused by a combination of blob-mutations, netherworld influence and accidentaly drinking mutagen polluted water or eating mutated limbs/fetuses.
The netherium forms would be very rare abominations, maybe only spawning in some new location(eldritch forests filled with such creatures?) and wouldn’t have much in common with their previous forms - unfortunately, i don’t have enough imagination right now to come up with anything that doesn’t sound stupid.

Also, about insects - i think that insects might at some point become something similar to fungi/triffids - hive minds focused at expanding their dominion and bringing everything under their rule.

[Wally-kun]

The animals and insects that mutate and change would be parts of the environment, and not real factions in their own right. They can gather intelligence, surely, but I don’t think any pig or even ant civilizations are going to pop up over the course of a few years, even with the blob’s influence.

Speaking of which, more intelligent instances of animals wouldn’t be an unusual kind of mutant, but there would have to be a line drawn somewhere. Cats with human hands and feet and unnatural climbing abilities and two rows of razor fangs that tends to eviscerate random wildlife, dogs with a head covered in eyes that never stop watching you and lunge at noises, squirrels with oversized heads that attack with chisel-like fangs in swarms…maybe some smaller varieties of the rat king? Some sort of construct of rats that don’t, y’know, make you a rat person. Swarms of rats that break apart into hostile individual rats when you “kill” them.

Oversized bats that bleed you and go passive by cleaning a tile of blood? That’d be fun. Flesh-eating murder pigs? Moose with a crocodile-like snout and an appetite to match? Spiders with bulbous heads that physically launch their fangs out of their head fast enough to pierce kevlar? Horse-sized land wasps with a build like a centaur and charge you like a cavalry line?

The options are tantalizing and freaky.

[Logrin]

If we’re being lore friendly with the idea of mutated wildlife we could focus our ideas through a few scenarios:

1. Maybe the scientists didn’t -begin- with human trials
2. Maybe the experiments initially required ‘live’ donor matter from animals
3. Perhaps the long term effects of mutagen exposure were being observed in animals etc etc.

Any of the above would allow for the following “How to Mutant” method:

1. Take animal
2. Take an existing mutation tree
3. Mix em’

For instance, Dog+Cephalopod = Whelkhound; or Dog+Cattle = Bulldog

It would get particularly dangerous if say…Bear+Insect = Bugbear or Bear+Avian = Owlbear…

[MrQwerty]

[quote=“Logrin, post:9, topic:11613”]If we’re being lore friendly with the idea of mutated wildlife we could focus our ideas through a few scenarios:

1. Maybe the scientists didn’t -begin- with human trials
2. Maybe the experiments initially required ‘live’ donor matter from animals
3. Perhaps the long term effects of mutagen exposure were being observed in animals etc etc.

Any of the above would allow for the following “How to Mutant” method:

1. Take animal
2. Take an existing mutation tree
3. Mix em’

For instance, Dog+Cephalopod = Whelkhound; or Dog+Cattle = Bulldog

It would get particularly dangerous if say…Bear+Insect = Bugbear or Bear+Avian = Owlbear…[/quote]
This mixing of animals and current mutation trees reminded me of a proverb “When a bird shits on you - thank god that he didn’t give wings to cows.”… Bullpigeon anyone?

[pisskop]

I love the idea of mixing mutations, the problem being we cant currently simulate random mutations except by making then by hand. And thus we would need several kinds to simulate them.

I had a similar idea where a small proportion of a population would aquire mutations from any of the mutation trees.
Ambient radiation and radical natural selection would be believable enough in a world where a human can mutate under these same conditions.

Making the critters is simple enough if you use the base creature as a template.

[Logrin]

I had a similar idea where a small proportion of a population would aquire mutations from any of the mutation trees. Ambient radiation and radical natural selection would be believable enough in a world where a human can mutate under these same conditions.

That’s actually what I was trying to say. I’ll take a look at this ‘base creature template’ you speak of and see if I can think up any mutanimals

[Wally-kun]

Tentacle pigs.

It’s a regular pig, except its legs, tail, and eyes are all tentacles. It also wants to eat your flesh and destroy humanity. And can probably revive as a zombie pig.

[pisskop]

So now that Im all learnified in how do place effects, I can do that. For ants. And ant-acid. The creature kind, not the stomach meds.

What do? Combine wit acid-ants? Do the devs have an opinion on the proposed changes were I to begin altering the core game to meet the above suggestion?

[Chezzo]

Man, I wish you could give mutagen to your pet dogs. I would draw every single tile before the pr got merged.

Also, I wish you could ride horses. And mutate them.

[voskhod]

Boars. Definitely boars of some kind. Even regular boars can be dangerous and kill a person and they’re common throughout parts of east-coast America, so any mutated-version of boars will definitely be something worth looking to adding in the future.

[pisskop]

So wildlife.

First, a list of the selected wildlife I want to focus upon.

-dog
-wolf
-cat
-bobcat
-moose
-deer
-cougar
-bear
-coyote
-wcoyote
-blackrat
-sewerrat
-pig
-horse
-cow
-raven
-bat
-rabbit
-turkey
-weasal
-fox
-lemming

-chipmunk
-squirrel
-chicken
-raccoon
-opossom

And assuming that inverabrates and other ‘lower’ life is only partially affected by the blob, limiting their usefulness to the blob as meat and limiting their ability to ‘morph’.

Now, I do want ‘an optimal’ evolution for each, one that isn’t completely aloof from reality. And then I would want select numbers of mutations into a chaotic form or otherweise into abomination territory. And since each mon_id only supports 1 kind Id need a few per. w.e.

-dog (extinct (alive because dogfood item))
-wolf (zergling)
-cat (extinct (alive because dogfood item))
-bobcat (acidcat)
-moose (extinct)
-deer (minideer)
-cougar (Skittish small-game hunter)
-bear (megasloth)
-coyote (skittish smaller animal)
-wcoyote (small pack hunter/scavanger)
-blackrat (larger digging pack critter)
-sewerrat (humanoid)
-pig (pseudoboar)
-horse (strong rare fielddweller)
-cow (extinct)
-raven (large predator what flies)
-bat (swarms and groupmorale and aggo)
-rabbit (stays mostly same)
-turkey (make noise, larger)
-weasel (diggy predator)l
-fox (pikachu limited lightning)
-lemming (amphibious and more aggressive)

-chipmunk
-squirrel
-chicken
-raccoon
-opossom

[scorpion451]

• chipmunk (mostly harmless, but explode like a grenade/landmine when they die.)
• squirrel (speedy aggressive predator; think land piranha)
• opossum (snake like creature with muscular prehensile tail)
• Chicken (similar to the real-life version of the velociraptor- a small feathery whirlwind of teeth and claws)
• Raccoons (smart stealthy thieves. Wield knives/tools/firearms?)

[TheFlame52]

Opossums should pretend to be zombified.

[i2amroy]

So first thing first, there’s a bit of a “no-go” zone in terms of size things in relation to the blob. The specific cutoff is somewhere between the size of a dog and a cat and then doesn’t start up again until little insect size with only a few small exceptions like rats (this is the reason why you’ll see zombie dogs but not zombie birds/cats/squirrels). That said I don’t see any problems with having mutants in creatures that are not in that blob-reduced zone developing over time.

That said there’s nothing that says anything about them developing towards sentience or humanoid forms. If anything they’d be more likely to develop away from humanoid forms based on what they’ve been exposed to in the environment over time; the blob is a faction of chaos and change at the individual level, not order and sentience.

[pisskop]

Are you saying that theres insufficient blob to even mutate the little critters, like bats, into some new lifeform. Not even if it were a form of accelerated evolution?

[i2amroy]

Are you saying that theres insufficient blob to even mutate the little critters, like bats, into some new lifeform. Not even if it were a form of accelerated evolution?

The blob doesn’t do “accelerated evolution”, the blob does “massive rewrites of the physical structure without changing the ‘code’ beneath it”, i.e. your mutation changes aren’t stored in your DNA, they’re stored in the blob “infecting” your body. That’s the reason why you can “undo” mutations as the player back to your baseline; it isn’t until you hit a mutation threshold that the changes have accumulated to the point where your baseline actually starts to shift permanently. Cases like giant insects and zombies are slightly different cases in the respect that they’ve warped the laws of physics enough that the only thing really keeping them up and moving is the blob at that point; even if you were somehow able to remove the massively large percentage of them that is the blob infestation it would just kill them rather than causing them to “turn back”, just like you would die if we removed a bunch of your internal organs.

In animals that are normally too small for the blob (like cats) but not small enough that the blob radically warps them (like insects) you could probably see some very small mutations occurring in very small quantities over large periods of time due to the fact that they do still have a little bit of blob in them, which would very slowly begin to accumulate changes to their baseline and speed up the process, but you’re not going to be seeing cat people mutating up in any sort of timeline that the player is going to be present on (or heck, even cat people at all; since the blob is somewhat responsive to the environment you’d be much more likely to see cats with extra limbs/etc. than you would be seeing them somehow “evolve” towards a human paradigm). I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing some very small changes beginning to show up on a very large timescale, but we’re talking about the type of time length (years) where you begin to ask if any players actually are gonna make it this far or if at this point regular old housecats are still gonna be alive in any sort of sensible numbers that the player is still encountering them.

[pisskop]

Well, that sounds like I havent broken any rules yet :o

All of my animal/insect mutations have been relatively tasteful. We’re throwing around ideas here though.

[i2amroy]

Yeah, I’m not against the idea as a whole (in fact I think it’s definitely a cool idea and should be implemented); I just wanted to get the information out there that a handful of the smaller creatures (like cats, ravens, chipmunks, etc.) are probably gonna be things that should end up more in your “extinct” category or basically unchanging before you went and came up with some cool idea of “a flaming death raven but is totally balanced by X” or whatever only to have it get shot down.

Also something that might be worth considering for ideas is “what would this creature be exposed to?”. The blob does a fair bit of just random mutations, but a heavy driver of the more extreme ones is the environment that the creature is exposed to (shocker zeds develop from people with electric sources like bionics in their bodies, burning zeds can cause changes, heck, even radiation mutations is just the blob panicing a bit and trying out random things to deal with a much less obvious source of danger than most).

[scorpion451]

That “the blob doesn’t affect anything small except for really small stuff because…um…reasons.” bit of the lore is mostly a hand-wave for why there weren’t zombie cats and mutant squirrels running around, so if such things were to be added, it can just be thrown out the window.