Please no random aboveground flaming eyes

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

So this last run was going pretty well. Got to summer, built a car, was driving around… Then I got stared at by a flaming eye. I didn’t notice for about 5 tiles or so, then I hit V to check where it was - Was nowhere to be seen. Must’ve been miles away in the first place. So I accelerate hard and avoid getting stared at a second time. “Phew”.

The night after that, I park my car in a garage and get myself to sleep in the car. Next day I’m reduced to 0 stats across the board. I literally just sit there. Zombies come, I kill them, but I don’t even have enough strength to smash their corpses, so they get back up and eat me. Game over. Nothing I could’ve done. Just by being stared at from a distance by a random encounter. Not cool.

2

Erm… What? This sounds like a bug…

3

Flaming eye gives you teleglow, teleglow gives you spore infection, spore infection reduces stats to 0. At least I think that’s how it works. checks code

EDIT: Well, something like that. Can’t find the actual place where it reduces stats to 0, but I guess it’s this part:

    // we're fucked
    } else if (one_in(6000 + bonus * 20)) {
        g->add_msg_player_or_npc(&p,
            _("Your hands bulge. Fungus stalks burst through the bulge!"),
            _("<npcname>'s hands bulge. Fungus stalks burst through the bulge!"));
        p.hurt(bp_arms, 0, 999);
        p.hurt(bp_arms, 1, 999);
    }

I had that message come up quite a lot of times.

4

hmm, remove flaming eyes because they killed you. anything else killed you ?
You might not be aware, but there are people pushing for more monsters than can present some kind of danger to chars.

5

I like the random above ground flaming eyes :frowning:

I think you just got extremely unlucky with the play through, it happens to everyone.

1 Like
6

Well getting killed by something you didn’t even see coming, or had no chance of preventing is annoying.

The real bug is that the vines spawning do not wake you up.

7

Can’t believe that the fungus bulges in your arms didn’t wake you up.
They don’t give pain? I thought pain wakes you up.

Also, why didn’t you just run away in the car you were in?
Also also, rivet added pharmaceutical fungicide, so getting rid of nasty teleglow side effects is easier!

@title Flaming eyes are hoars; you should snipe them with the readily available 75 range rifles on sight.
But yet they are fun to watch destroy cities if you circle them.

8

https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/issues/6106 made an issue out of it.

9

It’s not really “random”, since there most likely was a portal nearby. (If there wasn’t, then it was a bug, they shouldn’t spawn randomly).

10

Oh, I was awake the whole time. Couldn’t move. 0 strength and all other stats. It was pretty much instant death when all my stats dropped to 0 with zombies in the vicinity.

11

[quote=“Ferodaktyl, post:4, topic:5070”]hmm, remove flaming eyes because they killed you. anything else killed you ?
You might not be aware, but there are people pushing for more monsters than can present some kind of danger to chars.[/quote]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:5, topic:5070”]I like the random above ground flaming eyes :frowning:

I think you just got extremely unlucky with the play through, it happens to everyone.[/quote]

Honestly, I get that this is a roguelike community, but I think “If you die, it should be your own fault” is a pretty decent concept for a game. I’m fine with being presented a challenge that takes all my wit to live though, I’m not so fine with driving by an enemy in the distance at 50km/h and that somehow inflicting a lethal disease on me. I imagine I’d be pissed off even worse if I were a new player who doesn’t know about teleglow.

The point is, flaming eyes were fine when they were underground in labs. There you knew you’d have to be careful and avoiding the flaming eye’s gaze was not so difficult - simply close the door. Above ground, all the balancing factors to this are lost, and the thing just becomes ridiculously OP. In a car, even a jabberwocky would be a less dangerous thing to spawn than this.

12

Flaming Eyes seem like relics from a forgotten era (original Cataclysm) these days. It’s nice having them around.

13

[quote=“CIB, post:11, topic:5070”][quote=“Ferodaktyl, post:4, topic:5070”]hmm, remove flaming eyes because they killed you. anything else killed you ?
You might not be aware, but there are people pushing for more monsters than can present some kind of danger to chars.[/quote]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:5, topic:5070”]I like the random above ground flaming eyes :frowning:

I think you just got extremely unlucky with the play through, it happens to everyone.[/quote]

Honestly, I get that this is a roguelike community, but I think “If you die, it should be your own fault” is a pretty decent concept for a game. I’m fine with being presented a challenge that takes all my wit to live though, I’m not so fine with driving by an enemy in the distance at 50km/h and that somehow inflicting a lethal disease on me. I imagine I’d be pissed off even worse if I were a new player who doesn’t know about teleglow.

The point is, flaming eyes were fine when they were underground in labs. There you knew you’d have to be careful and avoiding the flaming eye’s gaze was not so difficult - simply close the door. Above ground, all the balancing factors to this are lost, and the thing just becomes ridiculously OP. In a car, even a jabberwocky would be a less dangerous thing to spawn than this.[/quote]

I think you have a valid point there. Always carrying around anti fungals just for this reason is a bit silly.

I however never had problems with them. Perhaps the teleglow effect should be limited in distance.

14

[quote=“CIB, post:11, topic:5070”][quote=“Ferodaktyl, post:4, topic:5070”]hmm, remove flaming eyes because they killed you. anything else killed you ?
You might not be aware, but there are people pushing for more monsters than can present some kind of danger to chars.[/quote]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:5, topic:5070”]I like the random above ground flaming eyes :frowning:

I think you just got extremely unlucky with the play through, it happens to everyone.[/quote]

Honestly, I get that this is a roguelike community, but I think “If you die, it should be your own fault” is a pretty decent concept for a game. I’m fine with being presented a challenge that takes all my wit to live though, I’m not so fine with driving by an enemy in the distance at 50km/h and that somehow inflicting a lethal disease on me. I imagine I’d be pissed off even worse if I were a new player who doesn’t know about teleglow.

The point is, flaming eyes were fine when they were underground in labs. There you knew you’d have to be careful and avoiding the flaming eye’s gaze was not so difficult - simply close the door. Above ground, all the balancing factors to this are lost, and the thing just becomes ridiculously OP. In a car, even a jabberwocky would be a less dangerous thing to spawn than this.[/quote]

Hmm. I’ll accept that you ought to get one Stare more-or-less of grace, let you know that the eye is active. Flee or kill NOW. So perhaps move the one-in-10K (disease.cpp at 1181) chance of fungal infection to the 8-teleport level, move the one-in 5K for hallucination to unrestricted as compensation? That would require three back-to-back (effectively, four) stares to get into the danger zone.

Removing eyes from topside altogether, however, seems overkill. Frankly, with their Destroy-All-Sightline-Blockers Ray, I’d prefer to remove 'em from labs. How exactly DID the scientists keep the eyes contained? :wink:

15

Use blinding sand and mirrors, how else?

16

They didn’t. Eyes are one of those things that didn’t show up until the portals fluxed and the labs collapsed.

As for avoiding a flaming eye’s gaze, you can’t, even underground. The game literally draws a line from them to you and destroys anything it can’t see through that’s in the road. As for their effects, I’m not too worried about them. They will only spawn above ground when there is a portal nearby (or you have an artifact calling them) so you can avoid them if you aren’t ready, and the chance of actually suffering from fungal infection is minuscule, and even then fungal infection gives plenty of warning in time to fix it.

17

That sounds stupidly OP. Can I level entire forests with a single flaming eye? Do they destroy vehicles?

18

You should be allowed to carry a mirror around as a shield and turn flaming eyes upon themselves. Or kill them and tote their corpse around as a terrain-destroying weapon. Worked for Perseus.

19
20

So THAAATS how they got into my evac shelter basement!

That was a weird start, I had holes in my basement so I walked through, and ended up wandering around the subway, day 1.