I searched the forums a bit, but only found a few threads pertaining to Nether creatures and Jabberwocks. But nothing on this The Blob. Even the wiki page is barely a stub.
So what the heck is this amorphous black muck? Is there any official lore out there? How fleshed out is it? What are your own thoughts on what it might be?
The Blob, or XE037 as the XEDRA scientists called it, is one of the three big factions in Cataclysm: DDA (originally, it was the only faction, AFAIK).
It is the source of almost everything: The Zombies, The Mutant Animals, The Mutant Creatures, what Mutagen is made out of, what Blobs are made out of, and most importantly is what has infected every living being on the planet.
Every living thing has some Blob in it. Every human, every animal, every mutant. Different lifeforms have different reactions to the blob.
Mammals: In mammalian bodies, the blob will multiply until an amount equaling 1% is inside the body. Then it becomes inert. However, upon the death of a mammal weighing at least 50 pounds, The Blob will become active and reanimate the corpse, with the features of the reanimated body being based on cause of death, damage done to the body, foreign bodies inside the corpse (think all of the cybernetic zombies), what resources are available to the blob and what it believes are currently the most desirable traits (itâll either make a zombie thatâs physically strong/has some kind of power, or make a zombie thatâs smart, like a Zombie Master, Zombie Scientist, or Zombie Grenadier). Zombie Animals seem to be exclusively physically based, though, with powers being unheard of (Smoky Bear notwithstanding).
Arthropods, Fish and Annelids seem to grow in size significantly. This seems to be limited, because only so many animals grow in size (you donât see thousands of giant spiders, for example). Entire ant colonies seem to mutate, though, so Iâm guessing that the blob will choose to concentrate in certain animals or groups of them to induce mutagenesis. Oddly enough, some fish turn into zombies.
Birds seem to be unaffected. For now, at leastâŚ
The blob also has mutagenic properties in its purest state, which is why Tainted Meat and Blob Globs can be used to make Mutagen. The Blob is essentially sentient stem cells, and these make up all of the Subprime/Nether lifeforms, with the exceptions of Triffids and Fungals. Adding different materials and DNA to mutagen allows it to create different mutation paths. When they mixed it with animal DNA, they got Bird, Lizard, the Beasts, etc. Plants got the Plant Mutation tree. Mixing it with Pharmaceuticals got Medical. Focusing it and giving it via injection got serums, and they also derived Purifier from it. Alpha was made with the lofty goal of making the perfect human, before everything went to Hell.
Chimera was made as a sort of âcrowd controlâ mechanism; the unstable mutant would kill as many zombies as possible before the numerous unstable mutations killed it, Elfa and Raptor were never able to be tested, because of the fact the world had ended by that point.
Anyway, the XEDRA scientists were actually being pretty responsible about the whole thing, except they didnât know that The Blob was sentient, and it caused a sort of spatial surge at multiple laboratories at once and broke out in the carnage, infected the water table, then the rest of the population. People didnât realize what was happening at first (in the States at least) because of riots over a peacetime draft. However, that ended quickly (5 days between the first zombie reanimating and the start of the game).
Anything else you want to know?
i think of it as a non sticky slime organism . and when cut regenerates cause its slime and has singular cells that has little brains that connect together when contacting another slime.
Most of your post is already somewhat common knowledge found through lab computers and such, but this part I was unaware of and I find rather surprising. What level of sentience are we talking about here, and how has this been displayed by the blob. Apparently it is able to communicate with other members of its kind over long distances, as described in the lab breakout scenario. Does this suggest some form of hive mind?
What the heck is a spatial surge?
Background story? Where does the blob come from? Is it from our universe or is it an extra-dimensional entity? Is it connected in any way to the Nether creatures? Did it evolve, or was it created? Does it need food or water or does have some other way of taking in energy?
Except of course for those things which have been infected or taken over by Mycus or Triffids, but then weâre getting into a whole new (but related) ball of was on the histories and relationship between these three factionsâŚ
The Blob comes from a universe called âSub-Primeâ, which is just a name that human scientists gave to the Nether. Earth is Prime, for reference.
Iâm actually not 100% sure what the Nether Creatures are. I know that theyâre either made from the same stuff as the blob (the same way that Humans and Daffodils are made from DNA/Carbon and other elements), or the Blob is the DNA and Nether Creatures are whatâs made from it.
The Triffids and Mycus are on the same level as the Blob; theyâre basically factions who have the biggest claim on the Nether, along with The Blob.
As for how intelligent it is? Itâs either alien smart (smart in a way we canât comprehend) or smart like a computer. Computers can do more calculations than humans ever could, but they canât get abstract concepts.
Something I forgot to mention is that (at least, according to lore I once saw) The Blob is using all those zombies as biological supercomputers, calculating how to better use its resources.
How close is the slime mutation tree to The Blob itself? The Blob seem like some sort of slime(in a way) so would the slime mutation tree be the closest link to it? If so, it could be the strangest and most dangerous to your human sanity. However, this may be the closest one could reach The Blob without lethality involved, and perhaps how humanity will figure out the âcure.â We may need to not get purely the physical properties and such rid ourselves of it, maybe weâll need part of the mind as well. It is sentient, which will very possibly matter.
Beyond human comprehension hyper intelligent, but it doesnât take much notice of humanity.
The blob itself is a hyperdimensional being, all blob cells are part of the same organism. Itâs less that itâs a hive mind and more that itâs a single organism that is distributed throughout the multiverse, Humans arenât capable of interacting with it in terms of organism-to-organism, humans just interact with its individual cells.
The actual Cataclysm event was a planetary-scale weakening of the normal barriers between our dimension and the foreign dimensions the blob, triffids, mi-go, Mycus, etc exist on. Effectively during the course of human experimentation into other dimensions, they attracted the attention of the actual organism composed of the Blob, and it decided to colonize our universe. Just a moment later and it was done, the Blob had permeated the entire surface of the planet, and in doing so it opened the path for other opportunistic dimensional aliens to use their own means to travel to Earth as well. From that point on, the majority of life on earth was infected with the Blob and the zombie apocalypse was inevitable. As if that werenât bad enough, the weakening of the dimensional barriers allowed innumerable other aliens to gain entrance to our dimension, rampaging across the planet and either establishing colonies (the Triffids and Mycus) or simply raiding the planet for various resources (various Nether creatures and mi-gos). Over the next several days of utter chaos, the vast majority of humanity was wiped out, and the Blob, Triffids and Mycus solidified their presence.
Extra-dimensional, donât know, donât know, donât know, donât know.
Slime mutations have nothing to do with blob, other than the fact that itâs the blob causing all mutations.
All mutations are based on the blob editing DNA, usually by copying foreign DNA into the host organismâs cells. this is the basis for âflavoredâ mutagens, you stimulate the blob to trigger mutations and simultaneously flood it with a bunch of foreign DNA of a particular type, so it ends up being much more likely to incorporate traits found in that source DNA instead of from elsewhere.
The blob story is similar to the Orz from the Ur-Quan Masters game. 
They said they are from the outside, they are fingers, not like other races who are many bubbles. They came into our dimension because the Inter-Dimensional Fatigue experiments that were being performed by the Androsynth. They prefer our dimension over their origin dimension and are now in the process of fully moving into it. Well, they are also a spacefaring âraceââŚ
6 posts were split to a new topic: Random ranting about humanity