Triffid, Blobs, and Fungaloid Expansion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I think the biggest change that needs to be made is to the wilderness. If you have the required skills (Namely survival and the ability to fend off animals) you’re good to go; the rest of the world can be conquered at your leisure.

I mean, with one starting point into survival I could essentially sustain myself forever on cooked veggies. Not even counting the stuff you get from butchering animals.

Let’s make the wilderness more dangerous aside from the occasional moose.

Give Triffids, Blobs, and Fungaloids the ability to expand. As they spread out, it gets harder to move around, limits resources in the area, and gives an incentive to build bases. As it is, if you build a base in the wilderness the only danger is the occasional animal.

Here’s what I have so far:

Triffids

Triffids spread out via “vine map tiles” that fan out from the grove and spearheads their expansion. Those vine map tiles will grow to the next map tile once enough time passes. Once the vines have grown large enough; they’ll grow another grove from which this process will repeat. Creating a new grove takes a significant amount of time though; so there’s plenty of time to plunk a base in front of a vine’s growing path to stop it. Vines and groves increase the radius in which triffids will spawn.

Vine map tiles look like regular forests except there are no fully grown trees. Instead you get a dense collection of “odd shrubs” and “odd trees” and “odd buds” in addition to regular shrubs and young trees. As time passes, those oddities will occasionally transform into monsters: “The odd bud suddenly blooms into a biollante!”. Stepping next to one vastly increases the chances of this happening.

Here are some defensive enemy ideas:
Snapdragon: A stationary enemy that lashes at you with a vine tendril; has a range of 3.
Darter: A stationary plant turret, launches large thorns at you.
Rootweed: Stationary, It launches a large, thorned vine into the ground which will erupt under you and deal large amounts of damage on the next turn. Dodging it is as simple as moving off the targeted tile, but it may be difficult if under attack by several enemies. Has a range of 10.
Mantrap: Stationary, stepping next to an oddity may trigger this to appear. It immediately latches onto you, dealing a large amount of piercing damage. Has a large amount of health.
Chokeweed: Like a creeper, but grows only in the cardinal directions to block your path.

In the center of the vine tiles is a building made of plant material with several “Vine Cores” in the center. Destroying the cires will kill the vine and any other vines not linked to a grove.

That’s just a few small ideas for that; let’s move onto fungaloids.

Fungaloids

Fungaloids spread like creepers do, but only to a certain extend; five map tiles from the center. After it reaches it’s maximum sustainable size; it starts creating tall mushroom towers. These towers are bio-luminescent and light up the area around them. In addition, it attracts wandering zombie hordes; which are the agents that spread the spores.

Once a horde is infected; they act as they usually would; attracted to sound; but their movement is biased to be away from existing fungal blooms. After enough time passes, the horde dies and the map tile they die on becomes a new bloom to begin the process again.

While standing in a fungal bloom, any existing fungal parasite infection will be much more active. Mushrooms of all types are very common in fungal blooms.

Some enemy ideas:
Puffball: Stationary enemy that emits spores.
Hypha: Depending on the type, releases gas that may poison, cause hallucinations, etc.
Oozing Mold: A monster that multiples; it attacks by slimes you in addition to blocking your path.
Fungal Pod: Will burst open releasing enemies.
Shroomites: Small enemies that swarm in groups; usually released from fungal pods.

Expect enemies such as fungal zombies and fungal insects as well.

Blobs

Blobs spread underground and occasionally create entrances on the surface; where they spread around in a certain radius. Whenever an entrance to the surface appears; an addition z-level below the second is made; where a “Blob Core” is found. Destroying the blob core causes that z-level and a few surrounding underground map tiles to collapse, becoming regular stone map tiles.

Blobs gain a bunch of new forms; here’s a few I can think of.
Sticky Blobs: Faster then regular blobs, they attack by charging you and dying on contact; sliming you. All blobs are more aggressive while you’re slimed.
Acid Blobs: See above, except they leave behind a 3x3 square of acid.
Boom Blobs: Their contents explode when exposed to air. A 3x3 concussion explosion.
Boulder Blobs: The blob equivalent of a tank. Their thick shell of gravel makes them immune to anything but the strongest attacks; they’re extremely slow though.
Splitter Blobs: They create regular blobs and hurl them at you for a surprising amount of bashing damage.
Bouncer Blobs: They can pounce like feral hunters; they deal a large amount of bashing damage when they hit you.

All blobs are highly resistant to bashing damage, but weak against piercing and cutting damage. Blobs explode in a 3x3 square of concussion damage when set on fire. Blobs are harder to spot while they’re on a slime tile.

Blobs have an ability to grow larger by absorbing blob globs. This increases all of their parameters as well as the effect of their deaths.

That’s all for now.
Further suggestions and ideas are welcome.

1 Like
2

Yet more shit to make living in a base harder…

3

What’s the point of these proposed changes? We now have jabberwocks, half a dozen flavours of zombie animal, rapidly waning huntable wildlife, worms, lack of protection against acid rain… I already fail to see the point of living in the wilderness in this game. It’s easier, more fun and vastly more rewarding to migrate from town to town.

Fungaloids, triffids and blobs in their present state are reward-free sources of risk and annoyance that are best avoided and ignored. I’m not sure what the point is of making them even more risky and annoying. I don’t have anything to do with them now, and I’d have even less to do with them if the changes you describe were implemented.

4

Whenever I build a base in the wilderness, nothing attacks aside from the occasional zombie animal. Usually when I’m at that point I can easily fend those off leaving my base nothing but a giant paperweight.

What's the point of these proposed changes? We now have jabberwocks, half a dozen flavours of zombie animal, rapidly waning huntable wildlife, worms, lack of protection against acid rain... I already fail to see the point of living in the wilderness in this game. It's easier, more fun and vastly more rewarding to migrate from town to town.

Forests are an essentially infinite source of food with enough survival skill, vehicles essentially negate acid rain, zombie animals are more annoying than deadly, worms can’t even attack while on roads.

Towns are as easy as placing down a blade trap and turning on a noisemaker. Even at a spawn rate of 50 I can sit and raise skills in the relative safety of the wilderness and then the world is my oyster.

The game as it is lacks late-game content. This adds a bit more. Furthermore, this increases difficulty as time passes; something we’ve been needing for a long time.

I didn’t add any rewards since I don’t have an exact measure of how this may be realized, but there SHOULD be a reward.

5

Firstly, without any incentive to actually fight these annoying enemies, I don’t see the point in investing a bunch of effort into expanding them. From where I’m sitting they’re already basically a waste of space in the game - something you might explore once out of curiosity, and then ignore in favour of things like science labs that actually reward your risk.

Secondly, I think your justification for doing this (i.e. it’s too easy to live off weeds) is odd. Yeah, you can sit around in a forest eating foliage if you want, but… so what? If you have the resources to drive a car into a forest, you have the resources to walk into a grocery store and walk out with a shopping cart full of food that’ll last you two seasons or more while you sit in a house on the outskirts of town reading the nearest library’s back catalog, and it’s not like you can’t just walk a few miles to the next town if you run out of food in the previous one. What’s the use of going to all this effort just to make an already boring and unrewarding play style more difficult? If you want more of a late game challenge then fine (again, I don’t agree that these suggestions serve that purpose without serious consideration given to the fact that dealing with triffids, fungaloids and blobs is both optional and pointless in the first place), but wild vegetables are hardly a game breaker.

6

The fact that destroying them will prevent the world from being overrun by horrible monsters isn’t enough of an incentive? Well then have them drop stuff that will.

It’s too easy to survive in the wilderness as a whole, not just in forests (Ridiculously common military/scientists drops notwithstanding). With the spawn rate in the options menu I could make the city dangerous. No such option appears for the wilderness aside from turning up the spawns of player-seeking zombnimals.

The wilderness as a whole is pretty empty; one could see it as a loading screen between two cities. So I figured give it more content; it’s only 80% of the game world after all.

In any case, I feel that the Wilderness, Triffids, Blobs, and Fungaloids were lacking and deserved an expansion. I’m very sorry that you do not feel the same. It will be up to the developers to decide whether this suggestion has merit. I simply listed off my suggestions as this is the suggestion forum.

As you failed to provide any suggestions on how to improve it but rather taken to simply shooting it down as you don’t see any benefit in it. I don’t see any benefit in conversing with you any further,

1 Like
7

Not at all, because it won’t. In fact it won’t have any marked effect on the game world at all. At present it won’t even remove the ‘F’ from the overmap. You might bandy about the idea of roleplaying as though it matters, but let’s be serious - players need to see results for their investment of time and energy. The job of the game is to provide that.

It’s easy to survive in the game in general, whether you camp out in the wilderness or not. The main difference is that hanging around the wilderness means you get to experience a whole lot of nothing, whereas hanging around in towns means you have frequent combat to deal with and loot to reward your efforts. The same applies to science labs. Making the wilderness more dangerous and no more rewarding will have the effect of discouraging people from going there.

1 Like
8

I don’t want this to be what it was like when I first started playing, the never leave the pavement without a car or OP weapon bitch game, because the triffids are in a small area and give no reward,(labs give bionics 'n shit) triffids and fungloids give what? A pain in the ass? I would rather see more work put on Z-levels, NPC’s, or even the medical system than a bunch of other triffids adding almost nothing to the game.

1 Like
9

This isn’t a traditional, one developer game. There are multiple developers, each decides to work what they want to work on, not what you want them to work on. You can shift their attention, but that’s all you can do.

Triffids add nothing to the game FOR YOU. That doesn’t necessarily hold for the rest of us.
And if they add nothing to the game, why are you against something that gives them something to add?

I think that’s the biggest problem, you’re basing your opinions on what the game is instead of what it COULD be.

10

Well what would it add? Loot at the end? Or just more cars drive and go vroom vroom or die?

11

In case you didn’t read the original post completely:

  1. Late-game activity. Like literally late-game, most of this stuff won’t be actively dangerous for 120-200 in-game days.
  2. Gives wilderness bases an actual opponent.
  3. Adds increasing difficulty to a game over time.
  4. Expands on lacking and ignored features.

Is loot really all this game is about? Does a mechanic suck because it doesn’t give a tangible reward?
Maybe it’d be better if I added some achievements?

12

A feature in the game that asks players to put their characters at risk for no reward is quite pointless, yes.

The reward doesn’t have to be loot, but that’s practically all there is of value in the game at the moment, because there isn’t much to it other than making your character stronger and killing stuff. If there were properly developed systems for NPCs and factions, or systems that made building a base and defending it actually serve a purpose, then you could add rewards for tackling things like triffids that weren’t just a shiny artifact at the end or whatever. But there aren’t, so you can’t.

13

sigh
I didn’t say there would be absolutely no reward. I didn’t know how these would be realized; therefore, I left that to the would-be-developers discretion.

As you can see in this quote.

I didn't add any rewards since I don't have an exact measure of how this may be realized, but there SHOULD be a reward.

If you want loot, then fine, have the developer throw some artifacts in there or something if that’s all it takes to satisfy you.

14

Well then with a reward I see something, perhaps something related to where it came from? The triffids let you grow walls or something? The spores allow you repel hordes? Maybe the blobs just have a bunch of corpses in the pit?

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15

Well, I did have ideas for things like implantation (like bionics, but alive) where you could get things like a triffid symbiote that would let you use an attack like a Zerg Sunken Colony, a fungal symbiote that lets you vomit out spores to infect legions zombies, a blob symbiote that automatically manifests itself on your body to act like armor, or something to those effects; but I didn’t have it fleshed out enough to add to the thread.

At the very least you’d get some special things like blob plating for your vehicle that autoregens or being able to throw biollante seeds to make friendly turrets.

1 Like
16

As far as late game rewards, I would rather see external to the character rewards, 1 ) because players at this point would be able to defend it, 2 ) opens up more interesting possibilities then further adding to an already super mutant CBM pumped martial art master demigod.
I think the ideas like the blob plating or bio seeds would be in that vein. Mutant tree seeds that provide a lot of special uber fruit, blob pal or blob infused stone that secrets gas, spore that follows you and acts like zombie pheromones on some condition (and doesn’t infect you). Things that signify, this is the end game, enjoy and then maybe you should start over.

If it’s just more artifacts, then meh. Triffids are annoying and fungaloids/blobs are useful to me only for making alpha serums when I am playing to that end.

I’d also like to make tiny excursions through portals for great reward and risk, and see more lovecraftian beasts. It 'd be an use of water/fire fighting breathing equipment, as I see it in my head.

17

One idea I had that might fit into this is making drinking water acquirement a lot more difficult over time. It includes expanding the water quality system to radiation, acid, blob and fungal pollution that need more effort than just cooking it to make it drinkable. Having a mechanism that makes surface water like pools or rivers more and more contaminated leaves the player then the options to either physically adapt, accept the effort to decontaminate it or get access to groundwater(via a well).

This is where the Triffid, Blob and Fungal sites come into play. Triffids hog the groundwater and a nearby Triffid base lowers the water level over time. So if you want your well to stay useable you have have to destroy the base. Reward could be a water cleaning item/component with a lot of charges and a lot of clean water which is stored there in organic containers. Alternatively you could leave the base intact and just steal water there from time to time because they do a real good job of cleaning it.

Local Blob pools and Fungal spires pollute the ground water over time. To stop that you have to destroy them. Again, a second reward could be a rare item or component as loot. Nuclear plants could also continuously pollute water until you seal them. Having a base with a cleared surroundings gives then the advantages of a stable clean water source as opposed to the traveler who has to constantly worry where his next drink will come from in a more and more inhospitable world.

1 Like
18

I don’t, personally, think there necessarily has to be loot. The ‘reward’ is not dying to a horde of triffid because you neglected dealing with them.

19

The game offers little incentive to stay in one location at present, so the obvious thing to do if your area is infested with triffids, fungaloids or blobs (and what most people probably do) is simply go elsewhere.

If the game were arranged differently, so that staying in one place didn’t ultimately result in exhausting the surrounding area of anything of interest and subsequent tedium, then yes, you would be right.

1 Like
20

Well, unless you’re the kind of player who likes building forts and wants to protect a certain location. With an active territorial control system and having to constantly fight and manage your resources to continue defending your base and not be overwhelmed, it probably would be a lot harder to run out of interesting things to do.

But, obviously, any such implementation of any system is a long ways off given that it’d require an active coding of factional support systems and territorial control in the first place, which doesn’t seem to be on the immediate horizon.

That doesn’t mean we can’t think about it.

Personally, I’d suggest that the first thing you’d need to do would be to code a sort earth faction to which the native wildlife is attached. The natural world, if you will. The other factions would overlay on top of this with their own territorial configurations and invasive growth ways, as outlined in the design document as well by developer intention. In areas in which the natural world is allowed to flourish, a player would have more access to huntable animals and so on over time, so it becomes in the player’s interest to protect that, as it’s their source of untainted water, meat, and vegetation.

It’s pretty obvious, by the design document, that the long range plan includes ideas similar to these, if not exactly these. There will probably be loot involved, but the proactive avoidance of later consequences is a pretty strong reward in the end in and of itself.