Did any children go feral during the cataclysm just like many adults did? If so where are they now? There would have been to many of them to just all die before game start.
Also what happened to the unborn children that where in the womb when their mother died? Did they die as well and fail to revive becease they where to small? Perhaps they where destroyed during the mutation process of thier mother or they mutated into some unique strain of zombie (pupating zombies perhaps?)
Definitely has some scary implications. But I think there are still some children in the game. Like some of the NPC at the refugee center are children.
Otherwise, they’re either zombified or gone feral.
Due to moral and rating reasons, CDDA has been pretty careful with children in the game. Generally, you won’t find many not undead children for that reason.
Maybe this is where flesh-raptors come from.
As Mega_Glub says, living children are generally “off camera” for various reasons (but not rating, don’t care), but for ferals I would tend to assert that they’re actually dead.
They’ve had plenty of time to die of thirst, exposure, or starvation, even setting aside the endemic violence of the cataclysm.
So we don´t want feral children in game becease we want too keep living children ¨off camera¨. And cannonically we explain them away as having even higher death rates than normal ferals becease of violence, becease many might die becease of thirst, starvation and exposure before the feral state fully sets in and becease a feral child even a evolved one would be an easy meal/target for anything pre- and post cataclysm.
But what about the unborn ones? Are they also not to be shown ingame or is anyone free too implement a new or serveral new enemies based on undead pragnant women or what comes crawling out of them. Would it be fine to show what are technically babies if that baby was a twisted deformed monstrosity.
From a lore point of view, creatures below a certain size won’t reanimate (that is violated by the tiniest dog breeds, such as chihuahuas, probably because they “inherit” revivability because they happen to be dogs, but they really shouldn’t reanimate), and unborn babies ought to fit squarely into that category. Newborn babies should be too small as well, which would explain why there aren’t any crawling baby zombies.
Since unborn babies are linked to the systems of their mothers, they’d probably fuse when the mother is zombiefied.
As far as I understand, ferals are alive, and thus have to eat, drink, and maintain a reasonable body temperature, which is why (small) children should die off quickly (I’m confused as to the age of zombie “children” given how disturbingly common it is for them to wear/carry (sometimes multiple) wedding rings, wedding gear, sex toys, hard drugs, and adult clothing, such as high heels, bondage suits, etc.).
As you already point out unborn babies are in many ways part of the system of thier mother. So there are big questions about wether they would be to small to revive or would treated as part of the mother by the blob.
Then there is also the question as to what would actually happen to the fetus if it did revive during the mutation process. It might differ depending on the stage of pregnancy. A small fetus might simply not revive or be fused with the mother to either no or horrifying effect while a late term pregnancy might result in a huge emaciaded zombie with ¨something¨ growing inside it waiting to bust out when you get to close.
No, they are independent. We don’t have regular living children on camera for “reasons” and completely separately I don’t think it makes sense for feral children to be around because their mortality would be too high.
As for zombified fetuses and infants on the fight might take on that is that those would be more useful to the blob as biomass for mothers or others wandering by then having an independent existence so they would be reabsorbed into the zombie horde one way or the other
Wouldn´t a largely undeveloped fetus be a much better template to start mutation with given that a fetus doesn´t have much pre-existing metabolism that the blob has to hijack or anatomy it needs to mutate? Wouldn´t the mother be much more usefull as biomass to grow the fetus into somekind of far more evolved (and maybe less rotten) zombie that the mother couldn´t never be turned into?
Not really - There’s no indication that the blob faces or even considers difficulty in mutations, or that it finds larger creature harder to mutate than smaller ones on a mechanical level, just time. The viability of any individual host isn’t specially considered so much as the mutations react to what its got, IE Bionics and natural conditions. Even if mutating its hands into knives or whatever would be marginally faster than doing so to the mother, it still can’t locomote well, lift its head, etc. It’d be an absolutely garbage blob host, completely nonviable.
Less viable candidates eventually die off from native resistance, or get absorbed in offscreen measures we haven’t observed (Waiting for the horrific blob flesh carpet across cities, Kevin. Need my Dead Space fix). Considering the baby has no real functioning sensory organs (Even if its developed, its encased and isn’t gonna see or hear anything), there’s no real reason for it to somehow conclude that its a better candidate than the fully grown human its inside, which we already know the blob has no issues turning into extremely lethal constructs. Hell, considering the interlinked nature of a mother and fetus, its unlikely the blob would draw a distinction between the two so long as blob filled blood flows freely between them.
I removed the solution becease there is one more group of unborn children that I realized wasn´t adressed. What happens to pragnant ferals?
The cataclysm happened quickly enough that someone could get pegnant and than go feral. And ferals are normal humans metabolism whise so the fetus would just continue to grow. They are safe from the zombies who would also keep away anything dangerous. Food and water should be a non-issue if they are in a town or a city.
So what happens after a few months? Does a feral baby get born that than quickly expiers? Does it get eaten by the mother as soon as it is born or does the mother and baby most likely die during unattended childbirth? Is the baby feral and go´s beserk and as soon as it´s able to claw it´s way out of the mother killing them both?
My guess is that the childbirth mortality rate will be very high, to start with the limited human ability to go through the birth process unassisted, and compounded with the assumption that the feral mother probably isn’t particularly capable at finding solutions to the problems that arise.
Should a baby be born it would probably perish quickly due to neglect, and zombie attacks if it isn’t feral. A feral baby would still be a baby, and thus unable to survive on its own, and not particularly capable of digging itself out of the womb either, given the lack of claws, teeth, strength, and coordination.
The best lore reason I can imagine is, you don’t see feral children because they don’t want you to see them.
Human beings are animals, and like all animals are subject to the same natural forces as every other animal. Human childbirth and parental care appeared long before doctors, nurses, or midwives. Human childbirth happens naturally, whether there’s a helper there or not, even in this day and age. Without helpers you’ll see increased maternal and infant mortaility in childbirth, especially at first because natural selection against very large infants has been severely relaxed for a long time. But childbirth mortality will not rise to the level of eliminating the species, which is what “actually no children” means.
Human infants require a lot of parental care to survive. Not a big deal. So do kangaroos, and they’ve survived a very long time. The need for parental care is not a reasonable reason for human extinction. Humans understand not caring for children means extinction. Survivors will care for and protect their children, because survival means reproduction, plain and simple.
Ferals will be as good or better protectors of their children than non-ferals, because they are the true survivors, doing whatever it takes. Wiping out adult ferals wipes out their children. It’s an essential truth that makes auto-attacking-to-the-death ferals unrealistic without lore that they have no other ferals back at a protected home caring for young, and are suicidal. Ferals do what comes naturally, it’s kind of their definition. Sex works the way it does in humans for a reason, that reason is to ensure humans reproduce, and it works extremely well. In the time it takes people to become feral, they will also make new families.
Realism for ferals would be relatively safe home sites, almost certainly run by the females (males MAY have “leadership” roles in home, enforced physically, but the females make sure the home site does what it must do, maximize childhood survival). Males scavenge, hunt, chase off threats including unknown humans, but run away when they are hurt, because their death weakens the entire clan. If home sites are all off camera, because reasons, then the ferals you see will all be male, will run away when badly hurt, will usually break off their attacks when you run away from them, and will heal because they have a safe haven to fall back to. Their primary focus, regarding you, is keeping you away from their family. The “reason” you don’t see feral children, is because they don’t want you to see them.
Ferals are brain damaged, not some evolved, still logically intelligent zombie adapted progress of humanity. Most act on instinct alone, although rarer cases can perform some limited amount of planning.
While you could argue that maternal instincts are, well, instincts, there are still a lot of factors that would prevent feral mothers from properly caring for infants, such as forgetting about them, not finding their way back to them, or get caught up in the chase of a fox. Not to mention that first time mothers don’t know how to deal with a lot of things and don’t have remaining brain functionality to figure it out. Given the brain damage, it’s questionable they’d be able to determine if a baby is too cold or too warm, for instance.
Feral family unit formation is completely out of the question. Ferals don’t have enough capacity to form such bonds.
does rating matter? other than publishing on the play store. this is open-source and there could just be a disclaimer: “this game is user created and (cleverraven/fill in the blank) does not take and moral or legal responsibility”. or something similar
You are necroposting in reply to what was said months ago without really adding anything relevant to the conversation.
Also no, that’s not how Ratings work, a disclaimer does not relieve you of any responsibility. There’s a reason why most games that have “depicted violence” do not have children in them (there are very few exceptions) and one of the reasons is that the people involved do not want to deal with the rabbit hole of accusations or speculations that said concept brings. And it would really be nice if people would finally understand and respect the idea that the devs themselves already stated in the main “Children” thread: They don’t want children in their game, period. But it really seems to be hard for a segment of people to understand it, for… whatever reason.
Pregnant zombies sound cool though… imagine fighting yet another boomer and then it bursts and you have to fight off twin zombie toddlers. Or fighting a zombie who has a chewed through hole in her belly from which her fetus tries to grab on and bite you. Or walking through the horde laying down fire and some sneaky Z toddler bursts from a corpse you shot a while ago and bites your ankle. Heavily pregnant zombie hulk shoving her hand into her ripped belly and tearing zombie toddlers off and chucking them at you so they grab on and slow you down.
And not just human zombies but e.g. cows from cattle farms, or Z-9s bursting with a litter of zombie puppies that are even more evasive, kinda like rats.
Its kinda like two-stage zombies from Half Life where you have to kill a small quick headcrab after killing the strong but slow zombie, potentially multiple headcrabs in HL2.
There’s a lot of nightmare fuel to be found there, a pity its never gonna be in the game.
To a degree, some zombies are like that. Like the pupating Zombie that spawns flesh raptors.
Considering how the pandemic works, mutating hosts into aliened beings, you can take a another approach and mutate the undead babies as well. Like Acid Zombies that continually spawn acid minions.
I noticed “play now” is in the latest experimatal im playing is the only way. Its like 16 in char creation min, but seems like the numbers are random.
I thought it was funny I got a decent random char and it was 12