Zombears, Antlered Horrors and the Design Outline

[Rhodri]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:18, topic:8836”]I say that if we wanted to take biome evolution seriously, Earth would more or less degenerate into giant insect country, its quite likely that giant insect scavengers would completely eat more or less every zombie in the planet (things are not looking that hot for the blob unless it manages to turn every zombie into a brute or hulk) and even then ants could realistically topple the bigger zeds just like they do with spiders and other insects IRL.
-snip-[/quote]
I don’t see the problem here.

[Barhandar]

[quote=“KA101, post:17, topic:8836”]Non-threatening/carnivorous critters, though, should become less common by the same token: increased predation as predators functionally DON’T die off thanks to rezzing. :-/

Critter replenishment should be a thing too, yeah.[/quote]
Shouldn’t blob-driven critters not go after small critters for pure food, and also understand that blobbing doesn’t work on them and thus leave them alone?

Then the result would be squirrel and the like populations exploding massively.

Oh, and if dead animals rise and go after their still-living relatives, these relatives will very, very quickly learn to immediately eat or at least tear apart their dead, balancing the numbers. Cannibalism isn’t a moral issue for the animals.

[Coolthulhu]

Non-threatening/carnivorous critters, though, should become less common by the same token: increased predation as predators functionally DON’T die off thanks to rezzing. :-/

Zed predators would probably not make good hunters. They can’t ambush and they’re slow, so no hunting fast critters. They’re loud and clumsy, so they “lose” to small forest critters.
Only good method of predation they have is persistence hunting due to their sense of smell and lack of fatigue.

Moose would probably die out, but small fish, water mammals, birds, small digging mammals etc. would probably get a huge population boom in zed-heavy areas.
Oh, and insects. Lots, lots of flies, possibly even adapted flies laying eggs on zeds. Huge, bloated mosquitoes too lazy to drain small stuff, but just small enough not to get smashed by zeds.

It would offer an interesting contrast with triffid/fungus areas, which would probably be eerily silent and devoid of animal life.

[Barhandar]

It would offer an interesting contrast with triffid/fungus areas, which would probably be eerily silent and devoid of animal life.

Fungus. Triffids probably wouldn’t, lore-wise, go after woodland critters since these maintain the ecosystem.

[KA101]

[quote=“Coolthulhu, post:23, topic:8836”]It would offer an interesting contrast with triffid/fungus areas, which would probably be eerily silent and devoid of animal life.

Fungus. Triffids probably wouldn’t, lore-wise, go after woodland critters since these maintain the ecosystem.[/quote]

Triffids aren’t some weird nature-guardian Ent thing. They’re semi-sentient plant critters, and can indeed eat meat.

And persistence hunting is a human long suit as well, IIRC. Deer, etc can’t run forever. (So stamina systems need to be universal, not just for the PC.)

[John_Candlebury]

Well if you ever wanted to be even more realist, the current implementation of fungus would have probably killed or turned anything on Earth by the first few months. Unless it has some sort of range limit like triffids do, it would just multiply too fast for anything to keep pace, this could be sorta cool, but the game would feel more like survive the alien ecosystem of this ruined space colony, surely not a bad game at all, but probably not what most players would expect.

That said, I wanted to ask, past lore (or well GlyphGryph) stated that the fungus and triffids were actually supposed to be symbiotic organisms, were the triffids use the fungus as a way to derive nutrients. Wanted to know if this piece of lore still stands, because now the fungus has a hive mind and it seems unlikely it would ever cooperate with the triffids.

The fungus does have a hive mind right? Or is the PC just imagining the interaction with the fungus?

[KA101]

[quote=“John Candlebury, post:26, topic:8836”]Well if you ever wanted to be even more realist, the current implementation of fungus would have probably killed or turned anything on Earth by the first few months. Unless it has some sort of range limit like triffids do, it would just multiply too fast for anything to keep pace, this could be sorta cool, but the game would feel more like survive the alien ecosystem of this ruined space colony, surely not a bad game at all, but probably not what most players would expect.

That said, I wanted to ask, past lore (or well GlyphGryph) stated that the fungus and triffids were actually supposed to be symbiotic organisms, where the triffids use the fungus as a way to derive nutrients. Wanted to know if this piece of lore still stands, because now the fungus has hive mind and it seems unlikely it would ever cooperate with the triffids.

The fungus does have a hive mind right? Or is the PC just imagining the interaction with the fungus?[/quote]

Yeah, we probably need to dial back the fungus a bit.

But it does have a hivemind, and the triffids have from time to time managed to contain and harness elements of it. There’s a reason the Filthy Traitors can go Adrenaline just from seeing a triffid: the Mycus is well aware that triffids are a threat!

[Burnt_Earth]

Eh, maybe fungus growth is halted by pollution? Say it’s sensitive to toxins in the ground, so farms, mines, cities, hazmat areas (maybe rivers?) are given wide berth since they could poison the whole organism. Some fields could be considered fallow farm fields and have residual fungicides in the soil or somethin

But more realistically I think the limiting factor to growth would be lack of nutrients in the soil which would limit it’s growth. That’s a lot of biomass to sustain after all. So growth fastest to slowest would be swamps, forests, fields, towns, craters, roads and perhaps polluted areas.

[i2amroy]

Thing is, you get zed critters when a critter dies and nothing takes care of the corpse. Old-age or non-predator-caused-injury, IOW. So zed critters kinda need to become more common over time. This could be handled by making off-camera (outside the reality bubble) critters make a save v. Zombie every so often, but whether that’s feasible to program is another question.

Assuming that you have a list stored of the various animal groups (which should include what type of animal they are) then it should be relatively easy to do, and could probably even be JSON’ed fairly easy (the same system could also easily be adapted to have say, evolving zombies over time or something similar with only a tiny tweak).