@vale scarab
#Infestation
empty mist
vale scarab
Hey guys I am currently working on a completey overhaul of the enemy system in factorio,
It has the following and I was wondering if these idea's are plausible.
It starts off with you a normal engineer on your HOME planet, you go ahead and start off by taking your car and going to work. You work at an automation & advanced research intelligence center. You get an AI called XAM, the Xenobiology Assistant Matrix- You recently discovered a weird seedpod or whatever seems to look like a seedpod... (not sure on this yet) It was traveling in the outer bounds of some of humanities planets. (merging this with Space exploration @nocturne cairn (Sorry Earendel! I didn't know you were a dev!)
It hits one of the planets and it didn't seem to burn up in the atmosphere of said planet...
It hit the ground and almost instantly collapsed and started to grow a sort of tree with seed clusters...
It's very slimy... looked off and smelled very weird... almost acidic.. if one were to smell acid.
The weird thing is the seeds that grew into some sort of fruit smelled horrible.. after testing, tasted magnificent almost addictive oddly enough ! We couldn't figure out where it came from though or how it even ended up there, in all these thousands of years we've been in space we've never detected something quite like this..
The zone around the tree has been quarantined and the engineer who ate the "fruit" had been quarantined as is being extensively tested on. It was your job to run further analysis on the tree..
This scenario continues for a bit with a few missions here and there and how it came to be. It'll be a seperate scenario in the factorio scenarios
I might have more extensive scenarios or let that be that and actually replace this as not a main character but just one of the random scientists so you knew how an outbreak had happened.
Continuing with the story it's now as such.
After months of testing the person that had been in quarantine was released for 2 weeks already everything seemed very stable and the tree was growing normally, as well as the seed pods, they continued to flourish and almost thrive in this atmosphere... Even outside where it barely had any nutrients on our planet and mostly pollution..
The thing had some sort of pulse now! This is where however it all went very.. VERY downhill...
One day when you went home you fell ill, you stayed home and recovered. You weren't ever in direct contact with it and always wore protective gear even despite it being safe enough you just didn't trust it because you couldn't figure out how or what it was just yet.. No origin.. scary...
You get a call.. To come immediately, the tree deployed it's seed pods, the fruit exploded everything was a mess... it's almost like it was living now.. Tiny creatures could be seen moving around darting from one side to the other over the fruit and seeds, even eating the corpse of the tree so to say..
You could see a form of liquid protruding from the supposed tree.. With creatures slurping it up every chance they could get and also making sure they kept eating, almost an unsatiated appetite.. The creatures were luckily all in quarantine and you sent in a robot to take a sample.. They didn't seem to do much as they were to busy eating so they didn't mind anything, after a while they had cocooned and not much else happened after that.
We immediately tried reaching out to the person who ate that fruit however what we got to hear was horrifying, he was in a hospital and there was something living.. inside of him.. the creatures were in the fruit he ate! They were eating him alive! They seemed to have been immune to his stomach asset or it never even reached his stomach..
Upon further analysis his body had some form of new cells. It attacked his body and all sorts of little creatures could be seen inside his body, in his blood in his cells ... Everywhere at different stages of growth...
We knew we were doomed because...
====
Oh no... even upon coughing or simply the food.. everything he ate had these cells on it... All in different stages of growth.
An outbreak started wide alert everywhere! We have a major outbreak in effect! Everyone get in doors and contain whatever we can!
After a few weeks it started to become clear a lot of people had become crazy sick, some sort of fungus started leaking out here and there
It started forming a very odd odor around certain areas of certain streets and some plants emitted a weird gas that had these cells in it, everything had been going airborne
Ontop of that it also came into our water, food, on our structures, it seemed there was no stopping it at all! We've been trying to dampen it with nanotechnology creating killer cells to root out the virus
wearing filters & specific air filtration system were kicked into gear by our military
The planet seemed to change overnight and a planetary lockdown was in effect IMMEDIATELY everyone on planet Acheon 3X was declared infected and quarantined. All the information and research we had about the infestation was shared within our entire galaxy
Here's where it begins* (The scenario above is playable to an extent with text and seeing with cutscenes sorta how all this unfolds)
CUT to a scene where infestation is rampant, you can see people dieing around you, new mutations happening, it's almost like it wasn't a seed at all but a bioattack
This is our suspicion too, someone or something out there targeted us, the creatures seemed to innately kill us and infect every thing except nature & minerals & resources.
Anything man made, walls, buildings, people were all going to be killed.. We are not sure how they distinguish between nature and man made... It's almost like they have a set of instructions
We could see mutations happen overnight almost, new creatures, leading different hives, there was also fighting among them to evolve even quicker or battle for some resource.
We see giant creatures now.. Buildings have been destroyed.. Our infrastructure gone.. Some brave individuals are fighting with everything they have creating turrets and logistic bases...
We were NOT prepared for this and it's only a matter of time before we are wiped out.. We can see some of the giant creatures now having extreme intelligence, some even leading other groups and making new structures...
We are highly suspecting there is something more behind this. We are being targeted by a civilization... That wants our planets and their resources... Would that really be the case though? Why didn't they just come here and ask?
They must have so much better technology than us if they can do this...
The features of this mod will originally be very small, having just a few new enemies and a new way biters work
first release:
New enemies replacing biters
New structures and evolution method
After this there will be a ton of features added thereafter.
The full release will have something like this
Full release:
-
A lot of new enemies with custom graphics
-
A mini campaign to explain the start of all of it and how we were doomed on several planets
-
Seamless mod support meaning you can play this with mostly any mod out there even Krastorio2+Space exploration
-
Enemy bosses and actual boss fight with phases
-
Lore of a civilization turned against us and first contact
*a complete overhaul to the evolution system and having multiple different evolution factors that result the enemy to evolve completely different overtime, even changing HOW they respond & evolve depending on how you pollute/play/fight against them. Sometimes triggering a completely different evolution / enemy type.
*Actual NPCs and human world
*The planet earth which you get to play the main game on, there's already structures and "people" roaming around, just like you, you'll see this planet crumble to dust overtime and the enemy killing all your fellow engineers and losing the place to them while you valiantly put up a fight against them (optional feature)
*A possibility to tame the biters or even understand and become one, mutating yourself with their DNA to get certain abilities or even neural command of some of them and even creating your own puppets / structures... Who knows, maybe you can take the fight back to the civilization at some point
*optional release when all is done (after a long while, this is not a simple mod) - Taking the fight back to the enemy civilization, meaning YOU get to play this insane overlord that has to kill to evolve & work against an ever stronger enemy fighting you with alien technology & such, you use their own technology against them, or maybe even OUR technology, depending on how you want to play.
*Multiplayer compatability
*Since it has an optional but still a very strong dependency on SE2. I'd suggest for the full experience to see SE2 to fully see the destruction of your starsystem and what system is infected / which isn't and maybe even encountering the enemies home base!? woah! Wiping them out will turn the game peaceful and you'll win! This means there's another way of winning!
1 Abandon the star system and create a rocket silo like usual but in a different form where it is now a galaxy teleporter that will explode upon use, you're going to be making people on the other planet by form of cloning to ensure your race continues (endcredits game over screen or continue to play on a new game with nothing but what you have in your inventory + research unlocked + peaceful
- You can take the fight to the enemy and wipe them out (this will continue the game but still endcredits)
++++ A LOT more features will be coming this way
vale scarab
@upper siren what do you think? This is going to be a seperate module from dark-tech
upper siren
As always, you have good ambition!
long meadow
Sounds like many coding-hours, good luck
teal stump
This sounds awesome! I would try limit the scope of a first release, because it takes quite a bit of work. Especially I would probably not try to make it compatible with all mods straight off the bat, because even overhaul mods with teams of developers don't have enough time to make all mods compatible 🙂 But for the rest, go for it! Sounds like something people will enjoy! For some inspiration for how you can structure your code you could look into how existing story-driven mods work, like Story Missions https://alt-f4.blog/ALTF4-54/ and DyWorld (also based of SE) https://alt-f4.blog/ALTF4-43/, but I'm sure you've heard of them. Maybe if one day your mod is well into an alpha stage you could write an article about it for Alt-F4 too 🙂