Ecology of the Angry Angry Isopods

[McBlaggart]

Something has been bugging me about the Angry Angry Isopods since I first started playing. It's the sheer mindless determination they have to kill me. Millions of them perish and they just keep coming. WHY? What's their deal? They just don't make sense yet, and they need to be fleshed out.

Everything I know about biters:
1) Biters and spitters are created by "spawners", huge structures that require no resources and produce their. . . young I guess, in a matter of seconds ex nhilo. (out of nothing)
2) Biters and spitters are heavily armed and armored in spite of the lack of any predator, competitor or prey to promote the evolution of these combat adaptations.
3) Biters eat nothing. They are living perpetual motion devices.
4) Worms, biters, spitters and their spawners are like nothing else on the planet. They have no potentially related species anywhere. The only other animal life, the fish, are obviously very different.
5) Biters hate pollution, even though it poses no threat to them whatsoever.
6) Pollution causes biters to develop heavier defensive adaptations.
7) Worms have some sort of cooperative relationship with biters.
8) Spawners are able to propagate their species by way of the biters they spawn.
9) Spawners drop strangely useful cotton candy when they die.

Inferences that I draw from this:
1) Biters and spawners are magical, creating matter and energy from nothing at a phenomenal rate.
2) Their combat ability indicates that biters used to have a competing species or enemy nearby, one that is not now present.
3) This rival or enemy must have produced pollution similar to what the player's factory produces. This is why they have a pre-programed violent reaction to pollution and why it prompts the growth of costly armor even when there is no enemy in range.
4) Because there is nothing else like them on the planet, biters, spitters, worms, and spawners are either a non-native, invasive species, as alien to the world as the player, or else they have exterminated all other land animals. Probably both.

The magical matter production is immersion breaking, but the other inferences are intrigue me. I think both can be served by developing the ecology of the biter. With my problem now explained, here's my idea for biter ecology:

Biters act like ants, traveling out from their hive to gather food. Their food of choice is a fast growing plant that the most advanced colonies of biters actually cultivate, the way leafcutter ants farm fungus. Their plant is extremely vulnerable to pollution, it stops growing and then it dies. If a spawner is not fed it will exhaust its gathered food then slow production of biters and slowly shrivel up.
This ties the biters into the planet's life web, gives them a stake in fighting the player, and a way they might be starved by a cunning player. Could it be effective to starve out a particularly dense patch of biters by building outposts near them to deliberately create pollution? I think there's room for some serious world building here.

[ssilk]

Correct analysis. Right questions. Good answers.

I think the most off you had said (plants, pollution...) is already in the game, we just don't see it yet.

[MF-]

If biters did things on their own, wouldn't they also explore -> create more and more world chunks?

On the other hand they wouldn't require "being pregenerated" in far chunks
if they could really spread and live on their own.

PS: https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... f=6&t=9419 suggests a compatible 2nd enemy race

[McBlaggart]

If biters did things on their own, wouldn't they also explore -> create more and more world chunks?

On the other hand they wouldn't require "being pregenerated" in far chunks
if they could really spread and live on their own.

Maybe they'd just be active in areas where they would be anyway. If a group of spawners is close enough to attack your base or character then their food economy activates.

[DaveMcW]

You don't see all the details, but it can still make sense.

1. You don't know what happens inside a spawner, you only see the biters after they are born.
2. Small biters are very weak. Only competition with humans drives their evolution.
3. They don't eat the same stuff as humans/machines. Therefore it is not shown on the map.
4. There may be other non-threatening lifeforms, but again they aren't shown on the map.
5. Pollution does not reduce biter hit points, that does not mean it poses no threat to them. Even if pollution poses no threat to the environment at all (HA HA!), it still symbolizes machines encroaching on their territory.

6-9 are not contradictions.

[McBlaggart]

You don't see all the details, but it can still make sense.

1. You don't know what happens inside a spawner, you only see the biters after they are born.
2. Small biters are very weak. Only competition with humans drives their evolution.
3. They don't eat the same stuff as humans/machines. Therefore it is not shown on the map.
4. There may be other non-threatening lifeforms, but again they aren't shown on the map.
5. Pollution does not reduce biter hit points, that does not mean it poses no threat to them. Even if pollution poses no threat to the environment at all (HA HA!), it still symbolizes machines encroaching on their territory.

6-9 are not contradictions.

1. It matters little what happens inside a spawner, the laws of thermodynamics still apply. It's a black box equation that does something impossible.
2. Small biters are aggressive and dangerous even if the player does literally nothing. Go walk up to a spawner holding out a flower. Go ahead. I'll wait.
3. I could assume they're eating something not shown, but I could also assume that they're actually puppets being run by members of the Lollipop Guild.
4. If they are not shown, nor even hinted at, in what sense do they exist?
5. If something is incapable of harming them, then it is harmless to them by definition. Does a factory game with alien bugs really need to depend on symbolism when it could actually just have the machines encroach on the wilderness?

6-9. I didn't say they were.

By the way, the wiki calls the biters arthropods, but they look like isopods to me. Arthropods are everything from scorpions to butterflies. Isopods are a smaller, more specific group of arthropods that look like the biters. Does anyone have any information that agrees or disagrees with that?

[cptepicness]

By the way, the wiki calls the biters arthropods, but they look like isopods to me. Arthropods are everything from scorpions to butterflies. Isopods are a smaller, more specific group of arthropods that look like the biters. Does anyone have any information that agrees or disagrees with that?

I'm not a real expert on these things, but with a little bit of poking around I found that Arthopods "moult" when they grow. Since the color of the skin on the Biter and Spitter changes as they grow bigger(Small BIter to Meduim/Big Biter), it may possibly this new bigger skin is different from the old which infers to moulting.
*Possible reason for color change is that pollution might have interfered with the color of their skin

This is just my theory on how the biters are Arthropods

[MF-]

1. It matters little what happens inside a spawner, the laws of thermodynamics still apply. It's a black box equation that does something impossible.

You missed what DaveMcW was trying to say.

Simplest: they live underground, hunting some kind of moles.

What's been said:
There are plants in the factorio world that are of no importance to the player,
so simulating it's ecology would needlessly eat computation power.
Similarly there is a kind of biter that collects those, but never interferes with the player.
Perhaps it even purposedly stays away from her "view distance".

Those simplications considerably reduce amount of computation (and coding),
allowing more factories and items to be simulated instead. And that's a good thing.