Their "shelters" seem more like biological structures, a part of their lifecycle.slay_mithos wrote:Well, Bitters seems to be intelligent enough to build shelters, to identify the source(s) of threats and are usually not attacking without reasons to, rather than just hunting like animals.
They currently consider things able to shoot or move (around) as a threat, both of which are quite obvious.
They also attack things that "stink". That's not a very complex behavior. It's rather hard to explain without giving them intelligence, though. They'd need a reason to naturally want to smash chemically smelling things. For example, an ability to digest sulfur and maybe even iron (like some IRL bacteria).
It would be cool if biters preferred moving things that they see, like active inserters, belts, assemblers, steam engines, pumpjacks and mines but not furnaces/boilers (fire is scary and you can't claw it to death), chemical plants or refineries.
Would give them both a more natural feel and would make their attacks less dependent on pollution chunks. Pollution would still attract them globally, but movement would make them switch from "roaming" to "raging".
That attraction could also depend on size - small biters would avoid furnaces until they cool down, but big biters could fearlessly (and mindlessly) smash everything in their way.
. And yes, at high evolutionfactor it should be the whole planet fighting. However, I can not imagine a situation in which an untouched planet would evolve anti-space weaponry. Even if we assume its whole biosphere is effectively a single organism.
