Ecology of the Angry Angry Isopods
Posted: Sat Apr 04, 2015 5:59 am
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.
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.
