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The true horrors of the super-pocalypse, seen through the fresh eyes of a new horror. Go, young Echidna. Run, hide, smash, mutate, learn and take it all in. Edit: LP post on bottom of previous page. BraveLittleToaster fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Apr 5, 2022 |
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Apr 5, 2022 07:29
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I hope Echidna can get out and enjoy some sunshine! 
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Apr 5, 2022 07:57
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Apr 5, 2022 08:11
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As well as being... enhanced in various other ways, Echidna seems to also have extremely high stats across the board (IIRC a stat of 8 is "average US citizen", 12 is "gifted", and 14 is "world class"). So in spite of being confused, alone, and nearly naked, they are fairly capable of kicking the undead's rear end. The mutation system is one of my favourite things in CDDA and I haven't really played with it since the reworks so I'm particularly interested to see how this one goes.
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Apr 5, 2022 08:18
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RabidWeasel posted:As well as being... enhanced in various other ways, Echidna seems to also have extremely high stats across the board (IIRC a stat of 8 is "average US citizen", 12 is "gifted", and 14 is "world class"). I purposefully made her pretty OP just to show that off. She used the same point by system as Gray and Kelly, but since she took 12 points of disadvantages and the super-cheap street fighter hobby, I had boatloads of points left over to spend on stats and good traits. I figure she's either been mutated into a pretty powerful specimen, or she survived the process because she was in peak condition to begin with. This style of lab used to be sort of an ultimate endgame location, but due to power creep in the rest of the game design, they're now very tame unless you don't know how to spot a gunbot before it spots you. You can very easily do this challenge with all 8s if you can figure out how to handle that brute in room 1.
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Apr 5, 2022 08:44
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The brute in Room 1 honestly feels a bit spiteful in design, since there's basically only one type of solution. Other than that, this starting setpiece is supremely interesting.
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Apr 5, 2022 08:56
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The most important thing is to scour every corner of this lab for more mutagen. We must ~become~.
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Apr 5, 2022 10:14
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I have poked my head into labs before and yes they can be... they can be bad! Also poor Echidna. Here's to hoping she makes some friends and gets to be happy. Does "terrifying" completely tank our ability to be friends with people? Or is it somehow actually beneficial? It seems like most things we fight don't have enough brains left for fear.
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Apr 5, 2022 10:32
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A much more interesting mix than the mutation combo I thought we would start with.
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Apr 5, 2022 10:53
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Echidna needs hugs. And friends. I hope they get both.
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Apr 5, 2022 13:00
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Keldulas posted:The brute in Room 1 honestly feels a bit spiteful in design, since there's basically only one type of solution. I mean as long as it isn't literally blocking the way out of your cell you can make a break for it, all it takes is a room or two or maybe a metal door in my experience to juke one. The old lab designs weren't as weirdly jam packed with murder like that other newer version earlier in the LP so you have decent odds of not running into new problems by just legging it.
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Apr 5, 2022 14:26
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PurpleXVI posted:I have poked my head into labs before and yes they can be... they can be bad! It adds +6 to the fear attitude of every non-static NPC she meets (so like, Smokes doesn't care, but if she met someone random like Madelene, they would). This makes "nice" dialog options much harder to succeed at, but it boosts the poo poo out of her ability to scare people, especially as the mutation adds an additional +15 to her intimidate checks. On top of that, leg tentacles is -4 beauty, chitinous skin is -2, fangs is -2, and long tail is -2. For comparison, Earnest's ugly trait is only -2. NPCs who meet you for the first time have their fear of you increased by 1/2 of your beauty*(-1), so people get 1 extra fear point when Earnest meets them (if he's the player character) and 11 extra fear points from Echidna. There are 4 Opinion stats: fear, trust, value, and anger. Someone can be extremely afraid of you, but still trust and value you immensely if, for example, you scared the poo poo out of them when you met, then passed a persuasion check and did a quest for them. However fear can cause NPCs to flee at the sight of you or instantly go hostile, so the best thing to do is to cover your ugly mutations, put your weapon away, and not be drunk or high when an NPC sees you for the first time. NPCs also have their own hidden personality traits on top of that: Aggression, bravery, collector, and altruism, which control how much they're affected by their opinions. These numbers aren't fixed and can be adjusted by different actions the player takes. Someone who is very brave can tolerate having a high fear of you, and someone who is altruistic might be more willing to overlook the fact that your DNA looks like spaghetti. Ultimately it comes down to intelligence and social skill. If we raise the latter enough, Echidna should still be able to make friends, especially if we're careful about how we approach people.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:09
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The Lone Badger posted:The most important thing is to scour every corner of this lab for more mutagen. We must ~become~. Isn't Gray the Aristocrat? I don't think Echidna will be welcomed by the nooks.
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Apr 5, 2022 15:32
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RabidWeasel posted:The mutation system is one of my favourite things in CDDA and I haven't really played with it since the reworks so I'm particularly interested to see how this one goes. The rework is really good. I've spent a bunch of time testing it out and giving some feedback and in the few weeks since the first wave of changes it's gotten very readable and is, overall, a huge improvement over the old system. Def check it out. I'm going to be completely honest and admit that in the absurd amount of time I've played this game, I had no idea you could hack things just by raising your computers like Echidna is doing. I thought it was auto-fail and I guess never reconsidered it afterwards. Echidna rules, I would die for her.
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Apr 5, 2022 23:16
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inscrutable horse posted:Isn't Gray the Aristocrat? I don't think Echidna will be welcomed by the nooks. Oh dang...the Eaters of the Earth were zombies!
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Apr 5, 2022 23:29
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Feeling really sorry for that Cyborg that attacked her, is it at all possible to save them?
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Apr 6, 2022 01:25
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i have just met echidna but i am already willing to kill for her
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Apr 6, 2022 02:16
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Phrosphor posted:Feeling really sorry for that Cyborg that attacked her, is it at all possible to save them? Wild guess, but maybe you need to EMP them and turn off their kill trigger? I believe WG had that for one of the robot quests, I could see that also applying to cyborgs maybe?
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Apr 6, 2022 02:55
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Based on the enemy descriptions one is beyond saving and one needs major surgery (lure them to an autodoc?).
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Apr 6, 2022 13:06
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I hope Echidna will somehow make some friends. And master the computmotron.
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Apr 6, 2022 13:11
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Great LP wormgirl, I'm impressed you can update so frequently while keeping the quality up as well. It's been years since I last picked Cata up, back when a fraction of the mechanics were implemented, and I must admit I'm tempted to get back in to play with the new mutation & NPC systems. I'm curious, is it possible to force NPCs to mutate short of taking control of them through the console? If you inject them with mutagen or feed them marlos will they transform? I kind of want to establish a mutant commune of insect or fungus people.
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Apr 6, 2022 13:40
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I don't THINK that you can save the cyborg mob, but it would be cool if that could be added as an option with an autodoc and high medical skill to spawn an npc
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Apr 6, 2022 14:30
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I think there is a way to save one type, but Worm Girl would probably know better than me. I do have to say this LP has helped me play better for sure. I am surviving quite nicely with a low STR high Dex character right now.
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Apr 6, 2022 15:34
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 There's a locked door near our apartment. The computer says there's a barracks in there. We bang on the door a few times and listen, trying to hear the whirring of a gun robot's wheels.  The computer shocks us once, but after that it lets us in. We move away from the screen - it looks dim over there, but those screens give off enough light for things to see us if we're standing next to them.  It's quiet in here. There's a desk to one side, some locked metal doors heading to something the computer says is a magazine (???) and rows of wooden doors. We'll try those first. Magazine of course means a place where weapons and especially ammunition are stored. The word comes from the Arabic "mak zin" which means storehouse. The term was adopted in the literary sense as European print shops in the late 16th century began selling collections of interesting articles and illustrations, and around the same time people began using it in the military to refer to wherever they were keeping their gunpowder.  Each of these little rooms has a locker full of clothing for soldiers. Some of this is armor! We should put it on.  Does everyone but Gray get a pair of these loving things? The Tokarev TT-33 is basically a Russian 1911. It's the Russian WW2 pistol, and it still sees service today. If you're not fond of Russia at the moment, note that the weapon is also widely used elsewhere in the world the same way that the famous Kalashnikov rifles spread to every corner of the globe, such as: North Korea, Pakistan, Hungary, Iraq, Congo...(this goes on for a while). Oh well. It's not the gun's fault. The gun is pretty cool. IMO it's charmingly ugly in the way a lot of Soviet stuff is, and it fires a really cool round, the 7.62x25mm. Yes, you heard me right, there's yet another type of 7.62. It turns out 7.62 is just a really convenient diameter for bullets. As the 25mm suggests, it's much shorter than the other 7.62s we've seen, which is appropriate because it's a pistol round. The bullets here are hot loads, which means they have more powder packed in them, which is standard for this gun. It can shoot lower-power bullets in the same caliber, but the hot loads may not be safe for other guns. As stated before, incorrect ammo blowing your gun up isn't a thing in CDDA yet, so just push (r) and put in whatever the game lets you, and 99% of the time it will work. As for performance, the 7.62x25mm is slightly stronger than 9mm, but less accurate, and with comparable range.  This other gun is really big. It doesn't have as many bullets, but we assume the bigger gun will shoot harder. We take both. Oh hey! It's finally a Rivtech gun. Rivtech is a fictional arms company that was working on high-tech guns when the cataclysm happened. These guns are generally quite a bit more powerful than normal guns, but ammunition for them is rare and as it's caseless, it can't be reloaded like brass can. Caseless rounds are a real thing, but they've never been brought to proper production due to some lingering kinks that need to be worked out. Basically instead of a brass casing, the round, its powder charge, and primer are packed in a powder that solidifies during production. When the bullet goes off, the charge blasts the powder apart and there's no casing left. This means the gun can have fewer moving parts which lets it shoot faster and cleaner, with less chance for jams or other failure, and that the ammo can be significantly lighter. HVP stands for high velocity penetrator, in this case it's a flechette made of depleted uranium cased in a little piece of plastic that falls off as it's fired. The sabot stabilizes the flechette so it fires straight like an arrow instead of spinning. It has a ton of mass for something so skinny and gets through armor really well. These bullets do slightly better damage than Gray's M16 and have a staggering 38 armor penetration.  None of the helmets fit us, but we have a backpack and an army vest now.  We also find a book about Indonesia. That's a place, we think. We can't remember anything about it, but according to this book, the people there are very dangerous. If this is their book, maybe they will help us. Pencak Silat is a fighting style that focuses on weapons, and in CDDA, as in real life, it is a motherfucker. While switching to this style causes us to lose the block bonus that brawl grants, it gives us an additional dodge attempt. Normally you can only attempt to dodge once every second, so anything that grants extra attempts is really really good. Silat is the dodgiest weapon style, so if you're planning on making a nimble weapon fighter, this may be the one for you. Silat can be used with a ton of different weapons - quarterstaves, knives, batons, bladed farming weapons, and polearms all work. Silat grants two on-crit special attacks, one's a stun and the other is a trip. It also boosts damage against downed or stunned enemies by 33%, and you can increase your crit chance for 1 second whenever you move - useful if you're having trouble landing a crit. This critical hit and dodge focus means that Silat requires a lot of melee and dodge skill. We certainly have the stats for a crit-heavy style, but for now we're just not skilled enough. We'll stick with brawling and consider switching later.  There's another barracks here. We can hear footsteps behind the door, but nobody answers us.  Oh no! The console powers down when we try to hack in.  This one says prisoner containment. Maybe there's someone in here.  They're all dead.  This is a bad place, isn't it?   This room is a library.  It has just what we need. We should learn more about computers before we try to open anything else.  We get our theoretical skill to 6, unfortunately we can't use the new training recipe it taught us as we don't have the hackPRO program. You can find that on USB drives in trash cans, dumps, sewers, and other areas you'd find garbage. Still, if your theoretical skill is higher than practical, it makes it really easy to get the practical up by just doing stuff. We'll roam around and hack nonessential terminals until we have 6 skill.    Dionne...Dionne...we know that name. Horrible. This is a horrible place.  We scream until our throat is hoarse, bashing the computer into pieces.  After wandering some more, we come across a computer that drops several flying blade robots on us. We smash them all, then read something on the screen about Melchior. It says we can access Melchior, but there's a missing memory unit. It's supposed to sit right behind the screen.   Revivification. Is this why everyone is dead? No, it's why the dead are walking. Dead people aren't supposed to do that. But why did they die?  Dr. Summers had a mustache, and he looked funny after he shaved it. A security guard shot him, he just snapped one day and shot everyone. They put him the guard the cell next to ours and told his family he was dead. He never screamed after that, no matter what they did to him. He's still in there now.  That's right, teleporting is bad! We knew it!  We've explored most of this place now. It's five floors high, and each floor is about the same size.  There's another barracks here, it looks the same as the other one. We take everything interesting.  There's a book here about Israel. Krav maga is often touted as "the world's deadliest martial art." It's not, but it is pretty brutal. Krav maga focuses first and foremost on real-world application and is used by the Israeli Defense Force, which also means it's sort of a vehicle for Israeli PR. Because of this, it's sort of like the Desert Eagle of martial arts, and I literally couldn't find a video to link here that wasn't too douchey to post. Google at your own risk. The main goal of Krav Maga is to use whatever's at hand to disable your opponent and either escape or go in for a finisher as quickly as possible. The martial art is designed for street combat, where you can never be sure if your opponent has friends nearby. It was first developed by a Jewish survivor of Nazi occupation who wanted to teach resistance fighters how to protect themselves, and as cringe as the culture around it can be, the fact that it's gone from those humble beginnings to being used by special forces units is pretty neat. In CDDA, it is primarily notable because it can be used with a gun. It's a good one to use while shooting because it gives you arm and leg blocks, plus grab break and a few moves to disable enemies and get away.The style comes with a trip and a stun (they only last one second, unlike the 2 silat gives you) that set up a special finisher called bone breaker that does 200% damage and adds your strength score to your armor penetration. Bone breaker requires that you be unarmed, so you may need to drop your gun for best results there. The 9mm +P is just a hand-loaded 9mm round with a bit of extra powder in it, so it hits slightly harder.  Now there are these little slime blobs. Hundreds of them! We fight them off with our fangs and a machete we found in a storeroom, but they keep coming. In the old lore, these slimes were actually bits of the XE037 mentioned in the logs. That's been changed for reasons I don't quite understand, and now they're just one of the "subplanar creatures" that were also mentioned. They have nothing to do with the cataclysm, they're just sort of here. A lot of zombie descriptions still mention black goo, as you may recall me mentioning, but that's neither these guys nor the mysterious pathogen, it's just corpse gunk.  We get away, but not before they smash two of the big plates in our army vest. We didn't mean to break them, let's hope the army doesn't get mad... We don't really need the ESAPI/ESBI plates in this thing, since the enemies here do fairly low damage and we know where all the gunbots are. It'll be lighter and less cumbersome without them, and there are plenty more if we need to replace these. The broken plates only provide 25 cut/bash instead of 50. ESAPI is cool. Normally I'd make us some gear in a situation like this, but I haven't found any tailoring books and Echidna has 0 tailoring. We actually can't succeed at any single-skill non-training crafting actions that teach anything if we have 0 relevant skill, so unless we find some yarn so we can use the knitting practice action, we're stuck with what we can find. This miiiight be a bug, stay tuned.  OH NO THE ARMY IS MAD  One of these soldiers had a helmet that will fit us. Since it doesn't cover our mouth, we can still use our fangs.  What...is this? The Mossberg Brownie is a teeny tiny pocket pistol designed for shooting trapped rabbits execution style. Smaller than a smartphone, it loads 4 .22 rounds (all types) in its four barrels. There's also 230 rounds of .22 rat-shot, which is a .22 round that has a bunch of little pellets instead of a bullet. As its name suggests, this is for hunting snakes or rats and is not really enough to kill a human. This might sound useless, but it's actually great if you want to hunt birds or squirrels or something without completely destroying them. This is also a great choice if you want to train shooting without wasting good ammo. Or you can deconstruct it with a bullet puller to get lead, primer, and powder. That's what I usually do with .22.  What...is THIS?! I am beside myself. The Taurus Raging Bull is a comically huge revolver, and this one's chambered in .454 Casull, which is a bullet big enough to hunt cape buffalo. This is one of the few guns I've ever held, and it was so heavy that I wasn't even able to keep the barrel straight. The guy I was dating at the time said it used to belong to Hunter S. Thompson, but he might have been full of poo poo. If you're an anime fan, you'll recognize the .454 as the bullets Alucard uses. Hirano is a huge fan of ridiculous excess and the fact that he's got Alucard firing these out of twin automatics is especially funny. IRL, you need a revolver for these things, they're too large to be practical in a semi.  We open up the PE012 storage. Inside, we find...  Right. This stuff is the PE. But is number twelve right? This one is...froggies! We knew that. There's also some purifier in here. That's for resetting, but it makes all the prisoners sick. If they give this to you, it means you don't have to be cut open yet. Frog is a very new mutation line. IMO it's a bit undeveloped, but it offers a few cool and unique things. We'll look at each line in detail soon, I promise!  We get back into the logs. We are starting to feel depressed, it's very lonely here. This message is confusing until it clicks: We're not the first ones to hack into this system. This message seems like it's from Maiar, but that can't be true. Maiar was one of the doctors. He found out something she wasn't supposed to, and then he told somebody on the outside, so they put him in a cell. Once you go in the cell, you never get out. They stick you with needles and change you over and over until you're not useful anymore, then they cut you open and burn you into nothing.  We slither back to our food pile and get into the bags marked Meal Ready to Eat. There are cookies in there! Food is your primary issue in lab starts. Since it's a sealed environment and you can't use the hydroponics trays, there's no way to get more food. Your best bet is to gobble up anything that's perishable the moment you see it - CDDA metabolism is unrealistically efficient and hunger itself doesn't really affect anything, so there's very little benefit to saving food until you're hungry. Most labs will have enough food to last weeks. I've gotten into the danger zone on some bad spawns before, where I needed to do a poo poo ton of crafting projects just to get out of the lab, but this one's actually extremely comfortable. You see all those barracks and prisons we keep finding? Those are little add-on rooms that are randomized, and sometimes you'll get a lab that's all prisons, or that barely has any of these side rooms at all.  We feel like we understand this computer system pretty well now. 6 ranks is just about the minimum I feel comfortable trying to open the magazines with.  In the last barracks, we find two more books about fighting. Wing chun, made famous by the incomparable Bruce Lee, is really good for unarmed combat. It allows arm and leg blocks and grants buffs to your dodge and block ability that scale with your perception. If you pass a turn, it gives you a buff that boosts accuracy and scales with perception. This buff allows you to perform knockback and knockdown attacks that set you up to re-apply your pause buff. You also hit 10% faster and harder most of the time, and it also has feint, which reduces the time spent on an attack by half if you happen to miss. It's best for keeping single opponents tripped up and unable to fight back. In a situation where you're dealing with a crowd, you may want to pick something that's better at killing quickly. Ninjutsu was probably not a single formalized martial art in the time of the Ninja. Ninja first appeared in the 15th century as strict codes of conduct for samurai opened the door to people who were willing to be more unscrupulous to accomplish military and political aims. Ninja did have formal clans and specialized training, but most of this probably centered around spycraft and deception in the same way MI5 or the CIA would give. During and following the Edo era (17th-19th century), nation-building campaigns began to depict the historical ninja as shadowy anti-heroes and legends began to grow up around their exploits, especially as they faded from importance or grew into more modernized intelligence organizations and secret police. This helped preserve the myth but also did a lot to obscure historical fact. What we have today are several very diverse schools, some of which have no historical lineage, while others are contested and all have been influenced by mythology and modernization. CDDA's ninjutsu focuses on alpha strikes. While using ninjutsu, movement makes less noise (not a concern for us thanks to our tentacles) and our attacks are completely silent. We get a boosted crit chance, and if we crit we get a good amount of extra damage and stun and down the target. This applies a status called loss of surprise which lasts 3 turns and negates the boosted crits. However, if we land a kill we get two extra dodges, and even if we don't, we get evasion buffs when we move. The strategy the style suggests is to sneak up on enemies, hit them very very hard, and then run away rather than staying to fight. The style works with swords, knives, claws, quarterstaves, and bladed farming tools, or you can use it unarmed. As a woman (女 onna), Echidna would be a kunoichi, which in Japanese is spelled くノ一. This is a fun bit of wordplay that simply breaks the onna kanji out into its three brush strokes, which if you squint can be read as ku no ichi. Female ninja were not uncommon, as women could often infiltrate courts or pass unnoticed in society in ways men could not.  We're finally able to break into the magazines. They're filled with lots of bullets and some rations.  There is a big gun here, it looks like it uses the same bullets as the pistol we found eariler. The schtick with the Rivtech guns is that they all use the same ammo. There's a pistol, an SMG, an assault rifle, and an LMG. Each one accepts progressively larger magazines. The assault rifle here uses a box magazine that holds 50 rounds. There are other rivtech guns that use different bullets, but we'll cover those if we find any.  There is also this really really big gun. The Barret is a sniper rifle that fires .50 BMG. In real life it holds the second and fifth farthest confirmed sniping kill record, with a range of up to two and a half miles away. At that distance, a shooter actually has to account for the curvature of the earth. This is one of the most powerful weapons in the game, and because it's single fire, it's a bit more portable than the M2HB. There's only one sniper rifle that's better, and that's the McMmillan Tac-50  This computer turned off when we tried to hack this door. Maybe we can shoot it open.   "Oops." We go get our hacksaw to try to cut through the rebar, but when we get back, the dead soldiers have already come out. Waaah!  Inside, we find mostly the same old stuff, but there's another gun. Here's another rivtech gun. This one shoots a different caliber than the others, and is a high-capacity saboted flechette pistol with burst fire. IDW is just a fancy attempt to create more complicated gun taxonomy than is strictly needed. It's a machine pistol, which is to say that it's a really small SMG. Judging by its dimensions, I picture something like this. Anyway, it's quite good. 30 AP and 50 rounds is awesome in action. It won't stop a kevlar hulk or a juggernaut, but it'll chew through most other stuff. This will be our main pistol. Also there's 350 bullets.  We get into the magazine here and find more guns. oh hey it's a mcmillan tac-50 Are you starting to see the problem here?  A scary robot comes out when we try to hack this door. We run into the dark where it can't see us. We keep shooting and moving away when it follows the sound.   Robots are stupid.  There are some little things in a sealed package inside. They have labels, but we don't recognize them. For staters: These labs have been around for over a decade, and they used to be the game's final destination. They're designed so that you could get all the ultratech, CBMs, mutagens, weapons, books, and crafting gear you'd missed out on elsewhere. They also used to be very risky. It's possible labs may continue to have some low-end cyberware in the future, as Earth Prime did have rudimentary bionic technology. That's what we'll assume here. These are Earth Prime's baby steps into what the exodii managed to research in their homeworld prior to the cataclysm. This is just two metabolic interchanges and an internal chronometer.  The massive surfeit of top-tier firearms we've acquired trivialize most of the enemies in the game, and we've only just started playing. Even for characters who don't start in these labs, getting all this stuff is as simple as grabbing a keycard off a dead scientist and swiping your way in. There's no reason to visit any military outposts, crash sites, exodii drop pods, or anything else. You come here and you win the game. These places used to be harder. For one, there were m249 and M2HB turrets everywhere, and killbots could wander quite a bit more freely. Over time, these were scaled back.  The game has a really beautiful early bit where you are grabbing whatever you can to survive, and vehicle construction and character improvement are a lot of fun, but the presence of these labs resulted in a meta that got super boring if you weren't purposefully challenging yourself. You'd struggle for about a week, then dive into a single lab, get all your endgame guns, cybernetics, and mutagens, make a survivor suit, and then go build a deathmobile. This was all doable before the end of spring. Once you'd done all that, all that was left to do was drive around looking for more labs. Not because you needed to - there was nothing left to challenge a player character by that point - but because it was fun to accumulate all the bionics and mutations. Echidna has existed for two weeks and has more and better guns and ammo than Gray, a suite of really nice mutations, five martial arts, and a whole lot more. If I wasn't doing a story playthrough, I would be at a loss as to what to do with her after escaping this lab. Everything after that would just be a victory lap.  There's another problem, too. What even is this place? It's just a procedurally generated mishmash of rooms. Some of them, like the apartments, make a bit of sense, but others are just huge open areas with a single countertop, or random boxes. It doesn't look at all like a real place. It's for all these reasons that this type of lab is being phased out. We've already seen one replacement, the minilab. While that place sucked a lot, it's the worst of the bunch, and the others are all waaaaay cooler and better, with appropriate loot and a decent challenge. Hopefully we'll see more - I'd love to see corrupted exodii bases full of zomborgs and turrets, prisons with secret mutagen testing labs in the basement, more and cooler military outposts, there are tons of possibilities. A lot of the changes people have complained about over the last two years like weariness, proficiencies, mutagen changes, exodii, the slow removal of old labs, the addition of new labs, stronger enemies, portal storms, and skill rust have been made with the aim of simply not letting the player fill up on dessert before their steak was even done cooking. I am not a fan of all of these - skill rust is a personal bugbear of mine in any game - but they're not being mindlessly done for "realism"'s sake, they're being done by veteran players who want to build out the midgame to give people a reason to play past summer, as there really wasn't one before. I broke into all these barracks (and there are still more to break into) because I wanted to show you that oftentimes, less is more in this game. I don't want to spoil Echidna's journey, so we'll be taking only a modest amount of this arsenal with us if and when we escape. Anyway, that's enough of that aside, let's get back to the good stuff.  There is a bed here, and a robot with lots of arms. There are disposable tools for the robot. It was supposed to be for something else, but mostly it was used to cut people open and see how they'd changed inside. A lot of people died in here.  There is a room here. It hurts too much, so we can't go inside. Our insides shriek and howl and try to tear us apart when we open the door and peek.  We want to find help, but we're starting to get scared that there is no help.  We like reading the computer logs because it feels like someone is talking to us, even if the computer logs say things that make us sad.  XE037 is the pathogen, The PE series are the mutagens, but really they're part of the same thing. PE is just instructions.  The dead people change. It's what they do. The scientists thought they were so smart when they came up with PE, but they didn't understand that they hadn't really invented anything.  People started hurting each other, but nobody noticed what was really wrong.  Dr. Dionne's report made the whole place go crazy, but they didn't know how bad it was.  They never figured it out. We can read their words and it's obvious to us, but they never learned.  They teleported with the stuff inside of them, and when they did that, it got out. It got out and it got everywhere.  After that, the soldiers came.  They were only supposed to hurt the dead people.  PE062 was supposed to be the cure.  We used to be somebody, but she's gone. Everything went wrong, she was supposed to help but the bad people made her go to the cell with the knives and the needles. They did it because she deserved it. They all deserved it, but somebody had to suffer.  We pick up our work badge off the table, but the other one is missing. Looking at it makes us scream until our voice stops working.  There is only one place left that the other badge could be.   The rifle is too big.  We have to fight all our bad thoughts inside. They want to scream and run away and jump on the robots, but that isn't right.  We have to be a careful hunter.     We take out our earplugs and check the room, but there are no bad robots anymore. Once it's safe, we go to the computer.   Everyone died for this. Everyone in the whole world.  We find our other work badge, the one that opens the front door. The lanyard is broken. We remember gloved hands tearing it off of us when the security guards came to get us. We remember screaming, we remember everyone in the cells screaming, but that's all. The purifier can make you human again, but it's not real, it's just another mutagen. You're still replacing yourself, it just looks like you used to look. Once you lose yourself, you're gone for good. We can't go back. We'll always be a monster.  We can only go forward.  X-03: 'Spectre' Recon Mech posted:The Boeing-Daewoo RMES (Recon Mechanical Exoskeleton Suit), a recent acquisition by the U.S. military, it was designed to be used in a scout-recon-sniper role, due to its mobility, integrated laser sniper rifle, and suite of optics for target designation and battlefield awareness. It was not deployed before the Cataclysm hit, though there were a few prototypes in the field. You may be able to hack it to accept you as its pilot. Like all mech-suits, it can act as a UPS from its large battery.  We found a card on one of the dead soldiers.  We have to squish half of our tentacles into either leg, but we fit.  We ride it to the top, but then we find out the laser gun is broken. This won't work, our plan is ruined. The mech works like any other mount, except it has an internal battery that drains as you use it. While riding it, it intercepts some attacks (a horse or other mount would also protect you this way), and you get night vision, infrared, and, when it isn't bugged, a laser sniper rifle. The mech can't do anything on its own, it's just a robot suit. This is a known issue and hopefully someone will fix it at some point.  After that, we have time to think, and we start to get sad again. Everyone got hurt. Was it our fault? We find the big dissection room. There's a nurse bot here, but even with our badge it doesn't know who we are anymore. nurse bot posted:The first product from Uncanny, a towering four-armed humanoid with a gentle face. The details of its visage are striking, but the stiffness of it makes you really uncomfortable. The end of the world did not stop it from looking for patients to assist. There are two kinds of nurse bots, good ones and evil ones, and it's impossible to tell the difference by looks alone. Good ones are harmless, and if you have a doctor's badge, they will assist with autodoc surgery, giving you a couple percent better success rate on everything. Evil ones will scan you for CBMs, and if you have any, they'll try to inject you with anesthetic, drag you to the operating table, and rip them out. This can be deadly if, say, it's cold in the room and you're not quite dressed for it, and they can fail at surgery as well, with all the catastrophic outcomes that includes. If you don't have any bionics, the evil ones are harmless. Either way, they don't put up a fight if you attack them.  This was the most important thing. We broke apart and got put back together over and over, but the new pieces were different. The ship...the ship of Archimedes.  We take more. Maybe it will all go away if we take more.  The insidious messaging is for the spider mutation line. I'm pretty sure they have stimulant psychosis because of that ancient crack spider meme.  We can't stay here. We need to hunt, but it hurts all over!  Our head hurts the most. That's a passive +1 int.  Our mouth waters, our fangs make it hard not to drool.  Nothing can hide from us anymore.  We need meat. NOW! This was bound to happen. Three of the top four mutation lines y'all voted for are carnivores. This can be a shortcut to starvation if you're stuck in a lab, but we have no further reason to stay here. We've been lying low while we mutate, but you don't actually need to do that. It hurts a bit and makes you hungry and thirsty, but those things are easily managed. Carnivores can eat certain plant-based things if they have to, but they get very little nutrition from it, and many items are totally inedible for them. They can eat things like hamburgers where it's partially meat as well, and dairy is just fine.  Look at our loving delightful night vision range now.  The big gun blows the turret apart. Now we can use our badge to go outside!! Don't do this. We have some grenades and we can make acid bombs, those would be much safer. If you shoot a turret and it lives, it will blind-fire back at you, and since it's a machine gun in a narrow hallway, it will probably hit you. We have a .50 and ESAPI, but it's still a risk. "Hunt...HUNT!!" We swipe our card and charge out into the...snow? It's winter? "MEAT!" "Incoming!" POP POP POP!  "Wait, wait up. Do you know who this is?!"
worm girl fucked around with this message at 02:38 on May 15, 2022 |
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Apr 6, 2022 18:08
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OH drat
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Apr 6, 2022 18:46
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I hope she's just down and not dead!
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Apr 6, 2022 18:46
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That was one of the most ridiculously stocked labs I've seen for ages.
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Apr 6, 2022 18:59
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I do have to ask, did you hack the door for the PE012 samples or knock it down? If you knocked it down without using a gun, what did you use? Also jesus I never found so much stuff in a lab before.
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Apr 6, 2022 19:03
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dervinosdoom posted:I do have to ask, did you hack the door for the PE012 samples or knock it down? If you knocked it down without using a gun, what did you use? I hacked all of them. I think I shot down the bionic and mech vaults, plus one or two barracks/magazine doors. We don't have any melee weapons that can hurt metal doors or reinforced concrete walls. It's funny how easy oldlabs are now. No turrets, usually no roaming talons, and unless you have a rift or something there aren't many aliens. It'd be cool to be in a space like that with a small number of fairly dangerous enemies rather than weak zombies. worm girl fucked around with this message at 02:36 on May 15, 2022 |
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Apr 6, 2022 19:24
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Aw. Echidna.  Whatever monster you may have been, it died with the old you. Let's hope Gray feels generous with his hunting expertise.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:30
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Poor Echidna, two steps into freedom and you run into a madman with a gun. Gray on the other hand is finally going to get some night vision goggles and a sweet hardsuit.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:42
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Huh, I didn't think that the oldlabs that exited out onto a surface road like that were still in the game.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:56
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Haha oh drat. I've been wondering if you were planning (or could) join the protagonists in the same game.
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Apr 6, 2022 20:58
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Donkringel posted:Haha oh drat. I've been wondering if you were planning (or could) join the protagonists in the same game. I think that's some authorial fiat.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:03
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This is not what I expected. Also MECH SUIT MECH SUIT MECH SUIT MECH SUIT MECH SUIT MECH SUIT MECH SUIT.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:07
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Worm, that was utterly perfect storytelling
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Apr 6, 2022 21:29
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Literally gasped out loud at the last bit there, lmao at the LPs on this forum having better written and visually framed dramatic tension than a lot of modern film (seriously, though, really, really excellent poo poo worm girl) Though I know it probably wasn't an issue here for storytelling reasons, do Scientists have their own evolution line? By which I mostly mean: are they considered separate from the other types of zombies evolution trees. It's not something I'd ever thought about before until Echidna popped out into the snow.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:33
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 Poor Echidna.Hopefully you find more of the newer labs, because the only other new lab you found sucked so bad, and I feel like there's a lot of potential for environmental storytelling in places like this.
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Apr 6, 2022 21:52
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Sab Sabbington posted:Literally gasped out loud at the last bit there, lmao at the LPs on this forum having better written and visually framed dramatic tension than a lot of modern film (seriously, though, really, really excellent poo poo worm girl) Apparently they turn into some sort of horrifying wolfsquider. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Apr 7, 2022 |
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Apr 6, 2022 23:24
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Sab Sabbington posted:Literally gasped out loud at the last bit there, lmao at the LPs on this forum having better written and visually framed dramatic tension than a lot of modern film (seriously, though, really, really excellent poo poo worm girl) They can evolve in all the same ways as basic zombies, but with a half-life of 28 days, presumably to ensure that labs are at least somewhat stocked with zombie scientists. I wonder if someone should go make them evolve into the medical zombies instead now that those are in. Caidin posted:Huh, I didn't think that the oldlabs that exited out onto a surface road like that were still in the game. They are super rare and being phased out. This one force spawned because I picked the lab escape scenario, but I believe they can still pop up occasionally. Donkringel posted:Haha oh drat. I've been wondering if you were planning (or could) join the protagonists in the same game. I will double check this, but unless something has changed with controllable NPCs, player characters are unloaded from the world when not in use. I had to use debug to get the Prometheus crew in here. Thanks everyone, I wasn't sure how this episode would go over, glad it worked!
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Apr 7, 2022 04:01
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