one day i'll make my blog look different

so like. got hit by a skullcrusher because i was distracted. broke my neck. started running low on food because the area i was in didn't have a lot of sap and i couldn't really move a whole lot to find more. went into a life pod hoping i could get some food in there and wait for my neck to heal a bit, and technically i was right but the food it gave me was just a bar of chocolate. but thankfully item hoarding tendencies paid off because what i DID have was fifty million helluces sitting in a few of my bags. so while i was stuck in there for a bit, i would just alternate taking a bite of the chocolate, then downing an herb or two.

and as i'm doing this i make a connection.

consider.

post-casualties unknown the expies sorta reinvent mexican hot chocolate as a way to actually eat the chocolate from the supply pods without poisoning themselves.

unfortunately probably a temporary thing since chocolate's not exactly a renewable resource on the grey planet once things stop getting thrown at it, but honestly what that probably just means is that they'd try and find some other sweet food to combine it with. i feel like this would be a popular enough thing that people would try and find replacements once the chocolate supply ran out.

i think way too much about the food on this planet. like, after the mission's done and everyone left can just kinda live their own lives on the planet without the pressure of having to find the cargo, what would they make? because we're only like five layers in and there's already a pretty good variety of food sources. there's the stuff from the first layer obviously, that's pretty safe, but also like. you could probably find a way to grow bananas. the cavendish bananas you typically find commercially are genetically modified to be seedless, as far as i know they're propagated via cuttings like seedless grapes, but like. even with seedless fruit varieties you can occasionally still find a couple of tiny immature seeds. they're extremely unlikely to be fertile seeds and the alien climate and expies' lack of prior knowledge on how to actually grow these things would make this even harder, with with some luck and experimentation i imagine they could still probably figure something out. plus who knows, maybe in the future there's some new banana variety that overtakes cavendish bananas as the popular commercial type that actually does produce proper mature seeds.

like there's so much food in this game. and the part of my brain that grew up on neopets and cooking shows is extremely interested in how these weird alien foods actually work. what the hell is going on with leadbushes? because if you can figure that out then those are likely an extremely easy source of farmable meat. if adding snow strider dna to milkies resulted in rozas having boobs, does that mean snow striders produce milk? can you milk the angry snow tarantulas? and with the new in-progress stuff added in 7.0, you could DEFINITELY farm those things from the crystalline hollow. it'd be dangerous, but (as they exist currently, who knows if this'll change later) that is an extremely obvious source of infinite food. whoever's butchering those would just have to be EXTREMELY kitted out in armor or something to avoid being shredded, like a metal beekeeper's outfit. like there's so many things you could DO. the POSSIBILITIES.

i'm separating this into chunks just so you all can understand.

so like. that was my layer four, right. aside from nearly drowning in a life pod due to my own greed and getting washed away into a coil that zapped me, that was probably the best i've ever been going into layer five.

and then i keep getting rewarded!

i craft a titanium machete for the first time, use it on some little bastards, get Even More Soup Despite Already Having Like Five Bottles Of It. things are great. i'm making good pace.

and then One Singular Bad Fall puts me in the depths of hell.

all fucking three of them.

maybe i should turn on steam's autorecord thing for this game i cannot properly communicate via text the amount of insane bullshit that happens to me in this game on a regular basis

might've actually sorta kinda been able to bring that back too if it weren't for the two little bastards that followed me into whatever little safe pocket i landed in before last stand activated. would've at least given me time to dig an escape tunnel and throw myself off and probably die to fall damage instead or something.

you know what'd really make this game even worse?

dental care.

and also like. we don't really get to see a whole lot of creatures aside from the stuff that's trying to kill us. and again this makes sense for a video game, but what were the thornbacks and everything eating before expies started getting thrown at them en masse? i guess it'd make sense for them to be omnivorous considering how they tunnel through walls, but point is like. what is/was in this ecosystem other than spiders. what are the spiders eating. are all these spiders secretly just really absurdly angry herbivores who were minding their business eating geofruit and shit up until all these furries showed up in their territory for some reason? i wanna know more about the spiders. and the leadbushes. how do those things work.

like i've gotta assume most of the plants and stuff you find in the caves have gotta be chemosynthetic, right? because no way is enough sunlight reaching down past the first layer to support all those plants.

i am so dead when i continue this run.

context for what happened: was dancing around a steep bit of territory trying to eat a cactus and avoid what i thought was a landmine. unfortunately failed miserably and fell right onto it. good news, not a landmine! bad news, bouncepad that knocked me out and threw me right into a sea of oil with a spent fuel barrel on the nearest shore. tried to swim to the other when i woke up, coil was in the way. figured the spent fuel was the lesser of two evils because i could at least touch it long enough to climb past without immediately exploding. there wasn't another way down, so i had to spend a while digging a little tunnel to escape, nearly passing out from exhaustion and getting irradiated all the while. once i was FINALLY far enough away that i wasn't getting irradiated anymore, spent the next little while trying and failing to recover from my severe radiation sickness. eventually said fuck it and bailed because the radline was getting close and happened to stumble into a supply room. and immediately knocked myself out with a box while the radline's on my ass. was just BARELY able to make that tiny fucking jump over the oil pool once i woke up and out of pure luck managed to not fall into any more traps on the way down.

i am. so dead. once i pick this run back up. i have armor in one of my bags but i don't think armor's gonna save me from my lungs getting turned into bloody water balloons.

worst part is i had a combat pen in the bag i had to leave behind when i woke up at the bottom of the fuckin oil sea and i could REALLY USE the oxyline that was in that thing right now

so like. crystals.

it feels weird that crystals are so normal, compared to other species. like, mechanically that makes sense, but i'm not talking about mechanics. i mean the fact that neither their gunsaw profile or their pda entry seem to really comment on the crystal part beyond "they're there". i feel like crystals should be weirder.

.....and then i thought about it a bit more. and i thought about their whole branch of the family tree. because it's expies>rozas>crystals>shellies. with rozas already having the dna of something from the grey planet. so we know that's fair game. and then you jump to shellies and.

that is! not how that works! for energy to power the health chips, sure, and living things can generate energy from stuff like light just fine. but a body needs more than just that to put itself together. there's a reason plants have to root themselves into the soil, they need water and nutrients and everything. you can't maintain a body with just energy, to build and repair a physical object you need physical things. that stuff doesn't just come out of nowhere. that's why nutrition is important, if you're not getting enough of something from somewhere in your diet then you're gonna run into problems.

.....but we do conveniently have an example of something from the grey planet that can also just ignore the laws of physics and make something out of nothing for mysterious reasons. or nothing out of something.

BECAUSE LIKE. LOOK. THIS MAKES SENSE RIGHT. AS AN EXPERIMENT THIS COMPANY WOULD DO. PLAY WITH ME IN THIS SPACE. COME DO MONSTER FACTORY WITH ME.

so like. in rough descending order of how survivable it'd be to have these things growing out of you at all times (based on both actual real world stuff and sandbox testing with one crystal in each inventory slot).

soothing crystal. probably the luckiest you could get here. i did test setting my mood to -100 while holding six of these in the sandbox and i still got That Minigame twice before leaving dangerously low mental health, so it's not even necessarily that you're just automatically happy all the time. you just recover quicker than the average person. would be interesting seeing the long-term effects of this, but from a glance at least it seems actively beneficial.

relief crystal. you just can't feel pain. which is kinda just an actual condition that exists. there is stuff like pain symbolia, where you feel pain but without the suffering or aversion response to it, but based on the crystal shard's ingame description saying you feel numb while holding it i'm assuming it'd be more of a case of just not being able to feel it at all. which does cause problems, pain's there in the first place to alert you that something's wrong, but it's definitely something you can work around (especially with stuff like the health chips to alert you to any injuries you might not notice).

emissive crystal. you just glow now. depending on the specific wavelength of light those crystals actually emit, you could end up with stuff like sunburn or skin cancer from long term exposure to uv light, plus probably some long-term psychological effects that i'm forgetting at the moment from the constant light fucking up your internal clock (think computer screens but worse), but given that those things don't actively microwave you or irradiate you ingame i'm assuming this would be another relatively safe one.

4. AND NOW WE TAKE A SHARP TURN INTO HELL. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT ORDER YOU'D PUT THESE IN, THEY'RE ALL BAD. ALL OF THESE WOULD SUCK.

so up is bad. have fun with that. this is also ignoring any other possible implications of moving with that amount of force in literally any other context. essentially you've just developed comic book superpowers but with none of the durability someone would actually need to SURVIVE using those superpowers.

digestion crystal's pretty straight forward, if it's constantly taking matter out of your body then that's proooobably not good in the long term. somewhere between constant starvation and having a black hole strapped to your back. surprised this one doesn't have any kinda negative effects in game, though i guess the crystals as a whole will probably be expanded on once the crystal hollow gets properly added to the game.

kinda the opposite of the digestion crystal in that there's now too much stuff being constantly added to your body. you ARE definitely able to counter the constant blood gain with severe enough injuries (you are not immune to cactus^100), but even so with just how quickly this adds blood into your system i dooooon't think you'd wanna deal with that. makes me curious about those unused hypervolemia moodles, were those a thing that was implemented at some point and then removed? or were they just never properly implemented in the first place?

and then the oxygen crystals.

so obviously like. hypoxia is bad.

however! too much oxygen! is also bad!

pretty much all the stuff i could find on this in adults involves divers (though it can also happen accidentally while taking care of prematurely born babies), so there's also some stuff involving high pressures getting added into the mix here. plus all of this is far beyond my understanding so the best i can do is show a bunch of screenshots instead of actually trying to explain biochemistry myself.

of course in real life, you can get yourself away from whatever the source of all this extra oxygen is. it's definitely not FUN, but if you survive long enough to separate yourself from whatever's causing the issue then most of the health complications seem (to me, a random non-medical-professional on the internet reading most of this off wikipedia) either reversible or at the very least manageable. long term damage is more noticeable in the case of infants, but point is like. in real life, you can cut off the extra oxygen supply.

here it's growing out of your body.

so yeah. pick your poison. literal in some cases.

4a. if you so much as even think about moving upwards say goodbye to every bone in your body.

4b. your body eats itself.

4c. honestly probably the most manageable of the bunch but still bad. blood water balloon.

4d. the rocks on the beach that make you old. and blind. and hypoxic ironically.

this is all assuming that it's the pure raw form of whatever the hell those crystals on the grey planet are growing out of these guys. i imagine due to both lab experimentation and crystals eventually having kids with each other things would probably get a lot more mixed up and less intense, like how if you get a bunch of those shrimp selectively bred for aquariums to be super bright colors and then let them loose the colors gradually get muddier and more natural as they reproduce.

i imagine it would've been some combination of the digestion, blood, and emissive crystal nonsense that would've eventually led to shellies being created, given that a. they literally glow and b. if anything would've led to a creature's entire fucking digestive system just getting fully fucking deleted out of nowhere, it would probably have been scientists messing around with the thing that removes stuff from your digestive system. if i had to give any guess as to why they chose scorpions out of all things to combine with that, i imagine it would've had to have been something to do with how scorpions have fluorescent chemicals in their chitin.

......which would then probably cause the whole "can you get sunburn from emissive crystals" question to start leaning a bit towards "yes". idea might've had something to do with using the fluorescence from the scorpions and the uv light from the emissive crystals to combine with the cold-blooded chameleon dna and see if it basically becomes its own personal heat lamp or something.

this is also in absence of whatever the hell else could be going on in the crystalline hollows up to and including what may or may not be actual literal ghosts

ohhhhhh my god i could make such cool fanart if i could just figure out this guy's pants/lack thereof

so this pda entry right

i've seen it a couple times as i've reviewed the lore entries on the wiki and always figured "oh neat lore, that's cool"

but i was just sitting here watching some videos and suddenly realized

IS THAT THE IN-UNIVERSE JUSTIFICATION FOR THE FUCKING MEGALOVANIA EASTER EGG.

how do i design lynxpoint cats please my family is dying

i'm kinda reluctant to actually put this in the warriors tag because like. This Is Not Actually For A Warriors Character. but at the same time if anyone out there knows how to make a good cat design, it's warriors fans.

like it's not that i don't know how they look, i've got plenty of reference images in front of me, it's more that i'm having trouble stylizing the stripes in a way that looks good. primarily on the limbs.

the mischievous blake andrews:

because like. we have so many stories about the apocalypse lately, right? everyone's outlook has become so dire that even fuckin pokemon's cashed in on it. everything feels like it's falling apart all at once, and we reflect that feeling in the art we make.

but then you have casualties unknown and like. sure, the game's not finished, but we know how this ends already. like you can go on the wiki and look up the planned endings right this seconds, but even if we pretend the wiki doesn't exist like. gunsaw exists. we know where this story's going. and it's not an "everyone dies and the chapter closes on life in the universe", the expies as a species survive. they form their own (if also demonstrably pretty fucked given the whole corporate war in gunsaw) society on the grey planet where they don't have to deal with humans anymore, at least not directly. stuff gets dropped on them for a few decades, but they're mostly free to do their own thing. sure, the canon ending has the mission end in a critical failure, but like. fuck the mission. the mission's what the humans are after, what the expies are after is just. survival and freedom. and, regardless of if you go with the canon ending or the escape ending, they get that. the cost to life was massive and unforgivable, but the expies win at the end of the day.