god you know what fuck it i don't have a sketch or anything or this yet but it's been stuck in my brain for DAYS and i need to share my headcanon/theory/unfocused science ramblings with the internet.
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
anyway that was a whole ass tangent thank you for listening to my ted talk about why the lizards should be weirder featuring surprise shelly tangent
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