#sbz

ok so robin and al-an are space traveling, this is set a couple years after the ending of sbz and phm btw. they end up getting hit by a rogue asteroid and al-an has to crash land on the closest planet, which is erid. al-an is familiar with the eridians, through the architect hivemind, however he's never met one personally.

there is a hole in the ship, robin almost dies but al-an stuffs her into a prawn suit they keep for robin so they can collect stuff and she can be safe because shes a little soft meat sack.

this is a very temporary fix, though. the prawn suit can only keep up anything to keep robin alive for so long. he does detect a little pocket of earth atmosphere on the planet, he overuses his tractor beam carrying robin in her prawn suit to bring her there, and comes across rocky shortly before he powers down.

a very panicked rocky sees the human and immediately works as hard as possible to bring her back to grace's dome, though its very hard to do so because she's kinda in a 3-5 ton suit

blah blah blah blah plot armor robin survives the trip

she wakes up to grace standing over her, confused and a little worried, and she almost ends up stabbing him because she's still in fight or flight and this woman is insane before she calms down just enough to not kill grace.

I decided on Fi-On. For fin for short

Themed heavyly off a seaslug and octopus.

This lad, professional nanny of a hidden precursor seedbed hidden on a secluded waterborne planet somewhere, he Hates company buuut gets saddled up with a bunch of humans looking to cultivate his planet for alterra purposes and forges a false alliance with them.

Unfortunately he can't seem to figure out how to kill the idiots with too much plot armor and no survival instincts.

im still in love with the Dynamic of my Precursor oc, surrounded by 3 questionably dysfunctional human survivors

The manic one who's always trying to amputate a limb or eat something they shouldn't and thinks they'll all definitely die from becoming eventually cannibals when there is food fucking everywhere. May or may not have asked questions leading Fl-on to suspect they considered if his species would make a sustainable food source. Hoards water in bottles. Because fuck it everything tastes better with micro plastics. But vary nice.The compulsive/dopamine deficient insomniac. Who is always awake, always infectiously anxious and always makes everyone else anxious because they are sometimes smart and sound reasonable when they claim they witnessed a reaper Leviathan head peering out of the toilet..

spontantiously does reckless unpredictable shit assuming they have plot armour they definitely do not. and like to cry about long past pets in the middle of the The sensitive, reasonable dumbass with too much empathy and no survival instincts or brains...but 280% plot armor, disney princess if they were a 5"11 bald trans man covered in tattoos and piercings. Sometimes says weirdly on the point crap but immediately assumes they are just being an idiot And disregards critical revelations.

and they all work with Alterra's new world cultivation project, and they've discovered a perfect water dominant planet..except they don't realize this specific planet houses a hidden precursor seed garden And its warden isn't pleased in the least at their presence there. But having researched humans using outdated media instead intended for enjoyment the poor thing is convinced they will kill him 80s slasher/doom guy style and destroy the hidden sanctuary he's guarding.

And so he just kind of tries to nudge them to kill themselves but they all have too much survival trauma because they read Ryley autobiography and use it like a Bible lmfao.

I like to think it'll be a comical dynamic with leading to heavier tones. Found family bullshit and dumb asses all collectively licking rocks because Ryley mentioned that was a good way to measure your blood sugar levels somewhere in his book (he was high on gasopod toxins when he wrote that btw)

She should have ended up with Marguerit...;_;

Also funny that all three games start with lesbians early on. ( Subnautica the lesbian couple waging swingers war on the Aurora who's lore and pic you find in EVERY ONE'S LOCKERS) implying that one slept with EVERYONE and made the other girl mad because be was filing complaints about her rizzing the who ship before she could???? Because they were supposed to be casual???? Lmfao 😂

Then we have doomed Sam/ Danielle.. (should have went with the grizzled gilf)

This is in regards to the architect/precursor race themselves.

In my mind, I can't help but go to how terrifying the warpers can be, and only imagining what kind of powerhouse an actual Architect would be. I would think they would be the most menacing creature to encounter pissed off.

I'm just imagining a situation where given that we have seen with the warpers that they can teleport an individual from a distance away from themselves, That maybe Architects could technically do the same thing, But maybe from a much further range, And maybe with a lot less restriction.

(Eg. Some idiot deciding to try and attack one thus may find themselves cut in half having been teleported halfway, through a wall type thing.)

Perhaps, a limiting factor in this maybe that they are of scientific thought process and thus more likely to analyze the situation and not act aggressively immediately. Perhaps with the intention to look over the situation and try and understand why an individual would act aggressively or intend an attacking position against them that is an intelligent race.

Or, it's dependent on their cultural stance on violence if perhaps they are peaceful? (Though, I have a hard time believing that they are peaceful entirely, Even if intelligent, given that they've already shown capacity for military equipment, Aka, the development of weaponry housed in observation, at the various laboratory locations in the first Subnautica. Though it can be argued that perhaps the weaponry came from other races though, is heavily suggested that alterra has not come in contact with another sentient intelligent life form despite having traveled to several worlds.

Or perhaps maybe functional factors can be considered they need there to be clear visual clearance from one point to the next?

What is the Architect cultural stance on violence? That is a great question! I'm not sure Architects are really what you would call a peaceful species, but it depends on how you define peaceful. I think they probably get along fairly well with each other, especially in comparison to humans, because they have the Network and a communal attitude. Their society socializes them not to even think of themselves as individuals even though they have the capacity for individuality (for example, Al-An made the decision on his own to disobey an order from the Network), so they're more communal than even the most communal society on Earth. They would have to adopt society wide goals and ambitions instead of individual goals and ambitions. That's going to make them cooperate with each other and avoid violence against each other. In that respect, they are a peaceful species.

However, the way they treat other living things exhibits a disturbing lack of care for the bodily autonomy of other creatures. I don't think that they're hostile to other species exactly, I think they simply do not see other species as having the same worth as their own people. Just look at the way they treated the Sea Emperor Leviathan. Sea Emperor Leviathans are a sapient species; they're intelligent enough to communicate with each other, and even with other receptive alien species. What the Architects did to the Sea Emperor Leviathan was quite literally a crime, and could easily have been avoided if the Architects had tried to cooperate. Kidnapping, non-consensual medical experimentation, and infanticide are not peaceful actions. If Sea Emperor Leviathans hadn't been on the verge of extinction, and instead had a society capable of retaliation, the Architects' actions could easily have sparked a war.

So why didn't they try to cooperate? Two possible reasons: either they didn't identify the Sea Emperor Leviathan as sapient, or they didn't care. Neither of these have good ramifications. If they didn't care, that means their society simply doesn't see other sapient species as people, and thus they treated the Sea Emperor Leviathan as a kind of clever animal by default. I think this reason is less likely, since they were desperate to find a cure, and would have tried to exhaust all avenues of research, including asking the Sea Emperor Leviathan how to hatch the eggs if they had the ability to communicate. If they didn't have the ability to communicate, but knew the Sea Emperor Leviathan was capable of communication, I think they would've spent more effort trying to communicate even if it was just to coerce the Sea Emperor Leviathan into cooperating. There's no evidence of that happening, so I think they simply didn't realize the Sea Emperor Leviathan was capable of communicating.

That begs the question why. Assuming that Architect telepathy and Sea Emperor Leviathan telepathy are not compatible, there are other ways of communicating, and other indicators of intelligence. Perhaps there was a failure of creative thinking on the part of the Architects–maybe the Sea Emperor Leviathan was acting incredibly different from how they expected a sapient species to act, and they couldn't imagine a life form like this being intelligent so they assumed it wasn't. Perhaps it was caused by a failure of empathy–the Architects couldn't put themselves in the place of the Sea Emperor Leviathan, so they never made that crucial realization. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Network stunted the Architects’ ability to be empathetic. If you're constantly handed the thoughts and emotional state of everyone else you interact with, you never have to work to figure it out for yourself, so you never develop the skill.

Regardless, their actions weren't peaceful in that instance, but that was kind of an emergency situation. What about normal interactions with other sapient species? We can infer a little bit about their attitude from the alien relics that we find in various places in the original Subnautica game. They seem to have been studying other species, including humans. Assuming that the world of Subnautica is based on Earth as it exists right now and not some alternate history, why doesn’t the game mention any records of aliens contacting humanity in the 1200s? Sure, maybe records got lost or dismissed as hoaxes, but I think it’s more likely that the Architects tried to keep contact with humanity (and other species they were studying) to a minimum to avoid contaminating their results. (I can’t remember off the top of my head what this kind of research error is called, but the one example I can think of is that time researchers put bands on bird legs only to discover that birds with colorful bands were considered more attractive mates.) 

Anyway, I think Architects had a study-from-afar attitude about interacting with other species, regardless of sapience. And if they needed more up-close study, I can easily see Architects taking the same kind of approach with other sapient species as they did with the Sea Emperor Leviathan (possibly originating ancient alien abduction conspiracy theories.) This isn’t really hostility so much as it is a lack of empathy for their subjects, but it can absolutely be construed as a kind of violence.

The conversation Al-An has with Robin about pets is also a good example of Architect confusion about the difference in appropriate treatment between sapient and non-sapient creatures, and how consent is supposed to work. 

Al-An: We also keep various creatures as pets. Robin: Really? How does a species that uses the genes and bodies of other creatures view pets? Al-An: They are curiosities that bring some sense of presence and energy. They are also test subjects to be evaluated for potential genetic enhancements. Robin: That’s not a pet Al-An… that’s a data point. Like you said, it’s literally a test subject. Al-An: You do not think they can be both? Robin: There’s a distinction. Pets are something that you care for simply for the pleasure of doing so. Al-An: Would humans consider me to be your pet? Robin: No, I said “pleasure,” Alan. This is more like a job. Al-An: Where I come from, you might be a pet. Robin: I find that thoroughly disturbing.

Basically, I don’t think Architects have a concept of consent; they don’t consider themselves individuals, so individual opinion isn’t really important. Plus they’re a pseudo-hive mind that already knows each other’s thoughts and feelings, so why would they need to ask for consent, ever? Combine that with their stunted sense of empathy, and you end up with a lot of systemic violence in the form of scientific ethical violations without any hostility attached.

The interaction about pets also gives us a clue about why Architects studied other species. They incorporated the traits of other species into their own vessels as part of their apparent goal to advance their own species. It's implied that they adapted traits from non-sapient animals, but it's never outright stated that all the species they took DNA from were non-sapient, since a bunch of the species were unrecognized, so who knows. Maybe when the Kharaa hit they were in the process of studying humans so they could steal our thumbs.

I also think they were studying the technology of other sapient species, and using it to enhance their own technology. Most of the alien relics in the original Subnautica game have significantly different design principles than you would expect from Architects. Some of the relics (like the leviathan sized tracking implant) are probably Architect relics that were important to the study of Kharaa, or the prototypes of tools used to study Kharaa, but why are there a bunch of unrelated relics there too? Some of the relics, like the human sword, seem to be there as trophies, or museum pieces. (I have a half developed theory that the structure of Architect society is shaped by a strong impulse to archive, memorialize, and display items of importance, but that’s probably an entirely different post.) I think some of the relics may have been relics they took from other sapient species and then used as prototypes to adapt their own versions of. I think that may actually be the case for the alien rifle. It doesn’t really look like something Architects would build, and it isn’t really adapted to their claws either. That’s not to say that they can’t build weapons, but I think most of the things they use as weapons are likely things that have multiple uses, like a laser designed as a cutting tool.

(The doomsday weapon doesn’t seem like a weapon of war so much as a safeguard to make sure that a civilization-ending bacterial infection doesn’t escape containment. It’s like the sterilization tool you find in the Primary Containment Facility; it could be used offensively, but it’s more likely just there as a sterilization tool on a catastrophic scale. I don’t think Architects are really interested in mass destruction. They’re too interested in studying things to destroy them. Their architecture is even as minimally invasive as possible, mostly using caves instead of clearing land to build.)

Now, this may be a biased view since we only ever find out about Architects through the lens of exploring their scientific research facilities and talking to one guy who’s a scientist, but I think it’s fair to assume that we can make more generalizations about Architects than we might otherwise because they’re a pseudo-hive mind. It seems to me that Architects had a species-wide project of creating their own biomechanical evolution, and it was a huge driving force for their exploration and scientific study. If this project was as important to Architect society as I think it was, that means they were likely to approach situations from a stance of scientific learning. So yes, that means they would likely have tried to find out why someone attacked them rather than responding with immediate retaliation. I think they were likely to analyze the situation and try to resolve it in a way that preserved the greatest range of possible future choices.

Regarding Architect capabilities versus Warper capabilities, and whether architects can teleport someone from a distance, I don't think they do that ordinarily. Warpers were designed for quarantine enforcement, so they were given tools that specifically allowed them to do their jobs, including things that would help with crowd control. And yes, these are tools that Architects made and could conceivably have installed in their own vessels, but I think they designed their own vessels for versatility unless they had a specific job they knew they'd need to do. They could already teleport themselves across the room if they needed to, or use their tractor beams to grab something, why would they install specialized equipment just to teleport other living beings around unless that's something they knew they were going to need to do? 

Besides, if some idiot decided to try and attack one, why couldn't they just pick the idiot up with their tractor beams the way Al-An picks up Robin? Or pick up their gun if they had one. Yeah getting teleported halfway through a wall would be dramatic, but is it the most efficient solution? Probably not.

Liiittle to risky to put on tumblr so this is all you EVER get

What even is this thing? What does it do?

According to the in-game description, fabricators have the power to rearrange matter at the atomic level. They are used for everything from constructing everyday implements to cooking dinner. Cooking is a process that often involves a lot of chemistry. However, you can't extract pure water from seawater with just a fabricator, you need a specialized machine which requires much more power. That means that fabricators have difficulty undoing chemical bonds which would be needed to remove dissolved salt from water. Therefore fabricators should have at least the following functions:

Construct: Mold a material into a preprogrammed shape. (Example: Air tank)

Copy: Creates a precise physical copy of an existing object using scan data. (Example: Purple Tablet)

Extract / Refine: Extract a substance of a known chemical composition from material. (Example: Silicone, Benzene) Source material must have high concentrations of desired substance, and will undergo significant texture changes.

Desiccate: Remove all liquid from material. (Example: Cured Fish)

Hydrate / Reconstitute: Add water to a material. (Source: According to the abandoned PDA entry in the canteen of the Aurora called "Today's Menu" you can reconstitute nutrient blocks at a fabricator.)

Synthesize / Composite: Add two or more substances together to create a material of a different chemical composition. (Example: Polyaniline)

Interlace: Add a substance evenly throughout a different substance without significantly changing its chemical composition. (Example: Cured Fish)

Cook / Sterilize: Heat material evenly to a specific temperature. (Example: Cooked Fish)

Salt Preserve: Remove all liquid from material and add salt evenly throughout (using the desiccate and interlace functions.) (Example: Cured Fish)

Dress: Gut and de-bone a fish (or any small animal.) (Source: The PDA tells you that’s what it’s doing the first time you cook a fish in the original subnautica game.)

Potential Additional Cooking Functions:

Dice / Chop: Divide a material into even pieces.

Purée: The extreme version of chopping.

Cool / Chill: The inverse of heating. At least a little bit of this would be required to make sure you don’t burn yourself on freshly fabricated things that involve heat. (Imagine touching a freshly cooked fish, or worse, something that involved melting metal. The lawsuits would be huge.)

Mix / Homogenize: Create an even mixture out of a material. (This is basically interlacing taken to an extreme.)

Pasteurize: Sterilize a substance without cooking it. (If you can cook it, you can pasteurize it. It’s just a matter of controlling the temperature precisely.)

Candy Preserve: Remove all liquid from material and add sugar evenly throughout (similar to salt preservation.)

Vacuum Pack: Put a substance into a vacuum sealed container. (Example: Spicy fruit salad.)

Canning / Jarring: Put a substance into a sealed container and sterilize it. (Similar to vacuum packing but with additional sterilization.)

Emulsify: Mix water and oil using an emulsifying agent which is able to chemically bond to both water and oil to create a stable mixture. Mayonnaise is an example of a substance that has been emulsified. Some natural emulsifying agents are things like garlic, eggs, honey, fruit pectin, and gelatin. Emulsification is similar to the synthesize/composite function of the fabricator, since it creates chemical bonds.

The Mercury II had a guy who was able to jailbreak fabricators, and he successfully made falafel with it. So how would cooking with a jailbroken fabricator work?

Falafel with a fabricator:

Rehydrate chickpeas.

Finely chop and mix together chickpeas and seasonings.

Chill the chickpea mixture.

Mix in baking powder and form into balls.

Traditionally the next step involves deep frying the chickpea balls in oil, but the fabricator could probably do this by interlacing small amounts of oil only on the surface of the balls and then cooking them.

Totally doable with the above fabricator functions. And once you had results you liked, you could input the settings into the fabricator as a recipe and have it do it all in one go instead of doing it one step at a time.

All the while Al-an tries everything in his power to convince them to let him keep an old disabled seal and bring it off world with him because he's already named it hylocichla mustelina and it's better off with him.

And just a shitload of speculative biology I'm not smart enough to know how to write and just Al-an taking in his silly little humans as they make the most of their visit to earth, clean up pollution and help aid in wildlife restoration..