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Idea for a new creature - Mimic

#1 by Doctorate in Charonn
I think I've worked out mechanics for a creature similar to the other parasite in this game. The name I've got for it right now is "Mimic", but if anyone else has a suggestion for it then it would probably work a fair bit better. I haven't done any of this, or even tried to, but I do think it is possible to do.

Mechanics. So, it would spread through as an infection, not through medical bottles or creatures, but as a bush of thorns and vines on a cave surface, with swaying vines hanging off it. Getting hit by one of the vines hanging off it would infect you, as would touching the main bush. It would inflict slight bleed, but nothing more than that. The infection would have 3 stages.

The first stage would involve keeping stock of every message sent by the infected player. This would later be used for the mimickry part of the infection, but for now, this stage only consists of keeping track of what each sentence sent by the player is. If the player were to send a message like this: "James has left with the rods. Can someone get him?", it would separate the sentences but count the total number of words as the max sentence. This phase would last 2 minutes.

The second stage would involve the host dying. The sentences here wouldn't be counted for the mimickry. The host could survive longer with Corrigodone or other healing meds, but would hopefully succumb to death. The damage part would be the way the husk virus keeps its host infecting people, by inflicting bleed until they die. This stage would last however long the host can stay alive.

Before I go into the third stage, I should describe the formula it uses for making sentences out of the gathered ones. Here's how it works:

The mimic uses an RNG to determine that sentence it will say. For punctuation, it says that any number between 1 and 4 will have no punctuation. If it's 5, it has a period after it. If it's 6, comma, 7, question mark, if it's an 8 it's an exclamation point. It then rolls between 1 and 8 to determine if a word has a punctuation mark after it. The rolling comes after the words are decided in the sentence.

Then, it starts gathering sentences. Each word in the sentence is assigned a number, starting from 0 and going up by an increment of 1 until the final number.

When the mimic speaks, it uses the number of words in the smallest sentence, and the number of the words in the biggest sentence, and then comes up with a number of words between them. So, if the smallest sentence has 1 word, and the biggest one has 5 words, it would generate a number between 1 and 5. After this, the mimic uses the numbers the words were given in the sentences to come up with a word for each of the five words. Say that there are 12 words to choose from. The mimic would choose, 1 8 5 9 3. It would then choose punctuation, doing it the way described.

The third stage would come after the host gives in, or until they die. The mimic would then take over, and mostly remain stationary while it speaks using the sentence generator described above. It would remain passive in the area the infected died in until a player came near it, at which point it would attack by flailing its fists at the attacked, for very little damage and stun. It would have the defense of the infected.
Goddammit man I just want stuff to work sometimes

Re: Idea for a new creature - Mimic

#3 by Clueless
You know, it would make more sense not to make a new creature, but to add this speech generator and wall growths infection to existing velonaceps calyx mechanics. You wouldn't be able to easily tell infected from uninfected just by testing who can talk and we'd finally get to see where husk infection comes from, because so far we've only seen husk growing in humans and human-made derelicts.
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