Fossils - A Cool Thing to Have

[warcrimes]

BRING INFOVORE TO THE AUTOMATON / SERVER

[LovelyMimic]

oh no
I'm not opposed to infovores wiping electronic data, that seems cool.

I took a shot at animating the tentative sprite I posted earlier:

[Gannets]

Rad!!

[Lady Birb]

Letting the infovore eat the mainframe should make something hilarious horrible happen.

[atomic1fire]

Letting the infovore eat the mainframe should make something hilarious horrible happen.

It should mutate into an omnivore

The joke being it now eats everything.

[warcrimes]

if the infovore eats the clown it should starve to death instantly

[LuigiThirty]

if the infovore attacks you, it should give you BRAIN damage

[Calebc789]

I really like this idea, and hope it goes somewhere. It would certainly give some purpose to the Long-Range Teleporter if we implement the Dig Site z-level, since all it's really there for nowadays is to go to Geminorum V.

I personally think we can include all three locations as different ways to obtain fossils. Maybe have the special z-level be a dig site on an island somewhere on Abzu, as well as a fossil finder tool and a shovel to locate and dig up fossil pieces, which are then assembled into full fossils on-station (either by hand or using a special fossil assembler machine) and then either sold for big bucks or revived at Genetics by putting the completed fossil into the DNA scanner and going through the DNA activation minigame.

[LovelyMimic]

I sprited some more infovores at varying levels of well-fed:

Adequately-fed:

Well-fed:

Uh oh:

UH OH:


(I should really get around to putting this stuff into my spriting thread, huh.)

[warcrimes]

if the information it excretes is based directly on what it consumes, I could see hours and hours of fun from feeding it things to try and get specific outputs.

[LovelyMimic]

Context-based information poops might be awfully hard to code though; I figured it'd just be a percentage chance affected by how much it's eaten to excrete something more useful than your average zoldorf fortune, but it can really be as involved as any coder wants it to be. That said, a markov chain kind of deal using words it's seen/garbled recently could be really funny.

At the risk of seeming like I've hyperfocused on the Infovore over the other fossil critters (which admittedly, I kinda have), I've thought a little bit on how to handle corruption/"ingestion" of text written on nearby papers, and my thinking is that it'd work best if it either corrupted all written texts above a certain size at the speed (so that it takes the same amount of time for the Infovore to corrupt, say, a copy+paste of the Bee Movie Script or War And Peace as it does for it to corrupt anything else exceeding, say, 500 words), or for it to just straight-up ignore papers with excessively long text, or replace the overlong text with a dumb joke or something ("you really expect it to read all this?" or "nice try, (russian novelist)", or something actually funny if you can suggest it). This would all make coaxing useful excreted information out of it more complex than just pasting 120k words onto five papers and waiting.

I'm not even sure I want the "pooping useful information" feature to yield anything more secret/useful than, say, winning lotto numbers, or at the high end, the current round's master packet code thing (the one that opens lockers and sets nuclear charges). Someone on the discord was like "yeah in the thread they mentioned that if it eats enough information it'll poop lotto numbers and Sol hints". I never said anything about Sol, and that'd all be up to admin-level coders to add if they saw fit. Personally I think it would be much more fun if Sol "hints" only showed up regularly on the crap-useless end of the Infovore's text poops, be they cryptic red herrings (FEED the SALT OF ABZU to the RINGS OF FLAME), flagrant lies ("for eve_ry biIird, a Catmandu..."), or incredibly old and unhelpful news ("OFFer yo_r sKUllS forthequiet mACHINE")

People do really seem to have taken a shine to the Infovore though, particularly its text poops, so here's some more brainstorming about what those might be:

While it's certainly possible and reasonable for it to just excrete text on any blank or wholly corrupted papers near it, I've actually been imagining it just leaving scrawls right on the station floors, in the style of the wall/floor writing inside certain rooms in the Asylum/Ainsley Staff Retreat Center and that one room in the void. You know, the ones that look kinda like this:
 
If that specific asset only works for text you've lain down in the map editor, you could probably(???) just swipe the code for sticky notes and have the Infovore lay down sticky notes with writing on them that just look like the above scrawl.

The Infovore's excretions could, and ideally would, vary greatly in terms of subject matter, intelligibility, and usefulness. They could include:

-All sorts of complete gibberish nonsense, constituting at least 50% of what the infovore excretes. It's pooping stuff it's already sucked most of the information content from, after all.
-Trashy gossip about the crew
-Incomplete snippets (two-thirds of the text of a spaceman the grifening card, a chunk of a centcom printout that starts and ends mid-sentence, etcetera)
-Stuff in the style of Zoldorf prognostications or fortune cookie fortunes
-Barman recipes
-Shitty Bill sayings
-Choice excerpts of people's genetic code (or if we'd rather have most of the lower-end infovore sayings not calling variables that change round-to-round, choice excerpts of the Diner Crew's/Ill-Looking Person's/Tanhony's DNA)
-Super out-of-date chem recipes
-Excerpts from Pharmacopia and the other books lying around the station
-All sorts of other junk!

For rarer/only-when-well-fed excretions:

-A lock combination, and a description of the object bearing that lock combination.
-The bank account number of a person who has been affected by, or nearby to, the Infovore recently.
-A functional traitor PDA unlock code (and no information as to whose PDA it might correspond to)
-Passwords for nearby locked crates?
-Whatever else the poor bastard who has to code all this disparate password-summoning and communication-scrambling thinks might be worth their while to code!

I will eventually develop more non-infovore fossil ideas, I promise!

[warcrimes]

those scrawls can be made in game with a marker

[LovelyMimic]

Wow I feel dumb
In my defense I think I've literally never encountered a player-made marker scrawl. I thought they were entirely for making colorful blocky letters on papers