mod Dreadbed - A Fleshbeast Tentacle Seedbed Mod 1.0.3

I gave the dreadmeld boss the ability to jump onto your colonists and swallow them whole like a devourer and use them as a seedbed.

 

Major Spoilers:

The bulbfreak fleshbeast can do it too, although with a little less range.

 

Being Used as a Seedbed

After being swallowed, depending on the pawn's gender (or genitals, if RJW is on) they will undergo one of two things:

• If the pawn is not a human female or doesn't have a vagina, this will trigger the normal devourer behavior where if you don't interrupt its swallowing in time (by burning or killing the swallower), the pawn is digested and receives a big acid damage (most likely killing the pawn).
• If the pawn is female, the seedbedding will occur.

 

Seedbedding

In case where the dreadmeld/bulbfreak decides to go through with seedbedding, it will heal some injuries to make the seedbed more likely to survive, strip her armor, pants, and hat, damaging the apparels in the process, regurgitate the pawn, and give her seedbed shock which will incapacitate her. It also has a chance to give her a hidden implantation hediff. This chance is based on her fertility.

 

Implantation

At first, this is a hidden hediff. You can perform a surgical inspection to reveal the hediff. I plan to allow removal of the implantation later on, but for now, upon the reveal the victim will get a mood debuff (except if she has inhumanization).

 

Parasitism

If not removed within a day, the implantation will turn into a parasite. I plan to have a remove parasite surgery too later on with a big drawback since you're too late to remove it while its still in implantation form, but for now here are the parasite hediff's behavior:

• The parasite takes 6 days to grow. Once fully grown, it'll harmlessly be born, incapacitating the pawn from labor.
• After a certain stage, the parasite will cause miscarriage if the pawn has any other pregnancy (Biotech and RJW pregnancies both supported).
• While the parasite behaves like a more manageable pregnancy, the game technically does not recognize it as pregnancy. It uses no code from neither Biotech nor RJW. Why? Because I didn't want this hediff to be too complicated and I'm frankly intimidated by pregnancy code to begin with.
• The parasite affects the mother psychologically the whole way it's in the oven, giving her a mood debuff. Its effect will become stronger and stronger as it grows.
• As long as this hediff exists, the mother will only have the humanity break mental break which will give her the inhumanization hediff. This is pretty much the same way the "inhumanization: required" precept work in vanilla.

 

What is Born

The culmination from all this effort is a homunculus. Homunculi are a semi-translucent, slime looking thing that are passive and extremely fragile. They are obligate carnivores and can only eat raw meat like wargs. That means feeding them meals won't work. If downed, you can capture them on holding platforms, but they will starve to death. They are supposed to keep eating and grow to finally reach adulthood where they will metamorphose into either a dreadmeld or bulbfreak. I did give them animal AI, and since they are untameable, they will just go leave the map if they can't find any raw meat, so make sure to stock up.

 

Two Types

There are two types of each implantation, parasite, and homunculus - both corresponding to either a dreadmeld or bulbfreak. Which one your seedbed will get depends on which of either dreadmeld or bulbfreak originally impregnated her:

• Dreadmeld has a very rare 1% chance to give its seedbed a bulbfreak offspring instead of dreadmeld.
• Bulbfreak has a 33% chance to give its seedbed a dreadmeld offspring. Otherwise, the 67% chance is bulbfreak offspring.

These two types look the same from the outside, but you can tell from an extra hediff the mother gets when she gives birth ("dread mother" for dreadmeld and "bulbous birther" for bulbfreak). For now these hediffs are only used to dampen the mood debuff for subsequent parasitism.

 

For What?

Dreadmelds in containment! Once a homunculus reaches adulthood, it will metamorphose and be incapacitated. You have about a day to capture it on a holding platform before it's finished. Once it's finished metamorphosing on the platform, you're left with a whole dreadmeld that's secured, contained, and protected. Dreadmelds are made to die the moment they are downed in vanilla, so you have no way to capture them at all. Since they're designed to be uncapturable, I did have to patch them into giving bioferrite like all the other fleshbeasts, but of all the patches I did, the one vanilla behavior I sure didn't touch is that they are still going to die once downed. Dreadmelds give a huge 10 bioferrite a day, which I think is a worthwhile reward for all the troubles.

And on the side, if you didn't get a dreadmeld, you still have a bulbfreak in its place instead. Bulbfreaks, while they look bulky and big, are actually incredibly fragile. It looks to me that they are designed to pop immediately in battle, swarming the player, so it's very unlikely you'll ever get a downed - not dead - bulbfreak to begin with, so consider them a nice bonus. Bulbfreaks give a competitive 7 bioferrite a day.

 

Inhumanization

Being inhumanized, despite its downsides, is actually a really helpful perk for this mod's context. It alters the mood debuffs into buffs which gets really punishing for the first pregnancy. After the first pregnancy (if you somehow manage to do a great job managing the seedbed's mood and prevent her being inhumanized from having a mental break while carrying a fleshbeast baby), the mood debuffs get less severe and the implantation will show up automatically without needing a surgical inspection.

 

I have an idea of some further plans for this mod, but I'm not really certain about them yet. I made this for the sole reason of it's kinda hot the dreadmelds are uncapturable and I'm annoyed because of it.