[Suggestion] Allow the Brightshade Smasher to destroy the Atrium’s Ancient Statues

[deemo_]

I’ve had worlds that are teeming with mineable Ancient Statues and worlds with a disappointingly small amount. Having such a small amount of thulecite available in a world isn’t fun for anyone, especially in a server with multiple players. Letting worlds have an extra 20 statues to mine in the form of allowing the Brightshade Smasher to mine the Atrium’s Ancient Statues would make the world gen dice roll a tiny bit less frustrating on a low roll.

[mkemal23]

Thulecite is a material used by the ancients. Statues in the ruins and the archives are made with thulecite but the Atrium's Statues are corpses of the ancients themselves. So I don't think making them mineable would make sense.

[-Variant]

4 minutes ago, mkemal23 said:

Atrium's Statues are corpses of the ancients themselfs. So I don't think making them mineable would make sense.

As much as I am still very mad about Dust Moths making the Corpses=Thulecite theory basically dead, I do have to add that the Atrium Statues are still statues.

[mkemal23]

19 minutes ago, -Variant said:

I do have to add that the Atrium Statues are still statues.

Wait are they? I thought they were originally meant to be parallels to moonrock/statues before klei(unfortunately) changed their minds to dust moths. Isn't this feature didn't got added just to confirm that these aren't actually statues?

[-Variant]

10 minutes ago, mkemal23 said:

Wait are they? I thought they were originally meant to be parallels to moonrock/statues before klei(unfortunately) changed their minds to dust moths. Isn't this feature didn't got added just to confirm that these aren't actually statues?

Whether or not they're Thulecite corpses, or just statues is in the air. With the way Dust Moths exist it's most likely the latter. 

They've currently got Thulecite loot pools and animations/art for being mined all the way through. I'm assuming it was left out for dramatic story telling.
Making them mineable would be one maybe 2 lines more.

[Zeklo]

While Thulecite is 100% just Dust Moth shenanigans, I like to believe the Atrium Statues could still be corpses.
Their Thulecite centers are only visible through cut content, and while that does provide some insight I wouldn't always consider it canon.

Lore-wise, I'm curious if they'll ever go into the brown muck—is it just goopy degradation or an organic byproduct??

[-Variant]

10 minutes ago, Zeklo said:

While Thulecite is 100% just Dust Moth shenanigans, I like to believe the Atrium Statues could still be corpses.

Was literally just coming back to edit my post. Forgot the entire bottom chunk showing that Nightmares were supposed to crawl out of Atrium Statues when damaged.

Man... I really do prefer the idea that they're remains/husks. I never cared for the Dust Moth stuff, such a let down. I liked the over the top absurd grim theories, ahah-

[deemo_]

1 hour ago, mkemal23 said:

Thulecite is a material used by the ancients. Statues in the ruins and the archives are made with thulecite but the Atrium's Statues are corpses of the ancients themselves. So I don't think making them mineable would make sense.

Even if they are corpses, who’s to say they haven’t been calcified in thulecite over however long they’ve been dead for? They also could’ve been turned into thulecite via the shadow magic that ended their civilisation, as it’s very clear that thulecite and shadow magic exist hand in hand.

 

1 hour ago, -Variant said:

As much as I am still very mad about Dust Moths making the Corpses=Thulecite theory basically dead, I do have to add that the Atrium Statues are still statues.

I’ve never heard of how Dust Moths disprove this theory, so apologies if that nullifies my post.

[lakhnish]

17 minutes ago, deemo_ said:

I’ve never heard of how Dust Moths disprove this theory, so apologies if that nullifies my post.

Dust Moths were revealed to be the source of how Thulecite is made.

Here are the relevant quotes for the Tidy Hidey-Hole (the place where the Dust Moths respawn and make Thulecite). 

Wickerbottom: "It seems a chemical reaction within the bodies of these creatures creates Thulecite".

Maxwell: "So this is the source of Thulecite... I must say, I'm underwhelmed".

Spoiler

Spoiler cause it's a tangent to the Dust Moths, but ultimately doesn't really matter.

Now having said that, there is still the question of why the Salt Stacks are shaped like people.

The characters just seem to say they just form that way and since we haven't heard anything from Klei on why else they look like people (despite their teasing during the Klei livestream when someone asked that question of "Yes, why do they look like people?"), that's probably the only answer we're gonna get.

And the weirder part is why is Maxwell's quote for Nitre "One third of the way there...", even in base game DS, even though he never knew about the archives. It doesn't really matter though since we again will probably never get an answer.

[maxwell_winters]

20 minutes ago, lakhnish said:

"One third of the way there..."

I think he was talking about gunpowder.

[lakhnish]

6 minutes ago, maxwell_winters said:

I think he was talking about gunpowder.

Ah, that makes much more sense.

[deemo_]

34 minutes ago, lakhnish said:

Dust Moths were revealed to be the source of how Thulecite is made.

Here are the relevant quotes for the Tidy Hidey-Hole (the place where the Dust Moths respawn and make Thulecite). 

Wickerbottom: "It seems a chemical reaction within the bodies of these creatures creates Thulecite".

Maxwell: "So this is the source of Thulecite... I must say, I'm underwhelmed".

I knew the Dust Moths made fragments but I didn’t know that meant they were the only source of thulecite, what a lame reveal. I hope Maxwell’s just uninformed and there’s a more exciting truth to the origin of thulecite, but that might be wishful thinking.

Thanks for the information!

[-Variant]

36 minutes ago, lakhnish said:

Now having said that, there is still the question of why the Salt Stacks are shaped like people.

Oh that one in particular is a reference to the Bible.
There's a whole lot of references to the Bible and its Angels coming up here and there with RoT, with Wormwood's entire namesake and history being one of the more obvious ones.

 

That aside, I still do love the idea of Thulecite being calcified remains, but Dust Moths producing/'being the source' make it so much harder to work with.

[lakhnish]

14 minutes ago, -Variant said:

That aside, I still do love the idea of Thulecite being calcified remains, but Dust Moths producing/'being the source' make it so much harder to work with.

Given that Dust Moths are the source of Thulecite, why not view the Atrium statues to be the opposite of what the statues in the Archives are?

In the Archives, the Ancients heavily worshipped the moon and made statues worshipping it, only for there to be a shift in what they worshipped, switching over to nightmare fuel.

It's still a pretty significant piece of lore!

[dois raios]

1 hour ago, lakhnish said:

Wickerbottom: "It seems a chemical reaction within the bodies of these creatures creates Thulecite".

The moths ate the ancients bodies and left only thulecite? 

This is even worse

[minespatch]

3 hours ago, -Variant said:

 

That aside, I still do love the idea of Thulecite being calcified remains, but Dust Moths producing/'being the source' make it so much harder to work with.

I have a neat theory that might make both theories work:

The dust moths came later due to evolution. 

[Zeklo]

44 minutes ago, minespatch said:

I have a neat theory that might make both theories work:

The dust moths came later due to evolution. 

The moth food is one of the recipes you get from the Archives' knowledge capsules though, isn't it?

[Primalflower]

7 hours ago, -Variant said:

As much as I am still very mad about Dust Moths making the Corpses=Thulecite theory basically dead

couldn't it be both? isn't dust just human skin cells constantly shedding off, can't dust moths just be a mechanism to coallesce such stray cells (which happens to form into thulecite in the case of dead ancient bits) on objects?

Ive never liked the assertion by the community that stuff like maxwells quote entirely shuts off any thought about where thulecite came from, not only because of how it could be so many other things, but also just like, think of the logistics of it. Are we really gonna just believe that an entire civilization was constructed largely with what would hypothetically be the tiny bits of debris collected by roombas...?? It just doesnt compute, obviously there is a source that was faster than that.

[-Variant]

12 minutes ago, Primalflower said:

couldn't it be both? isn't dust just human skin cells constantly shedding off, can't dust moths just be a mechanism to coallesce such stray cells (which happens to form into thulecite in the case of dead ancient bits) on objects?

It could be, yeah-
I've seen similar said before but I don't think it hits as close, personally. It wouldn't be a bad way of portraying it, but it doesn't have that same OMPF as having it be the direct shed skin/body to me! 
I was all for the grim implications the entire Ruins had with the concept of it being the remains in mind. It's all spooky ooky. The moths soften the blow a lot for me in a way I think feels less 'grandiose'.

[Primalflower]

1 minute ago, -Variant said:

 

Sorry, i edited my post a bunch!

[Creatorofswamps]

3 hours ago, Zeklo said:

The moth food is one of the recipes you get from the Archives' knowledge capsules though, isn't it?

AMBROSIA [Greek ambrosia - immortality] In ancient Greek mythology: the fragrant food of the gods, which gave them eternal youth and immortality.In fact, this is not the food of moths, rather it is the food of the ancients, perhaps after their departure the moths ate the remains of ambrosia and gained longevity, since we give them "excess food" there is an assumption that the tulecite they deposited is partially digested ambrosia, left by them for a "rainy day".

4 hours ago, minespatch said:

The dust moths came later due to evolution. 

Perhaps these are the ancestors of the ancients (a race of insects, as we know), who over the centuries simply degenerated into imperfectly intelligent beings who had only one goal, to KEEP EVERYTHING CLEAN.

There is also a theory about the crab race, which separated from the ancients in the evolutionary chain at the moment when they went underground. But this is a topic for a separate post

You can call it Speculative biology, but I assume that the evolution of the ancients could have gone this way

[Zeklo]

6 hours ago, Primalflower said:

Ive never liked the assertion by the community that stuff like maxwells quote entirely shuts off any thought about where thulecite came from ...

Theorizing very rarely stops, even if it maybe should at times. It's just a matter of choosing when it's best to move that effort elsewhere.
For me, Maxwell's quote specifically feels like an nod from the devs to encapsulate how the community feels about that kind of reveal.

Could it just be a red herring? Could it be misleading? Could it be a false wall?
Sure, but even then it wouldn't really be an exciting lie. What would be the point?

When I have quotes*, tooltips, and the like saying one thing—that's the conclusion I'm going to go with.
If something shows up later, awesome! But it's nice to have a few 'closed cases.'

* Specifically quotes from credible characters, even in their ignorance.

[Paxtonnnn]

1 hour ago, Zeklo said:

It's just a matter of choosing when it's best to move that effort elsewhere.

Only good thing about that theory not being true despite fans liking that is that it gives me a tiny bit of hope they won’t retcon the garbage ‘Wagstaff is Wilson’ theory into canon

[BezKa]

I always thought they were all statues. Thulecite is supposedly this extremely valuable material, and the statues are adorned with gems. I also thought that those statues were of those most important fellas on the murals? Since they're all the same. If I was making a cave filled with calcified corpses of just common people, I would make like several traits and randomize each between different combinations.

To me it makes perfect sense that the sealed away archives still have these small, slow, boring moths crawling around keeping the place clean, giving us a perfect view of what the civilization looked like before fuel overtook it. The moths are terrible source of thulecite - they make laughable amounts in sad amounts of time. Which, for the ancients who assumingly did not clone thulecite by making walls like we do (because that's too funny if they could) would make it the only source and extremely valuable. Making statues of it would be the highest honor, and that's why there's like 4 of possible shapes. + The ones from the archives, that were forgotten because friendship ended with the moon, now the fuel is my friend.

I'd assume all the moths that lived outside the archives died during the whole nightmarefication process.

I got nothing on the statues closest to the gate. They look like they're completely caked in nightmare fuel tho, since that's the epicenter of the whole thing.

+There's a graveyard the guardian is guarding. I think all the corpses they could give a burial to are there, the rest wasted away.

(This was the thoughts of a latecomer that doesn't know all the lore. Thanks for tuning in)

[SomebodyRandom]

2 hours ago, BezKa said:

Which, for the ancients who assumingly did not clone thulecite by making walls like we do (because that's too funny if they could)

Ancients adopting nightmare fuel marked the step in which they went from average casual player to ultimate Don't Starve pro fighting Misery Toadstool to dupe napsacks