Giant Lady Spider with a Top Hat

[Cerberis]

Since Mobius187 suggested I present my ideas one at a time with some semblance of order instead of a giant wall of text that scares people I decided to collect my thoughts a little on what suggestions I may have for upgradeing spiders as enemies. The Lady Spider with a top hat and warrior spider are two ideas I have in this line of thinking.

Firstly I think of these creatures as marks of progression as they require conditions to spawn that won't be present at the start of the game. The Warrior spider spawns as a daylight guardian of a high level nest so he won't travel far from it. The Lady spider requires a few nests of high level and she spawns from the death of the warrior spiders around thouse eggs so shes mutually exclusive.

The Warrior Spiders

Since your likely to encounter these first ill start with them. The warrior spiders spawn from a top level nest and are probably about as big as a regular sized nest. They sleep outside of the nest at night and patrol closeby during the day. They will chase you a little but not too far from the nest however if you've damaged them they will use a web ability to pin you down so they can fight you. The warrior spiders also employ some tactics as at 50% health they will attack the nest to wake up a group of regular spiders to fight with him. At 40% health he will EAT one of said spiders for a heal or attack the nest again and then eat a spider for a heal. Warrior spiders are immobile while eating and can't attack but constantly gain health from doing so making tactics of your own a nessessity. I figure they love beefalos and will actually forget about there duty to defend the nest when presented with one (a beefalo leash would be needed to exploit this) and likewise beefalo are terrified of them (so they don't gang up and kill the warrior spider) so its an effective way to get the warrior spider distracted while you deal with the nest. At night warrior spiders are just asleep and will wake up if they or the nest is attacked but they otherwise stay asleep. Warrior spiders drop spider a chintin that can be used with a log suit for better armour.

The Lady Spider with a Top Hat

As said before shes mutually exclusive with the Warrior Spiders. She spawns from corpses of a few warrior spiders and prevents the nests that spawned her from spawning warrior spiders. She sleeps in the middle of the clusters of nests during the day and only wakes up to fight you if you either attack her or the spider nests. Unique among the spiders I view her as carrying a poison that prevents you from eating anything except honey (In my giant wall of text I mentioned a change to the hunger system that'd make this extra nasty) and naturally she drops a poison sack nessassary for the antidote. At night she has a half dozen spiders with her and goes around looking for places to drop down spider eggs to form new nests but her range is limited because at a half way point during the night she goes home to sleep. At night shes actually fairly passive of your character although her spider escourt isn't and generally shes more concerned with finding groups of bunny holes to lay a spider nest in the middle of. Yes spiders eat bunnies in my mind which gives you competition for said resource but since spiders only come out at night I figure they can actually go down the bunnie holes. One thing of note is shes a music lover and can be lulled to a deep sleep with the flute that will allow you to attack the spider nests. Maybe some kind of Music Player can be researched later to set up and keep her asleep while you destroy her precious spider nests because I imagine if you attack her during the day all the nests unleash all there spiders at you.

Spider Armour

Made from the Chintin of the Warrior Spider, Spider Silk, and a Log Suit the Spider Armour is the first armour upgrade and next logical step in your character's progression. Maybe a weapon could be made from spider parts but I hadn't thought that through yet. Mostly I was looking to suggest new things to do with the nasty spider enemies of the game since although they themselves are weak seem like the typical 'rat' or 'goblins' you fight. Spiders are the starter enemy and don't need much changes to them but what they do need is the bigger enemies to stand behind them. Like Elites from Halo standing behind the cannon fodder guys who run around waveing there arms in the air.

The Hunger Thing I mentioned

Although in my "Baron Barrenbaron of Bad News" wall of text I mentioned more details im going to try to be breif if thats possable. The idea is that hunger doesn't make your health rapidly drop after two days (its two days before the body starts eating itself) but instead after two days your body turns in on itself and starts making survival a priority of mustle and so your maximum health starts to slowly decline before killing you at the end of five more days. Thus it took you a week to die of starvation. But the catch 22 is that it takes you basically just as long to regain your maximum health back as it took you to loose it and for that duration your hunger drains faster then it would if you hadn't started to starve to death. This makes my idea of a poison that makes you unable to eat (except perhaps gobbler noodle soup) rather painful long after your fight with what poisoned you unless your prepared.

In Summery

If I could summerize I woulden't present people with giant walls of text. As an attempt ill state that the basic idea of all of this is to make the spiders sort of a first tier enemy in the game with various different types of the same basic hostile enemy.

[Excess]

Fu, you like reading, would you mind posting a TL;DR for us?

[Toaster Fu]

I tend to agree with his summery, if I could it wouldn't be a giant wall of text.

[Cerberis]

Its half the size, broken up into bite size pieces, and people are still scared. Seems that im going to develop a reputation at this rate. Reputation aside I did try to stay on topic with this one but as a warning for everyone I think next time I want to start a topic ill name it "Giant Wall of Text, Part 1"...that way I can just keep going on with part 2, part 3, etc. and people will be warned in advance...course then only ToasterFu will read anything I post on the forum...not really bad but it complicates discussion about my ideas. Then again a simple comment from me takes what? 120 words approximately?

[501105]

Okay onto your comment. I like spiders as an enemy and your ideas certainly have potential, but you need to be carefull in going too far. I would not mind a spider leader/queen of some kind to lead the troops, but one of two spider kinds are enough imo. That said I would like something along the lines of a lady spider that offers something different than a enemy who charges straigth at you in a fit of rage. Having come competition for a food resource because of that would be fine, that would add some extra excitement to the game.

Spider armour would be fine (though chintin reminds me of Skyrim), but we need a bigger challenge first. We currently have sufficient armour and weapon to survive all there is in the game. Once a bigger challenge is present we could use anew set of armour.

[dra6o0n]

Spider Queen in a larger spider nest?

Then you can have your pig/spider wars!

Now if only you can give pigs spears.

[Cerberis]

Well I was trying to come up with a reward for killing the warrior spiders. Something that could help bridge the gap between the early game armour and the mid game so to speak since I don't see us making log suits and farming spider warriors for long (The spider armour would likely be to help in the fight against the Lady Spider but not last long after that).

The lady spider with a top hat seemed the more importent idea of the two to me because her role ensures destroying spider nests within an area is only a temporary solution. But at the same time shes not something that spawns immediately thus giving a natural progression to the game yet because she has conditions related to her spawning shes not unique as an enemy only a rare one.

The Warrior Spiders were partly to make nests you've left alone for too long become much more of a challange. A threat that isn't afraid of the light (but won't chase you forever) and impliments some basic tactics to make him a more difficult opponent that may require a bit of stratagy to take down. Naturally a bunch of hired pigs would solve the problem with either spider idea ive had but a bunch of hired pigs solves most problems in the game currently since they themselves are part of the different ways to play the game.

Still I view the basic spiders themselves as what Dungeons and Dragons would consider Goblins or most MMORPG games consider rats. They are a early game enemy that is suppose to represent very little real threat but are aggressive enough and in large numbers can be dangerious enough to warrent having to do something. The two higher versions of the spiders would ensure that the spiders themselves can't be brushed off of your island casually thus secureing it forever.

As a vague thought that just occured to me woulden't it be interesting if you took my idea and then added something that fed on the spiders? So having more spider nests means more of the midgame enemy that feeds on them. So in a way the game progresses and increases in difficulty if the player isn't active and keeping there island secure.