Video trailer: https://youtu.be/fUDrSWEvNEI
Fulgora's makers are long gone, but their machines aren't. Self-replicating swarms of holmium-rich blocks hold islands
far out across the oil, and they're hungry. Your factory is the richest thing on the planet.
They don't want to destroy your base. They want to eat it.
Replicator islands
Some of Fulgora's moated vault islands, more than 600 tiles from the landing site, belong to the replicators: bigger
than Fulgora's own, with ground and cliffs of their own, and none of Fulgora's scrap or ruins. A replicator core sits at
the centre of each, ringed by crawler and carrier spawners, forges, repair pylons and turrets, with a swarm all over it.
They show in the map preview, and the "Replicator nests" map generation setting controls how many there are.
They wake up
Fulgora gets its own pollution: electromagnetic interference, given off by every machine that would pollute
elsewhere. It spreads out from your base on the pollution map, and when it reaches a replicator island, the island
wakes, for good. A tidy, compact base wakes fewer of them.
Raid nights
Every 4th night (by default), each awake nest with one of your islands within 400 tiles raids the nearest one.
Replicators can't swim, so the raiders merge into drop ships, fly over the oil and land on the edge of your island
nearest their nest, never in the middle of your base. They walk to your belts and take what's on them, the most valuable
first. Carriers crack your chests open and spill their best stacks for the crawlers to pick up. When they're full,
or at dawn, they head back to their ship and fly home with what they took.
- They don't set out to attack anything, but they'll break through what's in their way, and they fight back.
- Kill a raider and it drops what it was carrying.
- Turrets can shoot the ships down in flight, and everyone aboard falls with them.
- Destroy a landed ship and its raiders are stranded. Stranded raiders go berserk.
Fighting them
- Bullets and explosions split them. A crawler or carrier shot below half health breaks into blocks, and blocks
that find each other reassemble into a crawler. - Lasers and tesla turrets kill them cleanly, and they're weak to both.
- They hold a grudge. Kill too many of a nest's replicators, or its buildings, and it means war: its next raid comes
in a mothership, and they go for your turrets before they loot. It calms down after a few quiet raid nights.
Taking the fight to them
A replicator island is strong but static. Its spawners replace the replicators you kill, repair pylons mend everything
nearby, and every building you knock down comes apart into more replicators. But what's destroyed stays destroyed, so
you can wear an island down spawner by spawner, or go straight for the core. Destroying the core brings the whole
island down.
The reward
Replicators are made of holmium. Dead replicators, their buildings and their ships drop replicator scrap, which
recycles into holmium ore fifteen times as often as Fulgora's own scrap. The first replicator you kill researches the
recycling.
Every core sits on a patch of replicator scrap that grows with everything the nest steals from you, and it's yours to
mine once the core is gone.
Settings
Map settings, changeable in a running game: raids on or off, nights per raid, raid range, raid intensity, which chests
carriers may crack (none, chests, or logistic chests too), and a cap on replicators on the surface. Each player can turn
raid alerts off.
Notes
- Requires Space Age.
- Adding it to an existing save: replicator islands only appear in parts of Fulgora generated after the mod is added.