Biter Born: Swarm Ascendant


First public alpha. Play as the swarm. Grow organs, spread creep, harvest living resources, digest biomass, mutate, and command brood.

Overhaul
7 days ago
2.0
757
Combat Enemies Mining Manufacturing

g Slop

22 days ago

The thumbnail was obviously obviously generated, but actually playing the mod is pure uncanny valley.

Very verbose item/building descriptions with inconsistent terminology, extremely weird and illogical production chains, including ones that straight up block the progression all contribute to that feeling. It even extends to the patch notes.

The examples of absurd issues include acid glands that require an special miner to gather but the miner requires the gland to make or locking research item production behind a research that requires said item.

Besides that there's very little in this mod. A few buildings ripped from the first starcraft, a recolored inserter and conveyor belt, reskinned chest (that's your entire logistic toolbox so have fun building anything more advanced than what you'd by 10 minute mark in vanilla). You can summon units that die after like 5 seconds (?) and craft ammo for your melee weapon (?), but there's nothing to use either of those against. There's creep that can spread but does literally nothing besides that (you don't need it for buildings). There are a few resources with convoluted production chains that ultimately lead nowhere.

Let this be a warning for those who value their time.

20 days ago

If the crash on launch didn't deter me, this did.

https://imgur.com/a/SPItKgA

16 days ago

unplayable shit
evey thing is grey mess
evrythin all at once at strat of game
just reskin and rendomlize name vanilla shit

13 days ago

The concept sounds cool but I can't spot a single line of text that you actually wrote :/ it's just ai stuff the whole way down

It doesn't seem like you are even playtesting it before release, on account of the startup crashes

Why would someone else want to play a mod that you don't even care about yourself?

13 days ago

You're right, and I’m not going to try to talk around it.

The idea got ahead of the actual mod. A lot of the text read like design notes instead of something written by someone who had sat down and played it properly, and the startup crashes make that worse. That is on me.

I do care about the mod, but the current state did not show that well enough. I pushed too hard on rebuilding the concept and not hard enough on the boring but necessary part: clean boot testing, fresh-save testing, readable tooltips, and making sure the first hour actually works without needing explanations outside the game.

I’m pulling 1.6.6 back into a test-candidate state until it has had a proper in-game pass. The next work is not more feature creep. It is startup stability, first-hour playtesting, hand-written player-facing text, and cleaning up anything that still feels like placeholder/generated filler.

Thanks for being blunt about it. That is the kind of feedback the mod needs before it deserves anyone else’s time.

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