I know you’re working on that halo mod at the moment, so I’m not expecting this concept to see the light of day any time soon, but I figured I might share it to you anyway.

I think funneltrunks have more potential for agriculture than just wood. Their standout feature are their “symbiotic worms”, and irl worms can be very useful for farming. Maybe funneltrunks could be harvested for these worms, which could be used for a few composting type recipes?

Maybe a more efficient recipe for landfill that combines stone, spoilage and worms for a better yield? Landfill can’t be recycled, so alternate recipes are on the table.

Or some recipes to efficiently compost jelly and mash into lots of spoilage? Right now spoilage is usually produced from nutrients, which leads to it being derived from bioflux like literally everything else. Perhaps these jelly/mash composting recipes could help shake that up.

Perhaps a recipe to release “methane” (petroleum gas) by composting spoilage, allowing a more interesting use for excess spoilage other than just burning it?

I’m not sure what the seed equivalent of funneltrunks could be. But if the worms are symbiotic, maybe the plant needs them to grow? Needing to combine wood and worms to create a “seed” could be neat. Most seeds or seed equivalents are quite simple to produce, a more involved one like this would be a change of pace.

You don’t need to use all of these ideas (or any of them lol), I just figured they might give you some inspiration.

Hey CyberCider,

First off, thanks for sharing, I really appreciate the angle your taking with the ideas. In short, hell yea, I have actually already been dreaming up ideas for the Funneltrunks worms, as the ingame description is the only mention of worms if you're not paying attention to the graphic all that much. They remind me of Lekgolo (hunter worms from Halo haha) and I have been thinking of some sort of biologically worm powered machine or symbiotic something, but hadn't fallen into a use case that I felt good about - but obviously something needs to give a story and purpose to those worms 100%!

I REALLY like your suggestion of mixing worms with wood to make some sort of seeded trunk... It makes me want to make both the worms and the 'seeds' spoilable (there are no spoilable seeds in the game yet, so could add an interesting difficulty in maintenance rather than hoard the seeds)

I like the idea of finding more ideas for spoilage - but hesitate to implement a good spoilage creation as mass making nutrients like you say is just so effective and easy to do already. The idea for oil from spoilage is good - and perhaps a really valuable concept for space ships and other planets. That implementation is tricky because oil is effectively bypassed by bioflux by making sulfur (already for free in spaceplatforms too!) and plastic so effectively - so what purpose would methane/oil have in many situations ya know? I somewhat addressed this with the boompuff agriculture mod, which provided the best use for oil on Gleba - a flamethrower ammo - but through a more novel mechanic.

All in all, I hear what your saying - the Funneltrunk worms are 100% on my radar as high potential - and I have tonnes of ideas too, but I am yet to land on a truely interesting and gameplay adding idea.... I like the "compost" route, there could be some legs in that, perhaps even some sort of growth modifier for trees, maybe? ergh.