PC [IDEA] Martian Mothership

[Kefke]

Hello there, forum goers come to eviscerate me for being a "lazy idea guy", and welcome to my thread! I'm no good at coding and colour-blindness makes spriting a herculean task. So, when I have a crazy idea, the only thing I can really do is to put it out there for other people to look at. Maybe someone who already had plans to do something like this will notice.

Here's a few core concepts I'm working off of;

1. The Martian Madness event is pretty cool, but it feels like a throwaway.
2. Dungeons are great, and the game doesn't have enough of them.

So, if you're following along, and you read the thread title, you should already know where I'm going with this. I'd love to see a mod add a post-Martian dungeon. Of course, that would mean needing the probes to spawn a little more to ensure people get to see it, but I don't know if that's so bad, really. Just make the spawn rate higher when you haven't had an invasion yet, extend the range they can appear in a bit, or even add some more variants on the probes. Once the event has happened, they can drop to normal rarity. From there, players would just have to beat the event normally. Except, at the end you'd get a status message along the lines of, The Martian mothership has arrived!

At that point, a new structure would spawn in, similar to how you get meteor spawns, Hallow and Corruption after the wall of flesh, or those wonderful "prize box" structures appearing. The difference is that this would be an entire dungeon, starting near space and extending down to several levels. However, it would be fairly shallow, instead being fairly long (possibly spanning a large percentage of the sky in Small worlds). Inside, players would face obstacles ranging from pre-placed Tesla Turrets, laser traps, and "Fizzler" gates that hurt players to pass through (and inflict Electrified) but not mobs (able to be turned into team doors later) with failsafes that go off if the player cuts the wrong wire trying to turn off the traps, to new mobs like "Elite" versions of the Officer and Engineer not in their helmets but packing new weapons and abilities, alien creatures and "Martian Scientists", or swarming cannon-fodder "Martian Security" and "Martian Crewman" enemies with ranged and melee attacks, respectively.

Of course, a new dungeon means new loot. Some chests should just contain Martian Madness event drops, but there's potential for new things too. Maybe there's a pokeball-like device that summons a space horror to fight for you. Or a way to deploy your own personal Tesla Turret. There could be an accessory that gives you one of those sweet personal forcefields. How about an alien probe pet that provides light and a Hunter Potion buff? As debuffs go, Electrified might be a little much for a player weapon, but weapons with a weaker "Shocked" effect could work.

The best type of treasure, though, could be in the form of new tiles. I mentioned laser traps, fizzlers, and bombs that go off if the player doesn't properly disarm them, but why stop there? Maybe throw in a more "alien" style of teleporter needed to get around the ship. Maybe some wireless transmitters? Maybe some camera/laser triggers that can be powered to move and trigger things when they "see" someone? Those could have a team version too. There could also be doors that only open for people carrying a keycard, again with team versions for doors and cards. Maybe there's some kind of healing machines or food dispensers to gain. Some machines could change gravity in an area. You could do a lot here.

To keep those items as rewards, and to encourage people from bypassing everything, you give the player a "Lockdown" debuff on getting close to the ship. With a description of "The mothership is on lockdown." it would basically be the same effect as in the Dungeon Defenders event. You'd probably make the dungeon immune to the few long-range digging tools as well. Laser-proof coating and all that. In order to lift the lockdown and get access to everything on the ship, players would fight their way to the control room, top and centre of the ship. There they would find...something. An alien queen? The captain? Mother Brain a legally distinct security system with a core computer that shoots at intruders? The point is, a boss. Something with the best loot to serve as a capstone for the whole ship. When they beat it for the first time, then and only then will they be able to break things. Any other time, there should be a spark effect to show that it's just not happening.

 

[temery2383]

Inside, players would face obstacles ranging from pre-placed Tesla Turrets, laser traps, and "Fizzler" gates that hurt players to pass through (and inflict Electrified) but not mobs (able to be turned into team doors later) with failsafes that go off if the player cuts the wrong wire trying to turn off the traps

I'm not really sure how you would manage to make the failsafe thing work, since cutting the wire on the trap itself would disable it (maybe some sort of logic gate trick - I might play around with it and see if I can make a proof of concept for you). But other than that, this would be a really great idea!

Edit: Now that I think about it, the logic gate idea may be more complicated than I thought, simply because Terraria's wiring is a pulse-based system rather than a constant output. I'll keep brainstorming and ask the folks at T-MEC though.

 

[Kefke]

Hmm. That's a fair point. Even with things that have an On and Off state, it's really just that the switch sends a signal when it's toggled off that those items recognize. If you cut the wire to them, they just stay in the state that they were in. I liked the idea of making disarming traps dangerous in its own right, but it might be simpler to just protect wires the same way as the rest of the ship. The only downside to that is that then traps _can't_ be disarmed, which is less fun in its own right. As you say, maybe something with logic gates (and probably a timer), though.

 

[temery2383]

Hmm. That's a fair point. Even with things that have an On and Off state, it's really just that the switch sends a signal when it's toggled off that those items recognize. If you cut the wire to them, they just stay in the state that they were in. I liked the idea of making disarming traps dangerous in its own right, but it might be simpler to just protect wires the same way as the rest of the ship. The only downside to that is that then traps _can't_ be disarmed, which is less fun in its own right. As you say, maybe something with logic gates (and probably a timer), though.

I haven't tried anything in-game yet, but an idea came to mind: perhaps it would work to put the traps on timers rather than activating them based on detection, and give the timer two outputs: one that runs through the trap and to a logic gate, and one that runs directly to the logic gate so that the player can't get to it. If the one running through the trap is cut, the state of the logic gate will be wrong and the failsafe will go off.

 

[temery2383]

So I asked T-MEC and got a little bit of feedback, as well as testing some things myself. Here's my idea that I mentioned before. In the last picture I had the wire removed from the explosives simply so they wouldn't blow up in the test.

Basically, the timer gives an output to both lamps of the XOR gate, keeping the gate from activating the explosives. When the trap is disabled, the timer still gives a signal to one of the lamps, causing the gate to activate. The timer, explosive wire and second output would be inaccessible from the vicinity of the trap, maybe with a shutoff in the control room. It's a fairly simple solution, but it's functional and probably wouldn't be too bad to put in a generated structure.

An alternative that was suggested would be to use some custom code to check for broken wires within the area of the structure and activate the failsafe that way, but that might lead to some confusion if players try to disable the traps the normal way and get blown up without warning.

 

[Kefke]

The pictures aren't showing for me, but that's basically what I came up with. The only real issue is that without some variation in the setup, it becomes trivial to figure out how to disarm the traps, at which point it's the same as a normal trap, just with extra steps. That would be the real trick, randomizing the wiring enough that the player has to take time to work out the circuit each time. It would probably also be good to use detectors rather than buttons, so the player can't avoid the trigger as easily (which would also fit the high-tech theme).

 

[temery2383]

The pictures aren't showing for me, but that's basically what I came up with. The only real issue is that without some variation in the setup, it becomes trivial to figure out how to disarm the traps, at which point it's the same as a normal trap, just with extra steps. That would be the real trick, randomizing the wiring enough that the player has to take time to work out the circuit each time. It would probably also be good to use detectors rather than buttons, so the player can't avoid the trigger as easily (which would also fit the high-tech theme).

Hopefully they show up this time; I copied and pasted from the T-MEC thread previously, but this time I uploaded them directly.

Obviously, the layout would be different than it is here, but I didn't want to make a whole big structure just to show the concept. I agree that there would need to be some sort of variation and/or randomization to make things a little more interesting and difficult. Maybe some sort of random activation with faulty logic gates would help. Using detectors instead of buttons is definitely a good idea as well, for functional reasons as well as thematic and aesthetic reasons.

With this general idea though, I don't think it would really become just traps with extra steps. Because the trap can't be disarmed regularly without consequences, players would have to navigate the ship with all the traps still active and turn them off from the control room, adding extra challenge. They would probably learn pretty quick, especially if the failsafe was a repeating occurrence instead of a consumable explosive (e.g. spiky balls or some other relatively irritating trap on a short timer), because every time they try to disarm something they would just make it harder on themselves.

Edit: I just had a fun idea for the total (control room) shutoff. Maybe the boss in the control room drops a key card to access the shutoff room, similar to Plantera dropping a temple key, and shutting off the system uses explosives to cinematically blow up the core that keeps the traps firing. At this point I'm just totally on the brainstorming train lol.

 

[Dunkle_Sans5]

Hell yeah! I would love it!