THE FLESH BEASTS
You intercept a distress signal from a nearby camp. The frantic voice begs you to save them from something horrible and offers everything at their camp in return, including shards of dark archotechnology. As the voice tries to explain what’s happening, the signal goes dead. If you choose to help this poor soul, assemble your caravan and come well-armed.
You arrive - and it’s a massacre. Bodies everywhere, fleshy creatures roam freely, and throbbing tissues cake the walls of the encampment. Giant burrows dot the ground’s surface, connecting to tunnels deep in the earth.
These cancerous enemies are an amalgamation of many tissues and parts. When you destroy a bigger one, it explodes into several smaller creatures. This means one flesh creature can become many and easily overwhelm your soldiers and defenses.
Embedded in the organic mass are fleshbulbs, organs that store and refine nutrients. This chemical process generates a soft bioluminescent glow, allowing you to see the full extent of the horror, day or night.
If you’re fortunate when investigating an area blighted by the fleshmass, you might stumble across a swollen lump with something inside. These are fleshsacks - stationary fleshbeasts that act as digestive organs, supplying the surrounding fleshmass with nutrients. Note that fleshsacks are unable to break down non-organic matter, meaning that valuable items can occasionally be found within - if you want to go rummaging in there!
There are many approaches to clearing out a flesh infestation: you can focus on systematically slaughtering the remaining flesh beasts with guns, or bring out the incinerator to properly cleanse the area (with the risk of destroying flammable loot), or work on filling in their burrows first to prevent further reinforcements.
THE FLESHMASS HEART
If you’re unfortunate enough to encounter the fleshmass heart, it starts with a small circle of terrain that shifts and cracks apart, pulsating rhythmically as something digs upwards. Eventually, the fleshmass heart will emerge. It is a cancer-like creature that grows flesh across (and under) the surface. From the heart, grows the fleshmass. This is an enormous assimilating creature that spreads across the landscape, consuming and covering the whole map with a quivering mass of meat. It defends itself with beasts and acid. You must fight it to acquire samples of its nervous system, then study them until you can venture to its heart and kill it for good.
The resulting fleshmass is a solid wall of twisted flesh, which throbs and shivers with horrible life. As it grows from the heart, it puts arterial roots into the ground in its quest for nutrients.
For any nearby colonists, the choices are simple - flee the colony or discover how to destroy the fleshmass. Whilst the heart itself is invulnerable due to rapid regeneration, the mass is susceptible to attacks. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s without weapons...
Embedded in the mass are spitters, defensive organs that filter toxins from the surrounding biomass, concentrate them into potent acid, and then spit it long distances. You don’t want your colonists to get hit by those.
The second line of defense is fleshbeasts, which normally emerge from temporary pit burrows that connect to a cave network deep below. These can be roughly categorized, depending on their mass. Toughspikes are man-sized lumps of roiling flesh with 2 spiked ‘limbs’ and a keratin-armored carapace. Trispikes are smaller three-pronged entities, which break down into the singular fingerspikes when killed. All of the ‘spike’ entities also throw hardened keratin or bone spikes.
Once your colonists have defeated the fleshbeasts and killed enough fleshmass nerve bundles, they will have gathered several neural lumps. Research these and you’ll discover the secret to defeating the heart, allowing you to capture and study it…
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…oh, what? You thought that was the end? That’s just one way it could go.
THE PIT GATE
Another time, the ground might shake with a different result. Now a larger piece of terrain has begun sinking into the depths, forming a deepening hole, much wider than before. Inhuman shrieks rise from the depths. It'd be wise to move your colonists, buildings and items away from the emergence point.
Within a day, the pit’s floor will vanish from sight, falling into the depths where the fleshmass heart came from. A pit gate has formed and will remain open until you collapse it, occasionally releasing foes. To celebrate, a horde of fleshbeasts emerges, along with a noxious stench of rot…
To close the gate, the colonists must descend into it. Under the ground all is flesh, having infested a massive cave system. The tunnels are so crammed with biomass that it’s supporting the ceiling and walls, making it thoroughly unstable. Defeat the motive force of the fleshmass and the tunnels should collapse.
That motive force is housed in a dreadmeld - a mammoth leader creature made up of dozens of smaller fleshbeasts and buried inside the stinking fleshmass.
Its psychic connection to the fleshmass filling the cavern is strong. So strong that killing the dreadmeld will destabilize the whole organism! If you manage to take down the flesh momma, grab what you can (particularly the strange archotech shards it drops) and flee before it collapses and buries you all!
MORE TO COME!
So that’s the fleshmass, an amorphous, expanding cancerous blob from the dark-beyond. Whether it arrives as a distress call, bursts from the ground as a fleshmass heart, or lurks beneath in the twisted form of a dreadmeld, it just wishes to be loved - or rather, consume all life and turn it into more of itself. Who can’t empathize with that? We hope you enjoyed our darling flesh-things. Please wishlist Anomaly on Steam and join the Reddit discussion for today’s preview blog! Gaze into this twisted, dark space for more information (not too closely, lest it gaze back into you.)- [HERE] Anomaly preview #1: The flesh beasts, pit gate, dreadmeld, and fleshmass heart
- Future blogs will be added to this list.
