Previous Page: Chapter 22 - Armor equipment and guns

Character health

Characters can be harmed by various hazards such as enemy attacks, fire and explosions, stepping onto acid, or getting hit by trains.

Your character is able to sustain some damage and heal slowly over time if not in combat. The character does not make a special sound when they receive damage, although this will be later added. When health is low, you can hear the character struggling to breath. The only way to speed up healing is to eat raw fish.

The character health overall is a modest but fair amount. For example, without armor, you can survive nearly a minute of constant attack from a single small biter. However, importantly, you are unlikely to survive being hit by a train at full speed and large enemy groups or units can be lethal within a few short seconds.

Armor significantly improves your resistance to all kinds of damage. For example, wearing heavy armor will make you almost completely protected from small biter attacks. However, in general you cannot be fully immune to most sources of damage. The next best thing is energy shield equipment which absorbs damage for you and restores itself using equipment grid electric power.

Character death

Taking too much damage will cause death. When your character dies, you hear the game over sound and the audio otherwise ends. The death screen is one of the few screens that do not yet have built in support and so you need to use your screen reader tool to select an appropriate button and leave this menu. The options are to exit the game or to load back an earlier save point or to respawn your character.

Note that if you respawn, your character's armor and equipment and inventory items will all be stored on a chracter corpse where your character died. The corpse disappears after 15 minutes. Other players are informed about the corpse coordinates and it also appears on the scanner list.

Introduction to enemies

Enemies on the planet of Nauvis are collectively known as the biters, which is also the name of a specific enemy type. The enemies in general are giant bugs that live in hives and they are spread across the world. The four overall types of enemies are biters, spitters, worms, and spawners. You can use the enemy alert system to determine how close you are to the nearest enemy. The alert sounds like marching insects in a way. Level 1 alerts have the lowest rate and they indicate an enemy is within 100 tiles. More rapid alerts mean that you are closer and you should be careful about being attacked, unless you are in peaceful mode.

Enemies cannot jump over gaps or walls, but worms and spitters can shoot over walls. Enemies cannot swim and they cannot grab onto vehicles. They are quite good at finding their way around obstacles and usually they travel in groups. Enemies left alone will usually try to return to the nearest enemy group or base.

Biters

As the name would suggest, biters attack by running up to you and using their teeth. This means that generally you can take them down before they can reach you. However, the bigger biter types are still quite threatening because basic bullets will barely damage them and they can run faster than you.

Spitters

These enemies spit acid at you from a distance. They don’t have great range so they need to run within range of your weapons before you are within their own attack range. However, they can shoot predictively and while moving, and so a large number of them is a significant threat. The acid also lingers on the ground for a few seconds.

Worms

These enemies also spit acid but with greater range and a stronger acid type that lingers on the ground for longer and cause you to slow down. Worms are a lot more armored than other enemies since they are half buried in the ground, but the good news is that they never change location. This makes them essentially work like turrets.

When you get nearly within range of a worm, you will hear it dig out of the ground and roar at you. Usually this also means that you are within range for the other enemies to charge at you.

Spawners

Spawners essentially function as enemy buildings. They are meaty round structures with tendrils and popping hives on them. Unlike other enemies, they do not have greater or lesser versions: There is either a biter spawner or a spitter spawner.

Spawners will make sure a minimum number of enemies are always around them for defensive and daily purposes. If the spawners start collecting pollution or if the existig units leave the base, the spawners will work on producing more units. Activity from spawners leaves some scars on the ground.

Enemy bases

Usually, enemies busy around at their base areas minding their own business. The bases themselves involve a group of spawners and worms as well as a local population of biters and perhaps spitters that wander around. Like ore patches, nearby enemy bases are smaller and further ones are larger.

If enemy expansion is enabled, which is true by default but false for peaceful mode and rail worlds, enemies will build new bases in empty areas, once every few minutes. This happens by a group of biters and spitters gathering up and wandering about until they find an empty spot far away from other enemy bases. Then they settle down and some of them disappear into the ground to set up spawners and call worms.

Peaceful Mode enemy aggression

If you enable the peaceful mode setting when creating the world, it will significantly reduce the need for combat by making it only necessary for the offensive expansion of your bases. In peaceful mode, enemies do not attempt to build new bases and they do not attack anyone unless they get attacked first. If a player or a turret fires a shot or the such, the enemies nearby are aggravated but they do not call other enemies from far away to join them. The aggravated enemies primarily attack the structures and players that initiated the aggression and also the structures that block their paths. After destroying their targets, most of the time the aggravated enemies will return to being peaceful, but some of them could also continue a nonstop rampage where they target nearby structures.

Default enemy aggression

In default settings, enemies attempt to build new bases every few hours or minutes. More importantly, they are a lot more aggressive. First of all, they will attack you if you come too close to them. They will also join in on a group of enemies already chasing you. In addition, they will come to the aid neighboring enemy bases if they are alerted. They will also attack any player or neutral object that blocks their marching path.

Most importantly, enemy spawners will organize attack groups targeting your factory if they pick up air pollution from the factory. The amount of enemies prepared in attack groups is directly proportional to the amount of pollution absorbed.

Enemy evolution

When you first land on Nauvis, only small enemies are around. However, medium or larger enemies begin to appear from spawners as the enemies evolve over time. This is driven by three factors. Firstly, the passage of time has a small effect. Secondly, the total amount of pollution you have produced has an effect, regardless of whether the pollution reaches enemy bases. Thirdly, and most significantly, every spawner destroyed causes a significant boost in enemy evolution.

There is a planetwide evolution coefficient that affects enemy bases you have and have not visited. As evolution progresses, medium size enemies first appear as a minority in the enemy population but they slowly become the majority. Small enemies disappear from the population entirely and large enemies become the new minority.

Worms in place do not evolve but newly found areas or newly formed bases will have larger worms over time. Spawners do not evolve but they gain the ability to spawn bigger enemies.

Estimated equipment requirements for different enemy sizes

Small enemies can be taken down quite easily with a regular pistol and regular ammo. However, your fire rate may not be enough to stop a larger group of them before they can deal some serious damage. Heavy armor can keep you fairly well protected from small enemies because their attacks will only slightly make it through the armor.

Medium sized enemies have more speed and health and armor and so a pistol with regular bullets is usually barely sufficient against more than one of them at a time. A large number of them would in fact be deadly unless you have at least a medium level weapon such as a submachine gun with armor piercing rounds, or at least good armor with energy shields to give you more time to shoot before you start taking serious damage.

For large enemies, even a single one is deadly unless you have strong armor and strong weapons. The good news is that they usually make up a smaller part of an enemy group when they appear, at least until very late in the evolution stages.

Offensive combat strategies

• Before going on an offensive, it is practical to store away anything you will not need so that you would lose the minimal number of items in case of death. It also helps to organize your quickbar to have your most used combat items ready to go.
• Your personal guns and armor are your most important combat equipment most of the time, because you fall back on them when all other options are exhausted. As mentioned in the previous chapter, a submachine gun is a reliable option.
• When you have high tech armor, it is useful to craft and install combat related armor equipment modules. Notably, energy shield equipment increases your survival chances by a lot.
• Early in the game, you unlock defender drones, which fly around you and shoot at nearby enemies for you. Defenders and other capsule-based follower robots have short lifespans based on timers, but they work very effectively as additional units in your offensive pushes.
• Gun turrets, while normally playing defensive roles, are very useful in offense too, because you can use them to set up little outposts to run back to when enemy numbers are too great.
• Even though driving is weakly supported, vehicles (mainly the car and the tank) can be effective in combat without driving them much. The idea would be to place one down facing the enemy base, filling it with a small amount of fuel and one stack of bullets, and slowly driving it in. You can deploy capsule drones while sitting inside, and you can use the vehicle gun at first instead of your own submachine gun because the vehicle gun shoots faster and with slightly higher range, and it also has automatic aiming. If the vehicle you are sitting in is destroyed, its inventory is lost but players are safely ejected.
• There are other combat options such as grenades and land mines, but these options have not been made accessible.

Next Chapter : Chapter 24 - Pollution