It was mentioned in this thread that I had some plans for a spider-esque race. What I didn’t say is that it’s what evolved from my old plans for a changeling race that’s more interesting, anyway I mentioned that I had some notes and was suggested I post them so here’s a photo of them because I don’t have a scanner.
I did warn that they weren’t particularly coherent when I called them scratchings but oh well. There’s notes in there on names, leadership structures, other races to draw inspiration off, appearance and biology, religion, magic, architecture, diet, and commonly used materials. I’m happy to answer any questions and I’m working on something for them that’s actually on the computer. They’re one of my two main interests in making though and will likely include useful things that could be used for other mods to make them.
well, you’ve certainly given your spider variant a lot of thought! 
but i weep for your childhood… shudders
any plans to take a stab at modeling something in qubicle? or enlisting the efforts of one of our resident experts? i would love to see someones take on a voxel spider…
I can’t run Qubicle for inexplicable reasons remember? I suppose I could take a stab at trying an Win 8 install if I really wanted but that’d take time so I’ll wait till the weekend. Hadn’t thought of that before actually, might be worth a shot. Although I haven’t even decided on what I want them to look like yet, although if you look closely enough you may see me suggest to base their appearance off David Bowie. Totally serious about that actually, I’ve been troubled on things as you could see though, opinions on them could be useful actually so here’s some of my questions/thoughts on appearance.
- Should they have 6 or 8 legs?
- Visible spinneret or magically create silk?
- Should they have arms?
- If not, Should they be able to use their legs as arms?
- If they have arms should they have hands?
- If so, How many fingers/claws?
- Humanoid upper body? Or a more insectoid one?
- What do for a face? I’ve the notes on different styles for eyes around the middle of the page.
- I’ve been heavily leaning towards a shell/exo-skeleton. Thoughts on that versus skin or fur?
A key thing first, while the devs have said magic will likely be a rare thing in Stonehearth I’m going with that only in a way, Active magic is a rare thing. Passive magic is fairly common and it’s what allows things like the lagomorphs or the dwarves, things like the dragons or the elementals are built off it. It’s fairly obviously magic but it’s also not really magic as it’s not really used for much other than to have them exist and function. Just my thoughts on that, as for actual thoughts on what makes the race interesting though here’s a couple of ideas off there for different mechanics to make them different. They’d have to be tested for balance but most of them should work in-game. They’re in a good bit more depth here though.
Empathic Vampirism
They feed off positive emotions. This only causes unhappiness (adjusted for actual mood systems) in whoever they feed off. This means you’ll have to have access to other races to feed off but it will be possible to survive without them, you’d just be greatly weakened and pretty much unable to access most of their magic which is required for advanced things. Alternatively if it would be possible (it should) I could guarantee that you start near another city to use as food, could add conflict though if you prove to be a bit greedy. Maybe you could negotiate for prisoners to use as food with them? Who knows.
The Hivemind
Fairly self descriptive, a telepathic connection between all Akrobi. Primarily functions as lore for things like the ability to have all your citizens know land discovered by any of them or special mechanics like the reincarnation. It could potentially be used for things like an extremely developed culture or science, not stuff you’d normally associate with things like this but myeh.
Reincarnation
As they are all part of the hivemind your dead citizens could revive into a new body keeping all their experience and skills as they’re mind/soul lives within the hivemind. It counters elite units of OPness by having so that as they get older and more experienced they feel less and less need to want to come back until they decide not to and retire to become an “Elder” (just the retired wise people really), you cannot force this and it would be fully automatic. It also means though that you may rarely be gifted with Elders who decided to live a life again. The actual becoming an Elder thing would be based off things like personality and job if possible, a soldier would probably be more impatient and stay around for longer than a scholar or an artist whose work is more calm and placid so they can retire to live within the world of the Hivemind to think on what they loved doing in life.
Materials
While they can use a variety of normal materials such as wood, stone or steel (Not really sure about the last two) their primary materials for items and construction will likely be a combination of magically grown crystals (For use in crafting and as fuels for crafting more advanced recipes and web types), soft normal webs (likely primarily used for construction) and hardened special webs which would likely be their main material for things like armor and swords and would need the crystals as fuel for the process. I’m not sure how you’d grow the crystals yet but I’m thinking some kind of magical plant as the source or maybe something like special cocoons you can make?
Web Properties
This is quite an interesting one. As I said above I plan for webs to be their primary building and crafting material but obviously that can’t match the diversity of things like metals without a bit of work and that’s what I did. How I plan on making it work is that in addition their normal diet to gain passive magic and properly live they can also eat physical things. That is what is required for the creation of webs, depending on how that turns out would vary this next bit. The web gains some properties of what they eat, so if they ate things like stone it could be harder, more rigid, brittle, and a higher melting point or if they ate metals it would be similar to stone except less brittle but a lower melting point, wood or bone could be more flammable, and something like blood could make it more magically receptive and flexible. There’s a lot of things you could do with them.
A lot of that I’ve thought of while writing all this out while that I didn’t cover that don’t matter quite as much like architecture but this post is quite long enough as is. Any thoughts or feedback on anything? Even if it’s just a wtf in response to their appearance being based off David Bowie.
Amazing Idea! 
well, this is different… i like the idea of having a nearby hive, that is slowly tearing away at the moral fabric of your society… somewhat twisted, but a nice twist at that… 
Does @TobiasSabathius tarantula count? 
And I shall get to work on deciphering your notes and reading your ideas after my tea, stay tuned for comments on what I’m already liking as a mod
o.m.g. i am like so totally forgetful! 
ahem
yes, absolutely… this beauty more than fits the spider bill…
Has it been so long that I have passed from memory to myth?
Well I shall have to pull something out of the hat… or maybe actually get off my lazy bum and do some work
no sir, i’m just trying to downplay my growing man-crush for you… i would hate for @Geoffers747 to fly into a fit of jealous rage…
And here be the comments:
For appearance, you have two options: make them spiders, or don’t. If I’m not mistaken, you see these as more spider-esque creatures, no? So I say have a bit of fun and be creative, and if they’re not just spiders, make sure they don’t look like that, so don’t do say 6-legged but otherwise unchanged spiders, as people will just go “This guy doesn’t know how many legs spiders have, LOL”. I personally do like 8 legs, as it feels one of the key elements of a spider to me, but if it’s too cramped or looks too much/ a bit off, 6 should be fine. Upper body? Hmmm. At first I thought you meant almost like a centaur, with a human body sticking out the top, which would be quite cool. But I think I know what you were more meaning now and I don’t really have much preference so no useful input there. Shell/exo-skeleton would look, in my opinion, pretty damn cool. I picture a shell with 8 legs, scuttling around. Bad ass. (Btw, this is what I imagine is being created. If you’re not going for such a badassery look ignore these opinions)
I wasn’t sure what you meant by arms? Do you mean in a different position to legs? Or do you mean a different shape to the legs? Also, not quite sure about hands. My feelings are a bit meh on that, too much detail. However I’m no major voxellor so I could be wrong.
I like the ideas and haven’t much else but that positive feedback. I think you balanced reincarnation well. Materials for a spider to build with was something I had though would be tricky, but you’ve got some decent ideas here. The idea for item consumption affecting building properties is really interesting. Would make for some easy ways to make building variants and would basically make the current materials implementable into your mod. Would suggest giving them different appearances too, altering thickness, colour, spacing between strands etc. so as to be easy to tell what it is from a distance and to give some variation amongst buildings. To side with going fairly web-heavy, you could also give them slight ant-like properties in terms of carrying large/heavy items with fair ease, and even animate it the same way, replacing Tom’s material carrying animation with this one. For special webs, I envisage them locating the item to be consumed and eating the correct amount (up to a cap? so if one spider was making a structure alone, it couldn’t eat 20 wood and then spin all of it’s web at once, it had to go back and eat some more) straight out of the stockpile before then heading back and creating the structure. How do you plan on normal webs working? Do they have to eat in the manner I suggested before they can create webbed structures? Would this follow through for specially webbed structures? (I should think it should, but this then costs more material than normal human houses would, web + material instead of just material) Or is there some other constraint? For they surely can’t just be able to create structures all the time.
Unfortunately your notes are a wee bit small for my eyes to make out much of your faces on the image 
Also, have you thought about class systems? And if so (and if you’re keeping them), how you’re going to differentiate in appearance? As I said above, I like the shell idea, I think it would look quite cool, so maybe symbols/colours?
And since nobody has, I’m wtfing the David Bowie comment 
I hope my feedback is of use and award self praise apologise for the length of my post, but I just thought I could be so much more helpful this way than if I just said “Cool ideas, bro”.
“Why are my people so unhappy?” pans camera “Well… I wonder if there’s a pest control class.”
Also the mandibles can act as hands (if they’re not centaurs) though this means the carrying animation happens unseen at the head, or it could just drag stuff behind using webs.
not much to contribute, other than my 
aye! clever use of the webbing…
What do you think I meant? Because I didn’t have much ideas formed about the insectoid upper body and I’d be interested in hearing how you pictured it. As for the humanoid one I absolutely pictured something like a centaur, something like [Evil Spinnerette][1] only a shell/insectoid armour as opposed to the fur/skin.
This was mainly in reference to the upper body. If they don’t have one then think of it as just having claws or something on the frontmost set of legs to use as hands. If they do have an upper body then I wasn’t sure how to do arms, I’ve had ideas from what looks like armoured human arms to basically having a sword for a forearm, things like a couple of claws at the end instead of a hand as well.
They’d have pretty much all new animations anyway due to the radically different anatomy, also considering a bit of physics they’ve likely got magically boosted strength anyway to be able to carry that exoskeleton of theirs. The force require to carry it as it gets bigger and the force provided from getting bigger do not scale at the same rate normally. But yeah being able to carry heavy items (e.g. humans, goblins, etc.) would be almost definitely in it as they need a way to carry off prisoners. Maybe just bind them to their back or something for easy carrying of heavy stuff.
Certainly sounds like a good idea, you’d need a way to check what your buildings are made of anyway and this would be good as a kind of quick reference. Have to work out how everything would change it’s appearance but it’d be good. The real test would be how flexible the game is for this as a couple of the things with webs will need things like dynamic resizing or colouring of models.
That’d sound about right for all webs. They’ll also have someone way though of creating a blob of webbing item or something though for use in crafting. A limit on the amount eaten at once would be necessary as suggested but it wouldn’t all need to be the same material.
For balance and common sense it would likely be that they go eat a bunch of stuff up to a certain amount (You could mix and match here to have like 5 wood and 5 stone to get a bit less properties of both or 10 wood to get more from that). Then they’d have a bit of a processing time to turn them into webbing, this would be needed for balance reasons as otherwise they could build insanely fast compared to other races with human buildings being only one or two trips worth of materials. They’d then be able to either go create blobs of web for use with crafting or to create webbing as part of their buildings (Giant webs).
The difference between the special web and normal webs seems to have been misinterpreted slightly, the special web is just the magically reinforced version of the normal web. Both of them gain the properties of things eaten and both of them require things to be eaten. The main difference is that the special web use whatever magic fuel source is chosen (normal fuels are normally fire based which is rather bad here as partial tradition applies so fairly flammable webs are in) to bring strengthen the unusual properties of the web (stone, wood, steel, blood, water, etc.), that will nearly always result in them being hardened but with things like liquids or more flexible materials it could potentially make things closer to normal silk and even liquids (e.g. consume oil to make super flammable liquid). It could also be used as a source of trade as silks that are as hard stone or the like could be quite desirable to nobility from other races. Exquisite high quality silk that provides nearly as much defence as steel? Where can I get it?
Normal web as it were would just be the web used for creating your webs, it would likely be the majority used at the start and it would have much less of the special properties (less strength from steel or whatnot). As for disassembly just being able to cut it down and then consume as a mostly neutral reagent would probably work, it would also let you cannibalize unneeded ones for extra special web if absolutely necessary but it would provide much less properties than actual materials.
I hadn’t thought of patterns for different classes but it sounds like a good way to differentiate as they probably won’t have clothes. I hadn’t really thought about classes much yet so much as what roles they have which classes will be based off. It will likely be somewhat similar to normal humans but with a fair few changes obviously, dedicated web builders and web creators instead of simple worker class as an example.
Remember that they evolved from the mlp changelings originally. That means they will almost definitely have some way of shapeshifting or disguising themselves even if it’s a specific class chain. But yeah having people randomly become unhappy would likely be a good sign that you’ve got a problem and to hope you can solve it diplomatically because otherwise you might be in a whole lot of trouble. As for the mandibles suggestion if they do have them then they’ll be part of the head and carrying stuff there just seems weird to me, the idea of dragging stuff behind them webs is an interesting one but I’m not sure how that would work for placing it in specific locations as you don’t have too much control if you’re dragging something behind you.
I probably could’ve gone into more detail on things but It’s quite long enough and I’ve got things to do and places to be.
[1]: Evil Spinnerette | Spinnerette Wiki | Fandom
Impressive how I can read it correctly, before going back on myself and changing my interpretation to be wrong, is it not? I like the centaur idea, something like this (on the gallery of that link)?
And of course arms make a lot more sense now I’m seeing things how you intended. I’d say probably yes, a limbless body might look a bit odd, but I’m not hugely opinionated on that one.
In the part about ants, I forgot to include the actual suggestion, the only bit of information in there that mattered. 
I had used the comparison of ants to say I think you could animate it like an ant carrying something on its back, so with maybe two arms/legs holding it in place on the shell.
Right you are, clumsy reading on my behalf 
ok, now there’s something that cant be unseen… but its wicked cool nonetheless…
You didn’t look at the gallery did you? Particularly useful was the transformation image where it shows them standing and you can see the junction between human and spider better. My image other than the face which I’m still fairly iffy bout with things like mandibles and whatnot is take those pictures of the drider and then imagine them wearing something like skyrim’s ebony armour.
Seems interesting, an idea I thought of while writing the previous post though that’s relevant here. A 3rd type of web, it’s just the type used when they need some for an animation or special personal thing or something like shooting web to swing off or whatnot. Requires no food or anything but it’s really just a special ability of theirs and not something usable in any real way. The reason why it’s relevant though is a thought of making it so that all of them can create some kind of basic sling thing to hang on their back/abdomen to carry stuff that way, it could only carry one thing but it would be how it carries various things while still retaining the ability to climb webs and things, it could also be used to carry various sizes of things so that it could carry humans or the like just as easily as wood.
EDIT: I forgot to comment on the David Bowie thing. Anyway in the top middle of the page you’d see the actual notes. It’s actually refers to Labyrinth and having a leader with unique powers and a massively more humanoid/different appearance. For example the queen having ultra telepathic mind control skills or more significantly the ability to directly communicate with the Elders and call on their help along with being something that could actually pass for human other than say having 4 eyes or something. As for why AoE mind control fails to channeling the Elders remember that the Elders are every super experienced unit you’ve ever, it would be a way to briefly super charge their skills (not stats though) to a massive degree, likely extremely time restricted but it would allow things like getting them to call upon every master crafter you’ve ever had to aid in the crafting of an item.
I got Qubicle working! Apparently if I swear at wine enough it mostly works, it’s just the pop ups rendering behind the window that’s annoying now. The good news is that that plus the alpha means that there should soon be an update here for some actual substance. I’ve just got to get the hang of qubicle. The first part will just be an attempt for direct item crafting via ui. Stoneweb is coming.
Good luck on your mod! I’m sure you won’t need it, I read the entire (Second) OP and the idea is incredibly imaginative.
Good news, everyone! Turns out qubicle didn’t work quite as well as I hoped, as in the whole saving and loading part seems to not work. Guess this is put on hiatus again, once I get godmode working it should at least be easier to make I suppose.
I hope Qubicle is sat in that corner, thinking about what its done! 