OVERHAUL: Pure White Latex (Hivemind) [OPEN FOR COMMENT]

[LtxProgrammer]

Environment

• Remodel and rework white latex pillar

Will no longer be a pre-placed trap block, but will instead be a weapon used by the white latex when chasing a transfurable entity. The block needs a remodel to better resemble the size seen in Changed.

• White latex "flora"

Transfur Variants

• Collapse pure white latex transfur variants into one: "will of white latex"

Since the pure white latex is a hivemind, you are not necessarily one entity among other white latexes, rather you are all one entity. You control whole areas covered by your presence.

A player in the default state of this variant will be a sort of spectator mode, a floating camera that can only travel in proximity to white latex.

• Ability: create wall

Create a white latex wall or pillar that will serve as an obstacle to trap and transfur enemies.

• Ability: make form

Shape an NPC white latex entity out surrounding white latex to chase transfurable entities. They'll exist for a limited duration, then they'll deform to nearby white latex.

• Ability: take form

Shape a white latex entity that you control directly. It has unlimited duration, but gradually loses strength when not in proximity to white latex. This ability should be used to personally chase a transfurable entity, or to spread white latex out further.

White latex forms can merge together into one larger and stronger entity (behemoth).

For any given area of white latex, one or more players can be present to control it. If multiple players control one area, they share ability cooldowns. If no players are present to use abilities, an AI (no not that kind of AI) will control the abilities.

[ZirconEye]

Because of how drastically this changes someone's gameplay if they decide to become a pure white latex, there should definitely be more rewards for growing the hivemind than just more territory. A player-controllable behemoth is already a really interesting idea! Maybe the abilities get stronger the more territory/the more entities transfurred the hivemind has? It seems like multiple behemoths is canonically possible for example, we can see at least half a dozen of them in the white latex jungle.
Some more options for terraforming (growing white latex mimic plants, or choosing to become a white latex "ocean" like what forms in Dr. K's trap) could also be really neat.

[KJEntytek303]

What about this:

The White Latex Nest

A large structure made of wl blocks (maybe with a nest core block?) , that would serve as a player's base, and the actual body of the player themselves. It's primary function would rotate around "White Latex Points", that could be gained by absorbing entities, and spend to spread the nest, take a temporary form, or to just keep the player alive. The nest capacity for WL Points should grow with it's size. Generally, the larger the nest, the more powerful it becomes.

Tbh, when it comes to "how to manage the nest", I don't have an idea on a design better than a central management panel, when it comes to managing the nest, so i encourage everyone to try to come up with something better. The central management panel would be the place where you do most of the things with the nest. So what would it have to offer?

• Storage
  The larger the nest, the more storage it should have. at 3x3 it wouldn't have any, at the size of an average surface of a chunk on WL Forest it would have the capacity of 8 shulkers, and the larger it would grow, the more storage it should have. This would be a big encouragement to build nests. I think some basic autocrafting should be a thing, but since 1.21 we have a crafter, so idk. A regular 3x3 crafting grid would be nice though.

• Access to "WL-trading" system
  This would essentially allow you to trade points for blocks of white latex, and other WL-themed blocks, rn it would be WL-Block, WL-Bucket (if given an empty bucket), WL-mug (if given an empty mug), WL-goo, WL-Pillar. Extracting an item would take away the WL points stored in the nest. It could also be used to give the latex back to the nest.

• Keeping the players alive and healthy
  A pure white player would get regeneration and saturation when entering the nest, and it would cost the WL points to regenerate both hunger and health. I think it should cost 4 times more to regenerate hp compared to hunger.

Abilities:

All ability cooldowns should be dependent on the size of the nest. The larger the nest, the more spammable (potentially also more powerful) the abilities should be. A tiny 3x3x3 nest shouldn't be able to quickly spawn a couple of pillars out of itself without the risk of dying or having to at least temporarily shrink itself, while an entire biome could easily afford 5 behemots under a minute. I believe that most ability cooldowns should be charge-based, i.e. you have for example 6 charges, and a single charge regenerates in a given amount of time, there's a short delay between uses, much shorter than the time needed to regenerate an ability charge, to prevent spawning 20 pure whites in a single tick.

• Trap
  This ability would attempt to spawn WL pillars on the surface, right under all transfurrable entities in a radius from the player. They would get a short time to escape before the pillars would rise.

• Spawn NPC
  This ability would work the way ltx described, but i believe that the spawned entity should behave like a tamed dl, with the owner being the nest and every player inside. It should also be possible to take control over it, as long as it's near the nest. I also think it would be nice if we could spawn them in 3 sizes: pup, normal and behemoth. Spawning an NPC would cost WL points. Absorbing the spawned npc gives the lost points back.

• Take Form
  Same as spawn npc, but you control it without needing to switch into it.

• Set Waypoint/Teleport To Waypoint
  This would set a waypoint on the nest surface a player can teleport to at any moment, it doesn't cost points, and has minimal cooldowns, for convenience in larger nests. You could also use a waypoints to spawn npcs in a given location remotely, without needing to be near the place you want to spawn them. A nest should have a limited amount of waypoints, depending on it's size.

• Spread the nest
  This ability should not be automatable, because it could repeat the mistake the old covered blocks had. This ability would allow the player to spread the nest without having to leave it to (for example) mine some dirt with a shovel, so they can put a WL block in it's place. The ability would allow the player to replace nearby blocks with white latex, at the cost of WL-points.

• Intruder alert
  This ability already exists, in the form of non-pure wl entities having glowing when stating on wl blocks from the perspective of pure wls.

Sustaining the nest

In order to sustain the nest, the player would have to either absorb entities from the surface of the nest (or absorb replicated pure-wls) or trade in the wl trader. A nest would periodically consume some points to sustain itself (configurable by /gr or servercfg, likely disabled by default). The player should get a warning when being low on WL, and when reaching 100% WL Point capacity, so they can either shrink the nest if they can't sustain it, trade some latex to keep the points at sensible values, or to enlarge the nest in case of overflow.

Potential for ability tree expansion

• Increase the time the player can be away from the nest / without absorbing, before starting to degrade.
• Longer degradation process (addition to latex spawn rate decrease).
• Intruder alert as an unlockable node.
• Take form as behemoth as an unlockable node.
• Call of the hive - An ability that would tell all nearby pure-whites to merge with you. If enough of them are nearby, you fuse into a behemoth. Call of the hive should always be usable with inside a nest, but rather than creating a behemoth it just make all pure-wls disolve into the nest.

[ZirconEye]

I really like this idea! It's kind of like a player-controlled infection mod.

I don't really have much to add, so here's a handful of ideas to expand on things: How about allowing a player hive to form and "store" multiple hibernating behemoths that they can later either take over or send in as NPC reinforcements as a very, VERY late-game upgrade (similar to what we see in Changed Special's white latex hive?) For balance reasons, there should probably be a cap on how many active/awake behemoths a hive can have at once, probably by having behemoths cost a LOT of WL points to keep active.

The behemoth boss fight (all the transfurs from the behemoth and the white latex making up the behemoth have eyes) and the "No Trust" bad ending in Special (white latex Colin going from eyeless to having eyes when he remembers Puro) also confirm that white latex drones and independent white latex with eyes are the same "species" of latex, just in different states.

Just brainstorming, so take these with a grain of salt, but here's some ideas for how this could be implemented mechanics-wise:
A) The player can "loose" white latex drone NPCS if they wander too far from the hive for too long, causing them to become uncontrollable normal white latex wolves and costing you the WL points you used to spawn them.
B) The same can happen to the player if they wander too far for too long outside the hive without WL points to sustain them. This could either be done by making the player loose control of their body (which becomes an NPC white wolf) and kicking them back to the hive, or by stranding the player in their body as a white wolf and making the hive revert to NPC control until the player returns and forcibly takes control back. (This could be an upgrade to replace degrading if the player chooses, and should come with some serious downsides for balance reasons.)
And C) Let the player unlock an alternate type of white latex drone that has eyes and is able to see normally, both as NPCs and as an optional "take form" form.

I'd also still love for the option to terraform the nest with decorative white latex "plants" and/or "coral", to give your nest a bit of extra customization.

Only other thing I can possibly think of is how the mutant white bloodcell wolf fits into hive creation vs the regular white latex wolves (maybe forming a new hive with one or the other changes the hive's stats/passive abilities a bit depending on which latex started it?)

[LtxProgrammer]

Resource management, interesting idea. Waypoints are also a good idea for this.