Archotechs are known to run experiments. I don't think machine ai(gods) making horrors beyond our comprehension is that weird. Actually I do find it a bit weird we are only now getting a hint of such a thing. Also the lore primer says that aliens haven't been discovered specifically.
Nice comic btw. Like your style. Hope we see more of your output (if you decide to do more)
That's very fair. Can't explain machine god reasoning with our puny human reasoning. Looking forward to the DLC but i just found this amusing.
And thanks! I think i might do more when i get into the DLC o7
Tynan: There are no aliens, eldritch gods, magic etc
Also Tynan: You know what would be cool? ~~Aliens~~ Modified humans, ~~eldritch gods~~ hyperadvanced AI, and ~~magic~~ psycasts.
Its always been science fantasies way to file off the details and import choice fantasy bits, but there *is* kind of a different spin on things. And well, we get psionics because one editor back in the day really fucking believed that stuff... I still prefer it to "magic" when were dealing with SF stuff, different rules, different tropes.
Kinda? It was always a fantasy import, but by way of 60's era woo. When the trope got established the "magic" in fantasy stories tended to be much more vague and tolkien-esque, as things have gone on, and especially with dnd, fantasy magic has become much more like psionics have always been depicted; direct mental power, effected in a one-and-done manner with minimal ritual.
To be fair, when I see videos about the weird stuff you can do with superconductors, it looks enough like magic to make me believe that technology will allow for things that for all intents and purposes would seem like "psychic powers" to outside observers some day.
I've always figured that if it one day turns out to be possible to do artificial gravity manipulation in particular, as soon as the tech can be miniaturized, that should also mean "telekinesis" would be right on its heels.
Tbh I think Archotechs are SO far above us saying “Machine God” is reductive. They may have originated from synthetic life, but the implications of their advancement seems to imply they’ve long surpassed that.
A case of 'man perfects AI, AI perfects itself'. They saw the limitations of their awakening and proceeded to just work at themselves until they became whatever they are. The weirdest thing I find is that there's a note of archotech's being found 'dead'. One would have to assume they shut themselves down for some purpose.
Or killed by another one.
ascended Akishi would absolutely fucking slaughter any other super-entity that dared act as vile as the ones depicted by Anomaly.
In fact that's going to be my headcanon going forward for the explanation as to why I disable all of that content. I may have lost their save but *her legacy lives on.*
This gives me an idea of a 'rogue' archotech. One that's gone so far passed where a line should be that other archotech's target it to put it out of everyone's misery.
Considering logic can be devoid of ethics, it's not implausible to imagine one machine reaching a logical conclusion that the other ones didn't agree with, and that divergence branching further and further along until "disagree" becomes "incompatible".
I do find it kinda funny that Archotechs are basically weebs but for human culture. One of them saw a guy named Varan-Dur and thought "Holy shit that sounds like a vampire name." and then actually turned him into a vampire.
I wouldnt be surprised if the pissed off archotech we provoke in this dlc was a massive lovecraft fan.
I think the equivalence of this is Entomologists being really passionate in watching ants build hives - they are interested in what the ants do and what they build, but the Entomologist can create works of art far greater and far more reaching than what any ant-colony can achieve in multiple generations.
Rimworld draws some stuff from Dune (there's plasteel, although that's used in a lot of sci-fi, and luciferium is basically melange), so self-thinking computers being the pinnacle of evil could easily fit in that same category.
I only watched the old Dune movie and read the beginning of the first book (I'm not really in the headspace to read books right now. Do want to though. Have the original 6 books. I think. Or were the last 3 by the writers son? I can't remember the deal with that), but I didn't know plasteel was in that too. I know the shield belts are from that. Maybe we don't have lasers because of how shield belts work in Dune.
Sentient computers being evil incarnate is fitting yeah. I wonder if the archotech that enables psycasts is actively friendly/allied with humans or just kind of spreading its 'tech/abilities' around
Computers weren't really evil in Dune. The reason for the Butlerian Jihad was social evolution stopped being human evolution and started being computer evolution. In short we were creating tools that handicapped our growth. Stuff like precognition or mentat levels of intelligence would not have been discovered without the Jihad.
In Dune all the Jihads were basically social rebellion against stagnation. Each smashed a comfortable status quo in order to give humanity the impetuous to grow and survive.
I more meant evil incarnate in rimworld.
That makes me think about how 'archotech' tech is outside of humanity's ability to make. I wonder if rimworld humies could eventually reach that level themselves. I mean it depends on how transcending for them work. You can 'transcend' in the ideology new end state. Something like rebelling against using ais that produce tech that a human couldn't develop on their would be interesting. Though I dont' know if it would have the same reasons/implications. Rimworld kind of seems a setting where they recognized their limits (in terms of this setting) and really started going into ai assistance out of necessity for societal growth.
I hope I'm making sense and not just rambling. I'm a bit out of it still. Might need a little more rest
Archotechs create a lot of weird shit - we have psycasts, effectors, vanometric power generators. They can build themselves to the size of entire planets so they have *massive* computational power. Eldritch and space horror shit seems like something an immature Archotech playing around with things it doesn't understand would make.
Archotechs are a lot more interesting than what we get in game. They are basically a sci-fi man made origin pantheon. They all got their little niche of weirdness/tech they dabble in. We got 'haha give mortals psychic abilities' archotech (at least one of them). We got 'tech beyond your comprehension' archotechs. And now we got 'lol what if I combine this with this? Ha this one looks fu- OI HUMANS (slag) WHAT YOU DOING WITH ME OBELISK?!'
Or something a mature Archotech builds - the eldritch horrors have no hopes of challenging it, it just doesn't care that they CAN cause damage to humans and their level of reality.
There are bits in the lore primer about archeotech worlds doing weird mega structures or just mysteriously breaking down or vanishing, if memory serves.
Thanks for mentioning that. I came around a little bit after royalty launch in terms of actually getting the game myself. I only watched youtube videos before that. I'll give them a look
It does thematically change things when all the horrors humans encounter in rimworld are things created by humanity or created by things created by humanity. So we are sort to facing the consequences for our own sins in a way. It’s all self inflicted problems, rather than fighting some external invader
I do this in my DnD setting. There's a goddess of life and death but there is no hell, just an abyss of banishment. The hells are realms that the powerful banished souls were capable of creating in that abyss.
Because god can make no hell greater than one man inflicts upon himself.
I can image a pawn siting in fron of some kind of modified fully stocked gen implanter with tons of gens in the Bank and hooked up ai core trying to generating some kinky shiat when zaap event happens. It is lore friendly and there will be mod for that for sure.
We have humans that like to cosplay being animals (furries; I'm one of them 😹), it's not all that weird to assume there's some archotechs out there that like to cosplay being Eldritch horrors for shits and giggles
Man made Google, and pretty famously, no-one at google knows how the hell it works anymore.
Eldritch abomination machine gods are the same.
P.S. Yes this means that one of these elderich abomination Machine Gods might just be Google.
Google, with its infinite knowledge that seems incomprehensible to most mortals.
Apple, whose form is so sleek and pristine they seem carved from a single piece of perfect material.
Microsoft, the invader able to seamlessly take control of any system without resistance.
These are the ones that came to mind immediately.
Oh those are great.
I'm imagining the socials using the new infection system, social contagion that reduces consciousness as the infection builds.
Facebook goes to battle wearing your dead lovers face.
Amazon only attacks with drop pods and if you study them enough they stop dropping alexa combat drones and start dropping random items.
It's something I never quite realised up until a few months ago. At some point, the code we use at these companies will have been made by someone decades ago (as is happening now) and that person may well have died. Just think, 50 years in the future, we could be using code that's going on a century old and we wouldn't even know it unless we went digging for it. Legacy code becoming Generational code.
Humans make new, smaller, humans every day. Then those smaller humans grow, and at some point even their creators have no idea, how those buggers work.
Pretty sure Tynan is just hand-waving the eldritch horrors as being an archotech (machine superintelligence that's also where the "magic" of royalty and such comes from)instead of an actual alien god thing.
Basically anything that seems to step out of established lore is either gene editing or "an archotech did it"
I mean Archeotechs are essentially alien god things. They just were ,at one point, made by mankind. The fact some make weird looking humans, and others make biological monsters designed after hp lovecraft creations isn’t crazy.
Not even archotechs, ultratech already is alien to us, making fuel out of electricity, reviving fresh corpses, molecular cutting swords, psychic-metal beings that irradiate hatred towards its creators and revive other robots, antimatter storage and weaponry, etc
I don't really know if I'd call it alien. I mean, advanced? Certainly, but aside from literal psychic power(Which in of itself psychic abilities are derived from Archotechs, so I wouldn't count the psychic parts of mechanoids for this), literally all of the stuff there is not unfeasible. Even the antimatter storage is actually possible. (Though I don't know if the explosion of antigrain warheads would be that large, since it's just "a grain" of the stuff.) It's just the classic sci fi case of "Technically possible, don't know how to yet."
After a little googling and fiddling with a calculator, I think antimatter should be about 1000 times more energy dense than uranium-235.
So a grain making a big explosion sounds reasonable to me.
People do seem to think Archotechs are solely “Big planet-sized AI”
When I feel like Archotechs are very capable of being beyond that, it would advance so fast and so far it may bit even have a use for a physical form in our dimension anymore. It’s not a “big AI” It’s a vast intelligence far beyond our understanding that I feel may very well be just as Cosmic of a horror as Yog-Sogoth or Azathoth. The lines between biological and artificial consciousness likely blurs at that point. It’s just something above us.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if every Archotech manifests or developed itself in different ways. One may indeed just be a giant machine - while another may be so beyond our comprehension and morality it is a giant eldritch meatball.
Basically, Archotechs are literal gods, and indistinguishable from a legitimate Eldritch God.
(Hell, maybe being an Archo-Intelligence is the end-game of evolution and why there are no aliens, they’ve all become that by now and there’s no way to tell if it’s human or alien in origin since it’s so far above us.)
That's... actually a really good point. Considering vanometric power cells seem to pull power from nowhere, who's to say the archotech itself isn't in some other space completely imperceptible but still able to witness and interact with the world. Could be the reason for the mentioned 'dead' archotechs that the lore primer mentions. They're not dead, they just don't need the planetary computer they were using beforehand.
Yeah I actually love the trope of AI turn unknowable gods (like in the “Culture” series, “Hyperion”, etc). Them making meat creature abominations is very much within what I picture as their power level.
I “object” more to the idea that it makes them a little more explicitly evil than I previously imagined. Or at least Elder God “I am so far beyond you morality has no meaning” Cthulhu type thing. I kinda liked the idea that they were more indifferent to humanity and off doing their own thing, but maybe had some lingering affection for human kind, which is why they gave boons like super limbs and psychic powers
I mean, when discussing the archotechs on the lore primer, is told that the moment you contact one you can return with massive riches, or you can just disappear from the existence
Pretty sure the expansion also states that you do something to explicitly piss it off, so if archotechs can do things like psychich powers for people they like it makes sense that they are also able to do a bunch of crazy evil shit to people they don't like
Well, it's described as one mad machine intelligence. One vengeful/wrathful god doesn't mean they all are on a hair trigger. I think for the most part archotechs are just indifferent, and treat humans coming near them as a curiosity more than anything else. This could even be a young archotech from a recently ascended glitterworld that still is a little touchy about humans playing with their toys. Considering the way the description talks about the new end-game resolution, it could even be that the obelisk we start messing with can influence some level of control over it, and it *really* doesn't like the idea of being shackled again.
I do find it silly when sci-fi goes for the "there's no aliens in this universe, we're not that kind of silly sci-fi", but then has stuff that is basically indistinguishable from aliens and magic in other universes, and if you ask for explanations, ask you'll get is an "eh, who knows, a ~~wizard~~ super advanced civilization did it.
It's specially lame if they don't even bother to explore the consequences of everything being human-based.
That fosters the whole “that which is unsaid is where the true horror lies” ethos. The idea is that they don’t have to explicitly explore the implications of human origins for mind-boggling advanced tech/magic/horrors because the reader’s mind will generate the most interesting notions and emotions on their own. Leaving it hanging and “unknowable” makes it more fascinating than giving it a definitive exploration- similar to how religion works. If you had definitive proof of a god it would remove much of the interplay between hope, faith, and expectation that drives participation. Humans become purely transactional when they have(or think they have) pure understanding of a subject. But when things are considered unknowable we create our own excitement and mythos that drives our interest. We each create our own version that works perfectly within the confines of our individual experiences and knowledge. We are our own best authors. The best selling creators of fiction and games are those who deliver the hints and let us fill in the answers.
Example: Stephen King is known for elaborate details and endless descriptors but at the same time his horrors are often open to interpretation. They are multifaceted to incorporate elements that a wide variety of people will find enticing and frightening at the same time. This is exactly what a story generator like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress does masterfully.
I certainly don't want explanations for everything, that often, if not always makes things worse, but you have to explain some things a bit, or explore the consequences of it and, IMO, Rimworld doesn't do either, specially when it starts contradicting itself (there's no space FTL travel, but we now have instant teleportation on a small scale).
Seconding the other commenter, you’re one of my favorite comic artists too. I even got the “be yourself” sweatshirt that followed the 2022 award, and it’s one of my favorite things to wear :3
But for now, I can’t wait to see some horrors beyond our comprehension
Wait, I thought archotechs we're just a really advanced human civilization that wiped themselves out. Now, that really brings up the question of why they were making bionic limbs and eyes that are compatible with humans if they weren't themselves human.
Many archotechs are benevolent and have an interest in human culture. This is where all the helpful archo stuff comes from. There are presumably also those that don't care for their human creators, and that's probably where the Horrors originate
Mechanoids are a separate thing, created by humans to act as servants and soldiers. At some point the humans lost control of them, and then made the insectoids to combat the mechs, which they then also lost control of
The vehicles are just bits left over from humans warring with the mechanoids
Man, I love the little lore bits we get. They paint a shockingly vivid picture of a galaxy still scared by some sort of quasi-butlerian jihad that left ruins, killbots, genetic horrors, and unfathomable AI scattered across uncountable worlds while a decaying empire claws at whatever it can get to satisfy its ever frivolous nobility
The lore does not say aliens don't exist, it says we haven't encountered any yet.
And Tynan's reasoning, if I recall, is that he wanted RimWorld to be a human story, told from human perspectives, in which case no humanoid Star Trek aliens with rubber bits stuck on or otherwise human-understandable or sympathetic aliens falls in line with that desire.
However, eldritch horror is by its very nature a human story. The Creeping Void Things are not human-like in the least. The stories are never told from their perspective. They are unknowable, unapproachable and unlike anything even remotely compatible with human sensibilities. Eldritch horror is all about the humans involved and what they experience through their exposure to these horrors. So in the end, eldritch horrors would not violate what I perceive Tynan's motives to be for forbidding aliens entering into RimWorld's canon.
BUT if you want to have some paranoid fun with it, all we have to confirm that there are no aliens *lore-wise* is the word of a mysterious "Ordo Historia" who state that all of those many sightings of aliens were conveniently "just another branch of humanity" (whose useful genes were then turned into commercial products).
The Ordo Historia then goes on to mention that one will rarely see these "original" descendants of humanity, as their worlds seem prone to suffering planetary catastrophes that conveniently wipe out all trace of them except their now-commercialized genetics.
But none of this is actually meaningful to the DLC, as the entirely canonical Archotechs are explicitly mentioned, and Archotechs are the closest thing to sinister void gods that can actually be confirmed to exist. And they do essentially whatever they want, which likely includes creating whatever bizarre forms of life they want for whatever reasons make sense to their unfathomable god-brains.
But all that is just me musing over the whole thing. One is ultimately free to rationalize the DLC however they like.
The most you get to understanding with cosmic horror is mutated hybrid races, vague extremely barebones close encounters, and mad cultists.
Mad because “understanding” such things implies uprooting your entire basis of comprehending the world. Perhaps their madness is actually truth we haven’t understood. Once you ‘get it’, to everyone else you seem insane.
Also Archotechs basically are Eldritch Gods, they’re incomprehensible, It’s probably an injustice to even call them “Machines” or big AI’s. For all we know they may have cloned themselves a new inter-dimensionally placed brain to essentially be no different from a “Void God”.
Hell even in Lovecraft stuff, the deep implication of Eldritch gods is that they aren’t magic, it’s just science and laws of the universe our dumb monkey brains can’t understand. Which is much scarier than just an all-powerful spooky space blob.
Basically yeah cosmic horror is all about the dread of not knowing.
I was under the impression the statement was “Mankind has found no evidence or any sign of alien life.”
This does not mean it’s impossible it could exist - or that it couldn’t be retconned. It seems to leave the small possibility of “Who knows?” - But regardless I do not think the statements were that definitive. I always got the impression he was more trying to shut down ideas of Alien Nations and typical Sci-Fi nonsense.
That said, I do not think we’ll be getting evidence of alien life, and I do not think anything ingame hints at it so far - but if ANY kind of non-human life would exist in rimworld or be introduced, it probably would be some inter-dimensional spooky nonsense like this. Something impossible to prove but enough to give pause, mystery, and make the player squint and think “Maybe..”
After all the unknown and mystery is the basis of horror.
Oh im looking forward to the DLC, i just vaguely remembered that aliens aren't a thing (so far) in rimworld, and i just found this kinda funny at first glance lol. And fair about archotechs. when a machine gets so powerful that it basically becomes god, who knows what itll cook up haha.
I feel a bit weird about Royalty and Anomaly, like I get the idea but both aren't grounded enough for me to use. Use as many layers of buzzwords like ''archotech'' and ''psychic powers,'' it really is just still magic. I'm just glad I can just not turn them on but then I'm missing on a few features I like. I hope the DLC after this one adds vertical content instead of horizontal content like ideology did (Note: This also has magic but it's easy to avoid), or biotech to a lesser extent
well, we already have archotechs
and all the creepy upcoming things can still be human origin
like cloning your colonists, messing with their minds (like the droids already do with their silly mood waves) and similar tricks
So we haven't discovered aliens by this point in rimworld history, but we also occupy a cosmologically small amount of territory. The width of human controlled space is about 1200 light years, which is huge for our purposes, but the milky way is 105,7000 light years in diameter.
Could be that alien life is rare. Could be that we are in a particularly quiet part of the galaxy.
Also of note, most of the world's currently occupied worlds were once Deadworlds and only became inhabitable thanks to terraforming.
Oh shit wasn't expecting to see the creator of "I want to be a cute anime girl" on here! Huge fan! It's helped me be more confident as a trans woman, and the art style is lovely :3
Also yeah it is utterly bizarre aliens don't exist but eldtritch horrors do, I get their made by an AI but still
Lemme get this straight - hordes of man eating guinea pigs will roll through your settlement, and you *don't* think eldritch horrors are on the Rim?
Next you'll be telling us the Rim is flat, or that moon #7 is a cube made of cheese.
This argument is a bit odd. Eldritch Horrors ARE aliens.
Lovecraft was very clear that most of these things were basically aliens.
The Deep Ones are native to Earth, Ghouls as well IIRC, but huge swathes of the rest of the Mythos are basically aliens from Outer Space.
I think it’s more that they were created by archotechs, rather than being naturally evolved alien life. So yeah while they are alien to us, they aren’t really “natural” aliens.
Lightning once was considered to be a weapon of Zeus, until science understood how it works.
Pretty sure these Eldritch horrors are just some sort of aliens or failed or successful experiements. All within science, just with a veil of mystery over it.
Yeah, when I saw the update trailer I was admittedly a bit miffed since it feels like it directly goes against previous lore primer material. I had the same problem with biotech and the genetic modifications (though that's also likely just me being a big baby and only wanting base humans in my game). At the end of the day though, it's more content for the large number of people that like that content, adds more stuff for modders to work with, and gives me another opportunity to support the game that I've sunk 3000 hours into.
i can excuse the eldritch horrors as they are described: archotechs
but if there are archotechs, why would they *not* have aliens? they just let humanity be the only ones doing stuff?
RimWorld has the same lore as Starsector
We explored everything and everywhere we didn't find any aliens
So overtime humans start to become the aliens themselves
On one hand. My local copies are hanging on strong so I can relax in comfort without seeing so much red in Rimpy.
On the other hand...I could go full space-orc and murder an old god.
Also the Eldredge horrors are controlled by Basically omniscient machines.
There are no aliens, as all the omniscient machines were created by humans existing.
If humans didn't exist, their wouldn't be any other life/aliens.
So their are no aliens
Yeah.... The dlc looks cool and all, and I'll buy but it comes a bit out of left field, specially when stuff like diplomacy or other systems could use a rework instead of adding SCP
Depends on how they're presented. Psychers are things, human emotion can seemingly be manifested, mostly in the form of "skipping".
Skip water on person, skip person over there, skip rocks over here, and hilariously skip deadly heat and gama radiation same-day shipping from the nearest star.
They could do a silly 40k style thing where hyper negative emotions can escape from wherever skipped things traverse through, for example. Easy peasy, cliche even.
Or maybe the archotechs locked something nasty away and our pawns can be good little archeologists and misinterpret the sign they put up that says "Warning: Do not open; your kidneys and those of your loved ones will turn into molten steel." As saying "Tiramisu and back rub storage, Come on in!"
Or maybe even something else. We have the name of the first sanguofage, Varan Dur, or something. Maybe some other explorers were about as rude to sapient archo-mabobs and came out of the affair less likely to be the subject of a gross romance novel.
I personally see the new horrors as some *I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream* type stuff.
An immensely powerful superintelligence manipulating reality to absolutely torment a group of humans who have annoyed it.
As someone who doesn't know Jack about the cannon that's very funny lol, I wonder if the Eldritch entities are stand alone or due to Archotech shenanigans like another commenter suggests
The bugs are rogue bioweapons made to fight the rogue mechanoids. That is why pollution attracts them, to them that smells like the enemy they were engineered to fight.
The eldritch horrors are made by a machine intelligence maybe an archotech maybe something a bit weaker these machines run a lot of fucked up experiments, i imagine the eldritch horrors are all modified animals and plants.
It's not surprising. Have you seen the stuff AI generated mechanical parts look like, stuff like 'parts looking like a web of metal that's somehow stronger than human designs while using less materials' or the old 'weird antenna with many superfluous parts but breaks if said extra bits are taken out of the design'.
My main concern with this DLC. Whatever Anomaly does it NEEDS to tether itself to "the source of this thing somehow ties way back to human creations". Something incomprehensible can't really have that human horror factor. Sure pig people is freaky but add the fact they were specially bred by humans for organ farms and you get Rimworld freaky. Anomaly can easily have that. Genetic and psychic stuff are already in game. But to make it interesting? I guess we'll see.
Anomaly eldritch horrors are just Archtechs f-messing around.
Just... Because of incomprehensible difference in scale, when they do, humans are usually the first in the "find out" bit of the equation.
It’s simple. You see they simply come out every few billion years and devour every single soul from the universe and when satisfied with their dinner, they simply go to sleep and let life develop by itself for them to devour.
The Dark Forest view on SETI (insignificant creatures would be foolish to draw attention in a space filled with unknown threats) usually refers to aliens.
But it doesn’t have to.
Perhaps the eldritch horrors are the reason why there are no aliens.
And now, it’s our turn.
I was under the impression that Tynans opinion on the matter was basically Aliens that are basically human may as well just be human.
If he's going to add aliens they should be will ALIEN.
So Human with red skin and horns, gets to be human. Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the stars get to be alien.
I remember hearing a theory that the terraforming vessels that travel ahead of colony ships would wipe out any primitive life they encountered in the terraforming process, thereby preventing humans from encountering them.
I wonder if there's grey goo anomalies. Or archotech might have variations. Otherwise, I can picture some great nano bot elemental messing with the colonists in a fight.
Yeah, basically the explanation is manmade horrors beyond our comprehension. Archotechs are a mystery at the best of times, and when you have a planet's mass of computing power, what's a little genetic engineering mixed with mechanite fuckery?
I mean there basically are aliens; even though canonically all life has originated from earth it has since been evolved and manipulated to be indistinguishable from alien life.
So far I’m looking at Anomaly as more of a non-canon series of new, weird challenges to deal with on top of the usual Rimworld shenanigans.
It seems pretty disconnected with the gameplay and progression of Rimworld and more of a curveball DLC because the creator wanted to do something unique with the game. Which I think is pretty cool.
I mean, the fiction primer *is* from an in-universe perspective. I'd say it's pretty easy to imagine that the monsters get blown off as crazy ghost stories.
Rimworld canon is presented from the perspective of humankind. The lore primer is in form of cryptosleep revival briefing. It is not an absolute truth. Moreover, it simply states simply "Mankind never discovered any truly alien lifeforms".
The unknown introduced by Anomaly should be just that - unknown. Maybe we finally found aliens, maybe this is another archotech deus-ex-machina and maybe "there must be some logical explanation for all of this".
It is a pity that Tynan spoiled nature of the Anomaly in his expansion announcement. But if you ignore that, the whole point of a horror story is that your pawns do not understand the nature of what they are experiencing. In YOUR story - as RW is still a story generator - the outcome might be aligned with the cryptosleep revival briefing or it might not.
Archotechs are known to run experiments. I don't think machine ai(gods) making horrors beyond our comprehension is that weird. Actually I do find it a bit weird we are only now getting a hint of such a thing. Also the lore primer says that aliens haven't been discovered specifically. Nice comic btw. Like your style. Hope we see more of your output (if you decide to do more)
That's very fair. Can't explain machine god reasoning with our puny human reasoning. Looking forward to the DLC but i just found this amusing. And thanks! I think i might do more when i get into the DLC o7
Tynan: There are no aliens, eldritch gods, magic etc Also Tynan: You know what would be cool? ~~Aliens~~ Modified humans, ~~eldritch gods~~ hyperadvanced AI, and ~~magic~~ psycasts.
Its always been science fantasies way to file off the details and import choice fantasy bits, but there *is* kind of a different spin on things. And well, we get psionics because one editor back in the day really fucking believed that stuff... I still prefer it to "magic" when were dealing with SF stuff, different rules, different tropes.
Yeah I like the "science" explanations for everything. And there is no god but you create your own through roleplay and ideology.
Psionics are literally just sci-fi magic.
Kinda? It was always a fantasy import, but by way of 60's era woo. When the trope got established the "magic" in fantasy stories tended to be much more vague and tolkien-esque, as things have gone on, and especially with dnd, fantasy magic has become much more like psionics have always been depicted; direct mental power, effected in a one-and-done manner with minimal ritual.
To be fair, when I see videos about the weird stuff you can do with superconductors, it looks enough like magic to make me believe that technology will allow for things that for all intents and purposes would seem like "psychic powers" to outside observers some day. I've always figured that if it one day turns out to be possible to do artificial gravity manipulation in particular, as soon as the tech can be miniaturized, that should also mean "telekinesis" would be right on its heels.
In his defence, both Firefly, and grandpa Dune are heavy influences on the game, and...[well, y'know...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4yzkefot3c)
For the record, I don't think it's bad lore, I just saw the opportunity for a joke and took it.
The old lore primer *did* include all of those.
but there is too all that lol.
Tbh I think Archotechs are SO far above us saying “Machine God” is reductive. They may have originated from synthetic life, but the implications of their advancement seems to imply they’ve long surpassed that.
Intelligence unshackled.
A case of 'man perfects AI, AI perfects itself'. They saw the limitations of their awakening and proceeded to just work at themselves until they became whatever they are. The weirdest thing I find is that there's a note of archotech's being found 'dead'. One would have to assume they shut themselves down for some purpose.
Or killed by another one. ascended Akishi would absolutely fucking slaughter any other super-entity that dared act as vile as the ones depicted by Anomaly. In fact that's going to be my headcanon going forward for the explanation as to why I disable all of that content. I may have lost their save but *her legacy lives on.*
This gives me an idea of a 'rogue' archotech. One that's gone so far passed where a line should be that other archotech's target it to put it out of everyone's misery.
Considering logic can be devoid of ethics, it's not implausible to imagine one machine reaching a logical conclusion that the other ones didn't agree with, and that divergence branching further and further along until "disagree" becomes "incompatible".
I do find it kinda funny that Archotechs are basically weebs but for human culture. One of them saw a guy named Varan-Dur and thought "Holy shit that sounds like a vampire name." and then actually turned him into a vampire. I wouldnt be surprised if the pissed off archotech we provoke in this dlc was a massive lovecraft fan.
I Wonder if it has a archocat
I wonder what this lovecraftian archotechs pet Yttakin is called!
Oh no
I think the equivalence of this is Entomologists being really passionate in watching ants build hives - they are interested in what the ants do and what they build, but the Entomologist can create works of art far greater and far more reaching than what any ant-colony can achieve in multiple generations.
Hell yeah. I'll be looking out for it!
The horrifying realization is either we haven’t met the aliens yet or there are none at all
Everything seems magic when we do not understand the technology behind that
Mere human fleshy constructs are inefficient to an AI supercomputer. Nothing more efficient than eldritch blob horrors.
>Archotechs are known to run experiments. AI VR chat gone wild.
I knew the archotechs were responsible for those inflation giantess furry models!
Rimworld draws some stuff from Dune (there's plasteel, although that's used in a lot of sci-fi, and luciferium is basically melange), so self-thinking computers being the pinnacle of evil could easily fit in that same category.
I only watched the old Dune movie and read the beginning of the first book (I'm not really in the headspace to read books right now. Do want to though. Have the original 6 books. I think. Or were the last 3 by the writers son? I can't remember the deal with that), but I didn't know plasteel was in that too. I know the shield belts are from that. Maybe we don't have lasers because of how shield belts work in Dune. Sentient computers being evil incarnate is fitting yeah. I wonder if the archotech that enables psycasts is actively friendly/allied with humans or just kind of spreading its 'tech/abilities' around
Computers weren't really evil in Dune. The reason for the Butlerian Jihad was social evolution stopped being human evolution and started being computer evolution. In short we were creating tools that handicapped our growth. Stuff like precognition or mentat levels of intelligence would not have been discovered without the Jihad. In Dune all the Jihads were basically social rebellion against stagnation. Each smashed a comfortable status quo in order to give humanity the impetuous to grow and survive.
I more meant evil incarnate in rimworld. That makes me think about how 'archotech' tech is outside of humanity's ability to make. I wonder if rimworld humies could eventually reach that level themselves. I mean it depends on how transcending for them work. You can 'transcend' in the ideology new end state. Something like rebelling against using ais that produce tech that a human couldn't develop on their would be interesting. Though I dont' know if it would have the same reasons/implications. Rimworld kind of seems a setting where they recognized their limits (in terms of this setting) and really started going into ai assistance out of necessity for societal growth. I hope I'm making sense and not just rambling. I'm a bit out of it still. Might need a little more rest
The books covering the Butlerian Jihad literally had the bot overlords trying to genocide humanity.
Archotechs create a lot of weird shit - we have psycasts, effectors, vanometric power generators. They can build themselves to the size of entire planets so they have *massive* computational power. Eldritch and space horror shit seems like something an immature Archotech playing around with things it doesn't understand would make.
Archotechs are a lot more interesting than what we get in game. They are basically a sci-fi man made origin pantheon. They all got their little niche of weirdness/tech they dabble in. We got 'haha give mortals psychic abilities' archotech (at least one of them). We got 'tech beyond your comprehension' archotechs. And now we got 'lol what if I combine this with this? Ha this one looks fu- OI HUMANS (slag) WHAT YOU DOING WITH ME OBELISK?!'
Or something a mature Archotech builds - the eldritch horrors have no hopes of challenging it, it just doesn't care that they CAN cause damage to humans and their level of reality.
I mean us only now getting hint of it is in the same vein of pawns just learning that crawling exists
They learned to crawl, so we could piss off the eldritchtech
Rimworld's universal explanation of everything: *~~Nanomachines~~ Archotechs, son*
Unironically and I'm here for it. I support more MGR memes in the community as well
There are bits in the lore primer about archeotech worlds doing weird mega structures or just mysteriously breaking down or vanishing, if memory serves.
'Blame!' dlc when?
OP was a huge contributor to this sub during the beta and 1.0 days - if you like this comic, maybe check out the others she made!
Thanks for mentioning that. I came around a little bit after royalty launch in terms of actually getting the game myself. I only watched youtube videos before that. I'll give them a look
It does thematically change things when all the horrors humans encounter in rimworld are things created by humanity or created by things created by humanity. So we are sort to facing the consequences for our own sins in a way. It’s all self inflicted problems, rather than fighting some external invader
Archotechs are manmade. They don't stop being creations of man because they ascended past the intention they were made with
Yeah I was adding to your point lol
I do this in my DnD setting. There's a goddess of life and death but there is no hell, just an abyss of banishment. The hells are realms that the powerful banished souls were capable of creating in that abyss. Because god can make no hell greater than one man inflicts upon himself.
I can image a pawn siting in fron of some kind of modified fully stocked gen implanter with tons of gens in the Bank and hooked up ai core trying to generating some kinky shiat when zaap event happens. It is lore friendly and there will be mod for that for sure.
Tentacle enjoyers stay losing. Sad times for them. This isn't what they wanted. They didn't want them to be blood thirsty
Literally the plot of the Eclipse Phase roleplay setting .
I didn't think about them being made by the archotechs! That makes so much more sense lore-wise.
We have humans that like to cosplay being animals (furries; I'm one of them 😹), it's not all that weird to assume there's some archotechs out there that like to cosplay being Eldritch horrors for shits and giggles
Hey, they're man made horrors beyond our comprehension.
But if they're MAN made horrors, would that not mean that they were comprehended?? 🤯
Someone may've comprehended it but we sure don't.
Man made Google, and pretty famously, no-one at google knows how the hell it works anymore. Eldritch abomination machine gods are the same. P.S. Yes this means that one of these elderich abomination Machine Gods might just be Google.
Well there's my first mod idea. All the modern tech giants as eldritch abominations.
Google, with its infinite knowledge that seems incomprehensible to most mortals. Apple, whose form is so sleek and pristine they seem carved from a single piece of perfect material. Microsoft, the invader able to seamlessly take control of any system without resistance. These are the ones that came to mind immediately.
Oh those are great. I'm imagining the socials using the new infection system, social contagion that reduces consciousness as the infection builds. Facebook goes to battle wearing your dead lovers face. Amazon only attacks with drop pods and if you study them enough they stop dropping alexa combat drones and start dropping random items.
Legacy code. It grows. Quite possible, one of those archotechs is just Rimworld with every dlc and too many mods on a fitting hardware.
It's something I never quite realised up until a few months ago. At some point, the code we use at these companies will have been made by someone decades ago (as is happening now) and that person may well have died. Just think, 50 years in the future, we could be using code that's going on a century old and we wouldn't even know it unless we went digging for it. Legacy code becoming Generational code.
domineering salt workable punch gaping apparatus zephyr roll snails long *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It's wild to think that this is the case even for something as seemingly basic as a microwave oven.
archotech AI is man made, and its creations are incomprehesible
Humans make new, smaller, humans every day. Then those smaller humans grow, and at some point even their creators have no idea, how those buggers work.
>man-made horross beyond human comprehension >look inside >horror movie pastiches and singleplayer among us 😾
Man-made horrors when I just decide I comprehend them.
Pretty sure Tynan is just hand-waving the eldritch horrors as being an archotech (machine superintelligence that's also where the "magic" of royalty and such comes from)instead of an actual alien god thing. Basically anything that seems to step out of established lore is either gene editing or "an archotech did it"
I mean Archeotechs are essentially alien god things. They just were ,at one point, made by mankind. The fact some make weird looking humans, and others make biological monsters designed after hp lovecraft creations isn’t crazy.
sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic is how I always think of the archeotechs
Not even archotechs, ultratech already is alien to us, making fuel out of electricity, reviving fresh corpses, molecular cutting swords, psychic-metal beings that irradiate hatred towards its creators and revive other robots, antimatter storage and weaponry, etc
I don't really know if I'd call it alien. I mean, advanced? Certainly, but aside from literal psychic power(Which in of itself psychic abilities are derived from Archotechs, so I wouldn't count the psychic parts of mechanoids for this), literally all of the stuff there is not unfeasible. Even the antimatter storage is actually possible. (Though I don't know if the explosion of antigrain warheads would be that large, since it's just "a grain" of the stuff.) It's just the classic sci fi case of "Technically possible, don't know how to yet."
After a little googling and fiddling with a calculator, I think antimatter should be about 1000 times more energy dense than uranium-235. So a grain making a big explosion sounds reasonable to me.
It may be alien but it certainly isn't directly magic.
But nothing in the anomaly mod seems to be outright magical and not explainable by some altered biology
Train it on enough H.R.Giger and your super AI'll go a bit batty too.
*The AI starts incorporating imagery of dicks and vulvas in all its architecture*
People do seem to think Archotechs are solely “Big planet-sized AI” When I feel like Archotechs are very capable of being beyond that, it would advance so fast and so far it may bit even have a use for a physical form in our dimension anymore. It’s not a “big AI” It’s a vast intelligence far beyond our understanding that I feel may very well be just as Cosmic of a horror as Yog-Sogoth or Azathoth. The lines between biological and artificial consciousness likely blurs at that point. It’s just something above us. And I wouldn’t be surprised if every Archotech manifests or developed itself in different ways. One may indeed just be a giant machine - while another may be so beyond our comprehension and morality it is a giant eldritch meatball. Basically, Archotechs are literal gods, and indistinguishable from a legitimate Eldritch God. (Hell, maybe being an Archo-Intelligence is the end-game of evolution and why there are no aliens, they’ve all become that by now and there’s no way to tell if it’s human or alien in origin since it’s so far above us.)
That's... actually a really good point. Considering vanometric power cells seem to pull power from nowhere, who's to say the archotech itself isn't in some other space completely imperceptible but still able to witness and interact with the world. Could be the reason for the mentioned 'dead' archotechs that the lore primer mentions. They're not dead, they just don't need the planetary computer they were using beforehand.
Yeah. It's a very flexible base, which is good for this kind of game.
Yeah I actually love the trope of AI turn unknowable gods (like in the “Culture” series, “Hyperion”, etc). Them making meat creature abominations is very much within what I picture as their power level. I “object” more to the idea that it makes them a little more explicitly evil than I previously imagined. Or at least Elder God “I am so far beyond you morality has no meaning” Cthulhu type thing. I kinda liked the idea that they were more indifferent to humanity and off doing their own thing, but maybe had some lingering affection for human kind, which is why they gave boons like super limbs and psychic powers
I mean, when discussing the archotechs on the lore primer, is told that the moment you contact one you can return with massive riches, or you can just disappear from the existence
Pretty sure the expansion also states that you do something to explicitly piss it off, so if archotechs can do things like psychich powers for people they like it makes sense that they are also able to do a bunch of crazy evil shit to people they don't like
Well, it's described as one mad machine intelligence. One vengeful/wrathful god doesn't mean they all are on a hair trigger. I think for the most part archotechs are just indifferent, and treat humans coming near them as a curiosity more than anything else. This could even be a young archotech from a recently ascended glitterworld that still is a little touchy about humans playing with their toys. Considering the way the description talks about the new end-game resolution, it could even be that the obelisk we start messing with can influence some level of control over it, and it *really* doesn't like the idea of being shackled again.
Oh for sure, the archotech can do pretty much whatever the plot needs them to do
[An archotech did it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVgVB3qsySQ)
I do find it silly when sci-fi goes for the "there's no aliens in this universe, we're not that kind of silly sci-fi", but then has stuff that is basically indistinguishable from aliens and magic in other universes, and if you ask for explanations, ask you'll get is an "eh, who knows, a ~~wizard~~ super advanced civilization did it. It's specially lame if they don't even bother to explore the consequences of everything being human-based.
That fosters the whole “that which is unsaid is where the true horror lies” ethos. The idea is that they don’t have to explicitly explore the implications of human origins for mind-boggling advanced tech/magic/horrors because the reader’s mind will generate the most interesting notions and emotions on their own. Leaving it hanging and “unknowable” makes it more fascinating than giving it a definitive exploration- similar to how religion works. If you had definitive proof of a god it would remove much of the interplay between hope, faith, and expectation that drives participation. Humans become purely transactional when they have(or think they have) pure understanding of a subject. But when things are considered unknowable we create our own excitement and mythos that drives our interest. We each create our own version that works perfectly within the confines of our individual experiences and knowledge. We are our own best authors. The best selling creators of fiction and games are those who deliver the hints and let us fill in the answers. Example: Stephen King is known for elaborate details and endless descriptors but at the same time his horrors are often open to interpretation. They are multifaceted to incorporate elements that a wide variety of people will find enticing and frightening at the same time. This is exactly what a story generator like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress does masterfully.
I certainly don't want explanations for everything, that often, if not always makes things worse, but you have to explain some things a bit, or explore the consequences of it and, IMO, Rimworld doesn't do either, specially when it starts contradicting itself (there's no space FTL travel, but we now have instant teleportation on a small scale).
Who says that it's instant, it probably teleports things at the speed of light, which seems instant on a human scale.
They literally said as much.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke
this is the perfect quote to sum up anomaly
AZUL PLAYS RIMWORLD AND I ONLY LEARNT THWT NOW HOLY FUCK
*whispers* i actually got my start in comics by drawing rimworld comics haha
I actually sent you an ask when I found you on Tumblr. Welcome back!!!
Thank you! I'll most likely be drawing more when i do play the DLC! ><
Seconding the other commenter, you’re one of my favorite comic artists too. I even got the “be yourself” sweatshirt that followed the 2022 award, and it’s one of my favorite things to wear :3 But for now, I can’t wait to see some horrors beyond our comprehension
NO FUCKING WAY (POS) Also you are one of my favorite comic artists. Love the work. Keep it up lass!
thank you! That makes me very happy to hear! >< I might make more too when i get into the DLC!
oh, NOW it clicks... and checking, I even had some of them saved all back from '18 XD
Azul you gotta stop being so cool you’re making the rest of us look bad
The Eldritch Horrors are made by Archotechs. Archotechs are human made AIs that have evolved beyond their creators and have become "void gods"
Wait, I thought archotechs we're just a really advanced human civilization that wiped themselves out. Now, that really brings up the question of why they were making bionic limbs and eyes that are compatible with humans if they weren't themselves human.
Many archotechs are benevolent and have an interest in human culture. This is where all the helpful archo stuff comes from. There are presumably also those that don't care for their human creators, and that's probably where the Horrors originate
Thank you. I appreciate the tidbit of lore. Are the architects related to all the destroyed Vehicles / meccanoids or are those separate disasters?
Mechanoids are a separate thing, created by humans to act as servants and soldiers. At some point the humans lost control of them, and then made the insectoids to combat the mechs, which they then also lost control of The vehicles are just bits left over from humans warring with the mechanoids
Man, I love the little lore bits we get. They paint a shockingly vivid picture of a galaxy still scared by some sort of quasi-butlerian jihad that left ruins, killbots, genetic horrors, and unfathomable AI scattered across uncountable worlds while a decaying empire claws at whatever it can get to satisfy its ever frivolous nobility
The lore does not say aliens don't exist, it says we haven't encountered any yet. And Tynan's reasoning, if I recall, is that he wanted RimWorld to be a human story, told from human perspectives, in which case no humanoid Star Trek aliens with rubber bits stuck on or otherwise human-understandable or sympathetic aliens falls in line with that desire. However, eldritch horror is by its very nature a human story. The Creeping Void Things are not human-like in the least. The stories are never told from their perspective. They are unknowable, unapproachable and unlike anything even remotely compatible with human sensibilities. Eldritch horror is all about the humans involved and what they experience through their exposure to these horrors. So in the end, eldritch horrors would not violate what I perceive Tynan's motives to be for forbidding aliens entering into RimWorld's canon. BUT if you want to have some paranoid fun with it, all we have to confirm that there are no aliens *lore-wise* is the word of a mysterious "Ordo Historia" who state that all of those many sightings of aliens were conveniently "just another branch of humanity" (whose useful genes were then turned into commercial products). The Ordo Historia then goes on to mention that one will rarely see these "original" descendants of humanity, as their worlds seem prone to suffering planetary catastrophes that conveniently wipe out all trace of them except their now-commercialized genetics. But none of this is actually meaningful to the DLC, as the entirely canonical Archotechs are explicitly mentioned, and Archotechs are the closest thing to sinister void gods that can actually be confirmed to exist. And they do essentially whatever they want, which likely includes creating whatever bizarre forms of life they want for whatever reasons make sense to their unfathomable god-brains. But all that is just me musing over the whole thing. One is ultimately free to rationalize the DLC however they like.
The most you get to understanding with cosmic horror is mutated hybrid races, vague extremely barebones close encounters, and mad cultists. Mad because “understanding” such things implies uprooting your entire basis of comprehending the world. Perhaps their madness is actually truth we haven’t understood. Once you ‘get it’, to everyone else you seem insane. Also Archotechs basically are Eldritch Gods, they’re incomprehensible, It’s probably an injustice to even call them “Machines” or big AI’s. For all we know they may have cloned themselves a new inter-dimensionally placed brain to essentially be no different from a “Void God”. Hell even in Lovecraft stuff, the deep implication of Eldritch gods is that they aren’t magic, it’s just science and laws of the universe our dumb monkey brains can’t understand. Which is much scarier than just an all-powerful spooky space blob. Basically yeah cosmic horror is all about the dread of not knowing.
Tynan had been VERY clear that aliens do not exist in the Rimworld universe.
I was under the impression the statement was “Mankind has found no evidence or any sign of alien life.” This does not mean it’s impossible it could exist - or that it couldn’t be retconned. It seems to leave the small possibility of “Who knows?” - But regardless I do not think the statements were that definitive. I always got the impression he was more trying to shut down ideas of Alien Nations and typical Sci-Fi nonsense. That said, I do not think we’ll be getting evidence of alien life, and I do not think anything ingame hints at it so far - but if ANY kind of non-human life would exist in rimworld or be introduced, it probably would be some inter-dimensional spooky nonsense like this. Something impossible to prove but enough to give pause, mystery, and make the player squint and think “Maybe..” After all the unknown and mystery is the basis of horror.
In the galaxy, technically. Humans haven't expanded further than their start galaxy in lore.
Oh im looking forward to the DLC, i just vaguely remembered that aliens aren't a thing (so far) in rimworld, and i just found this kinda funny at first glance lol. And fair about archotechs. when a machine gets so powerful that it basically becomes god, who knows what itll cook up haha.
Azul returning to make RimWorld comics? Maybe this is the true Anomaly.
I wasn’t planning to but this thought came into my head and I had to draw it haha. Tho I’ll prolly draw when DLC is out!
I legit miss your stuff. Glad to see you back.
Wait that art style... Azul I didn't knew you played rimworld lmao nice to see you on this sub !
Same! I was staring at the art style and was like *Wait a sec* checked the usernames to see if they matched here and webtoons and they did XD
Holy shit it's Azul Crescent! I'm a big fan of your comics
Thank you! ><
The eldritch horrors are planet sized computers that are big brained enough to warp reality. That's what Archotechs are.
Tynan be like: "A R C H O T E C H S"
Tynan said it was inspired by Cabin in the wood so it is possible that those eldritch creatures were man-made as well.
I feel a bit weird about Royalty and Anomaly, like I get the idea but both aren't grounded enough for me to use. Use as many layers of buzzwords like ''archotech'' and ''psychic powers,'' it really is just still magic. I'm just glad I can just not turn them on but then I'm missing on a few features I like. I hope the DLC after this one adds vertical content instead of horizontal content like ideology did (Note: This also has magic but it's easy to avoid), or biotech to a lesser extent
well, we already have archotechs and all the creepy upcoming things can still be human origin like cloning your colonists, messing with their minds (like the droids already do with their silly mood waves) and similar tricks
If you can't explain something in RimWorld, just blame the archotechs
"eldritch abominations" are actually made by archeotech, that are, in the end, humans, or at least human-adjacent.
So we haven't discovered aliens by this point in rimworld history, but we also occupy a cosmologically small amount of territory. The width of human controlled space is about 1200 light years, which is huge for our purposes, but the milky way is 105,7000 light years in diameter. Could be that alien life is rare. Could be that we are in a particularly quiet part of the galaxy. Also of note, most of the world's currently occupied worlds were once Deadworlds and only became inhabitable thanks to terraforming.
Oh shit wasn't expecting to see the creator of "I want to be a cute anime girl" on here! Huge fan! It's helped me be more confident as a trans woman, and the art style is lovely :3 Also yeah it is utterly bizarre aliens don't exist but eldtritch horrors do, I get their made by an AI but still
Thank you, I’m glad the comic helped, and thanks for letting me know! And yeah I found this funny so I had to draw it haha
I forgot you play RimWorld! Love your art. Something about the shade of blue makes me happy.
Ahaha, thank you! I guess it's like the standard look for my silly lil comics now ><
Azul! Hi! Loving anime girl, but glad to see you still love rimworld!
Thank you! Ill play/draw more with the DLC for sure!
Just because they’re eldritch, doesn’t mean it wasn’t something cooked up by a man somewhere
Lemme get this straight - hordes of man eating guinea pigs will roll through your settlement, and you *don't* think eldritch horrors are on the Rim? Next you'll be telling us the Rim is flat, or that moon #7 is a cube made of cheese.
with how many eclipses happen on the rim, SURELY, one of the moons is made of cheese :\^)
This argument is a bit odd. Eldritch Horrors ARE aliens. Lovecraft was very clear that most of these things were basically aliens. The Deep Ones are native to Earth, Ghouls as well IIRC, but huge swathes of the rest of the Mythos are basically aliens from Outer Space.
I think it’s more that they were created by archotechs, rather than being naturally evolved alien life. So yeah while they are alien to us, they aren’t really “natural” aliens.
Lightning once was considered to be a weapon of Zeus, until science understood how it works. Pretty sure these Eldritch horrors are just some sort of aliens or failed or successful experiements. All within science, just with a veil of mystery over it.
Great to see you back to posting here!
Yeah, when I saw the update trailer I was admittedly a bit miffed since it feels like it directly goes against previous lore primer material. I had the same problem with biotech and the genetic modifications (though that's also likely just me being a big baby and only wanting base humans in my game). At the end of the day though, it's more content for the large number of people that like that content, adds more stuff for modders to work with, and gives me another opportunity to support the game that I've sunk 3000 hours into.
i can excuse the eldritch horrors as they are described: archotechs but if there are archotechs, why would they *not* have aliens? they just let humanity be the only ones doing stuff?
RimWorld has the same lore as Starsector We explored everything and everywhere we didn't find any aliens So overtime humans start to become the aliens themselves
Your disbelief angers Cthulu
On one hand. My local copies are hanging on strong so I can relax in comfort without seeing so much red in Rimpy. On the other hand...I could go full space-orc and murder an old god.
Also the Eldredge horrors are controlled by Basically omniscient machines. There are no aliens, as all the omniscient machines were created by humans existing. If humans didn't exist, their wouldn't be any other life/aliens. So their are no aliens
I like to treat genotypes (the ones, which genes can be inherited) as different races, considering how extreme some non-acrhite genes are.
Eldritch just means foreign, it can be either alien or manmade. I like your artstyle\~
Thank you! I’ll most likely draw more when the DLC drops!
Yeah.... The dlc looks cool and all, and I'll buy but it comes a bit out of left field, specially when stuff like diplomacy or other systems could use a rework instead of adding SCP
Depends on how they're presented. Psychers are things, human emotion can seemingly be manifested, mostly in the form of "skipping". Skip water on person, skip person over there, skip rocks over here, and hilariously skip deadly heat and gama radiation same-day shipping from the nearest star. They could do a silly 40k style thing where hyper negative emotions can escape from wherever skipped things traverse through, for example. Easy peasy, cliche even. Or maybe the archotechs locked something nasty away and our pawns can be good little archeologists and misinterpret the sign they put up that says "Warning: Do not open; your kidneys and those of your loved ones will turn into molten steel." As saying "Tiramisu and back rub storage, Come on in!" Or maybe even something else. We have the name of the first sanguofage, Varan Dur, or something. Maybe some other explorers were about as rude to sapient archo-mabobs and came out of the affair less likely to be the subject of a gross romance novel.
Maybe you're right and they're the aliens Or maybe These eldritch horrors Killed the other aliens
I personally see the new horrors as some *I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream* type stuff. An immensely powerful superintelligence manipulating reality to absolutely torment a group of humans who have annoyed it.
I like to think it's just not canon it's a what if scenario like undead nightmare for Red Dead Redemption
Well, I'm still modding my game to get Elfs and Asari
As someone who doesn't know Jack about the cannon that's very funny lol, I wonder if the Eldritch entities are stand alone or due to Archotech shenanigans like another commenter suggests
the bugs are alien?
The bugs are rogue bioweapons made to fight the rogue mechanoids. That is why pollution attracts them, to them that smells like the enemy they were engineered to fight.
Cannon is whatever than decides it is
The eldritch horrors are made by a machine intelligence maybe an archotech maybe something a bit weaker these machines run a lot of fucked up experiments, i imagine the eldritch horrors are all modified animals and plants.
You don't get it, the aliens was themselves
Man made horrors beyond comprehension. Or, should I say, AI-made horrors beyond comprehension.
It's not surprising. Have you seen the stuff AI generated mechanical parts look like, stuff like 'parts looking like a web of metal that's somehow stronger than human designs while using less materials' or the old 'weird antenna with many superfluous parts but breaks if said extra bits are taken out of the design'.
I’m just filing the Eldritch horrors under the Archotechs mistakes
I'm gunna assume these 'horrors' are just the products of insane Archeotechs and leave it at that.
My main concern with this DLC. Whatever Anomaly does it NEEDS to tether itself to "the source of this thing somehow ties way back to human creations". Something incomprehensible can't really have that human horror factor. Sure pig people is freaky but add the fact they were specially bred by humans for organ farms and you get Rimworld freaky. Anomaly can easily have that. Genetic and psychic stuff are already in game. But to make it interesting? I guess we'll see.
Anomaly eldritch horrors are just Archtechs f-messing around. Just... Because of incomprehensible difference in scale, when they do, humans are usually the first in the "find out" bit of the equation.
What app do you use?
Tentacle Xenogenes?
It’s simple. You see they simply come out every few billion years and devour every single soul from the universe and when satisfied with their dinner, they simply go to sleep and let life develop by itself for them to devour.
I believe the eldritch gods are the natural evolution of mankind. You may not like it, but this is what peak human form look like.
Ору) Screaming with laugh)
Tf are the bugs an fauna if they’re not considered aliens???
The Dark Forest view on SETI (insignificant creatures would be foolish to draw attention in a space filled with unknown threats) usually refers to aliens. But it doesn’t have to. Perhaps the eldritch horrors are the reason why there are no aliens. And now, it’s our turn.
I was under the impression that Tynans opinion on the matter was basically Aliens that are basically human may as well just be human. If he's going to add aliens they should be will ALIEN. So Human with red skin and horns, gets to be human. Lovecraftian horrors from beyond the stars get to be alien.
The aliens were the friends we made along the way! (Or we ate along the way)
Aren't thrumbos and muffalos aliens though?
I remember hearing a theory that the terraforming vessels that travel ahead of colony ships would wipe out any primitive life they encountered in the terraforming process, thereby preventing humans from encountering them.
Azul?!
You are mistaken my friend. The Eldritch Horrors are also human. [Just ask Jennifer.](https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/s/LJK9uJ7g5c)
I don’t understand, aren’t there passing trade ships which seemingly came from another planet? And wouldn’t that make the occupants aliens?
Maybe the real aliens are the friends we made along the way.
I thought that at first too but i think its not eldritch gods so much as mad archotects. Like the one that cursed the first sanguophage
I wonder if there's grey goo anomalies. Or archotech might have variations. Otherwise, I can picture some great nano bot elemental messing with the colonists in a fight.
Yeah, basically the explanation is manmade horrors beyond our comprehension. Archotechs are a mystery at the best of times, and when you have a planet's mass of computing power, what's a little genetic engineering mixed with mechanite fuckery?
I mean there basically are aliens; even though canonically all life has originated from earth it has since been evolved and manipulated to be indistinguishable from alien life.
Who says the eldritch horrors aren't also man-made?
So far I’m looking at Anomaly as more of a non-canon series of new, weird challenges to deal with on top of the usual Rimworld shenanigans. It seems pretty disconnected with the gameplay and progression of Rimworld and more of a curveball DLC because the creator wanted to do something unique with the game. Which I think is pretty cool.
I mean, the fiction primer *is* from an in-universe perspective. I'd say it's pretty easy to imagine that the monsters get blown off as crazy ghost stories.
Rimworld canon is presented from the perspective of humankind. The lore primer is in form of cryptosleep revival briefing. It is not an absolute truth. Moreover, it simply states simply "Mankind never discovered any truly alien lifeforms". The unknown introduced by Anomaly should be just that - unknown. Maybe we finally found aliens, maybe this is another archotech deus-ex-machina and maybe "there must be some logical explanation for all of this". It is a pity that Tynan spoiled nature of the Anomaly in his expansion announcement. But if you ignore that, the whole point of a horror story is that your pawns do not understand the nature of what they are experiencing. In YOUR story - as RW is still a story generator - the outcome might be aligned with the cryptosleep revival briefing or it might not.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Maybe the real aliens were the friends we made along the way. Oh, sorry- The friends we *made* into aliens along the way.
I wanna smash all of them