Redesigning Arhtropods Part 4: Cellar Spiders

[Venera3]

Summary

Content "Rework cellar spiders"

Purpose of change

Turn cellar spiders from just another line of boring melee beatstick enemies into something with a bit more flavor.
Part of #47275

Describe the solution

Rework the progression:

• cellar spiders are small, shy (if slightly creepy) spooders that will spawn from day one, grow up to
• giant cellar spiders: large enough to try and take a bite out of you, especially when you are already injured. Not terribly threatening, but can mess an early survivor up if they jump you at the end of a raid. Grow up into one of two variants
• mommy long-legs (couldn't resist) - docile, slightly slower and less dangerous giants with a ball of lil' spiderlings carried in their mouth. Drops a cellar spider once a week or 3-8 on death (the little ones are flee-on-sight, so this is mostly a flavor thing)
• warehouse spiders (no new name for now, we'll see if I come up with one) - the obligatory "properly weird" variant with extra legs sprouting here and there, and those legs occasionally fall off and start flailing blindly at anything they can grasp. No reproduction, not very dangerous after you get to midgame gear.
• detached spider legs - blind, graspy, slightly cutty legs flailing about for two minutes before dying, attacking anything in melee range. Mostly meant as a distraction (for both you and other enemies), the warehouse spiders spawn them when something hits their leg

They universally are pretty brittle but dodgy, with a new painful venom but no real way to deal with armor. They are also social, but hunt other spiders.

TODO:

• Add some harvest snippets for that nice creepy flavor
• Update the subway mongroup (and get them to the same ballpark as Evolution/growth time audit #58851 aims for)
• A bit more combat testing
• Unhardcode the spider cellar map extra and do something about the egg sacs these give live birth, so the sacs can stay for now. The spider basement spawns only cellar spiders for now (used to be a 50% chance of widows), the widows will have to wait until their turn in the limelight.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Give them a web emission and a spinneret attack, but their IRL webs aren't adhesive and web spiders probably won't have much else going for them.
Make some sort of gyration attack, but there's no real way to handle "Zoomzoom I'm flipping out and making you fall out of my web" without webs (or cross-Z mapgen).
Reproduction/growth times will be interesting, since they mostly spawn in out of the way areas the player might inadvertantly travel over often, but even the largest version is a bit of a pushover so we'll see how it turns out. The subway tunnels are also a bit of a clusterfuck, so they will need the numbers to hold out.

Testing

Usual bout of combat testing (Day 1 / Midgame / Lategame chars, gear and skill changes only, Brawling + Tab) - solo giants are a bit annoying in the midgame with three being able to tear you apart, warehouse spiders are a concern outside of lategame chars. The pain debuffs from the venom can stack pretty high, but armor negates the buildup pretty well.

Additional context

Cellar spider venom seems to be pretty inconsequential, but at the sizes we're talking about pain seemed like a good way to handle it. They are not meant to be too dangerous, after all.

The real spiders carry around their egg sacs for a long time before they hatch, obviously, but ingame eggs are a bit clunky in general (especially underground), so I decided to go directly with the spiderlings.

[anoobindisguise]

Should prophylactic antivenom and poison resistant have an influence on their venom? Currently it's just pain resistant so those will do nothing.

[Venera3]

I'm kind of debating restricting the prophylactic to systemic venoms in some way - whatever you're dosing won't have much of an effect on enzymes and co that are wreaking a havoc around the wound itself. Possibly upgraded to a short-lived block on them, as opposed to a longish resist.

[LyleSY]

Love the ideas and the weakpoints. Not sure how the game balance stuff will work out since these are such big changes, but the overall direction is promising

[github-actions]

Spell checker encountered unrecognized words in the in-game text added in this pull request. See below for details.

Click to expand

• A huge reddish lump reveals itself to be a sort of lung with a deflating noise. You're blasted with hot air and droplets of haemolymph
• Something not unlike a heart still spasms in the depth of the corpse, and the legs twitch to its rhytm

This alert is automatically generated. You can simply disregard if this is inaccurate, or (optionally) you can also add the new words to tools/spell_checker/dictionary.txt so they will not trigger an alert next time.