A massive crashing sound wakes you up. A flash of light and noise strikes you afterwards, and occasionally a thunderous noise shakes the area. You feel intact, highly energized (quite
overly energized for what appears to be a hole in a planet's surface, infact) and yet...off. Something that was there is no longer there. The thunderous noises continues to happen above your landing place, but otherwise all is still.
...After some length of time, you've entirely woken up from what seems to have been a state of stasis. The missing part was your old connection to the
Prime Crystal, which is troubling, because it means you were detached at somepoint in the past. The only material you can detect around you is rather useless at first, but after closer examination is not completely inert. So while not difficult to convert to protect yourself from this new planet, it will be will also be terrible crystal without significant adjustment and energy costs. Not the best of locations, but its a start.
This is a suggestion game with pictures about a crystal that has crashed into a planet, separated from what it used to be a part of. Perhaps later you will gain more abilities, but right now you are in a hole in a field, in the middle of a massive storm, with nothing but your core crystal and too much energy. Do you want to attempt to extract yourself from the hole, or convert some of the material around you and go further into the ground?
Cycles: A cycle is the main unit of time for our crystal. Each cycle can have up to four subcycles. On cycles that involve major crystal fabrication there are 10 subcycles, not four, and a cycle ends when either we are out of energy, or out of fabrication commands if it was more than 10 crystals. For cycles without major crystal fabrication, unless required or noted otherwise, all actions fit into one subcycle each.
Energy generation happens as the beginning of each cycle. Other things can and probably will act midcycle due to not being a crystal.
Vision: You can see 4 spaces out in the cardinal directions from your core, and 3 cardinal spaces away from any connected crystal that isn't broken, or from assimilated matter. This makes a diamond of vision about the size of the above picture.
Energy production: Each cycle, a pulse radiates from the core crystal, releasing a cycle of energy production from all parts directly connected to it into the main mass of the crystal. This pulse can also have other effects, like destroying assimilated matter with no energy left, but does not extend outside of the crystal or connected assimilated matter.
Energy: There is not a strict limit on energy storage, but if too much is stored in too little crystal, various effects can happen ranging from minor glowing or melting surrounding non-crystal materials, to exploding. The current effect (if any) is listed in the status.
The more dangerous effects are d10-based, with 6+ being bad and 4 or lower being non-threatening, but only to the crystal. A 5 on the other hand combines the two: it will vent the energy down below dangerous levels for no subcycle cost in exchange for some integrity (getting a five when you were about to explode from the overcharge will instead mean you just disintegrate in a spectacular but no less deadly manner). You can spend an action to vent without integrity damage, but it takes up time and you guys will probably have a better use for both the time and the energy.
Movement: Rocks generally doesn't move, but it can be done. You need at least a full cycle (and the energy production from it) to do it. You also need empty space to move into.
Conversion: You must be near the material you want to convert. Otherwise look at the types of crystal for how much energy you need and what kind of crystal you could make with it.
Assimilated matter: This stuff is for when you want to get somewhere in a hurry. It will degrade as the energy pulse tears into it (only fully-converted crystal forms are not damaged by the pulse), but in the short term it acts as a a quick boost to production and a low-energy way to look around or reach interesting areas. It also will produce empty spaces eventually.
Repairing: Crystals do not produce energy while heavily damaged, if they do at all. You cannot upgrade crystals that are damaged until they're repaired. Repair however, is simple. Crystals are either 'damaged' or 'heavily damaged'; for the former you just need the normal cost of the crystal's fabrication cost, for the latter you need twice the fabrication cost. You can also destroy heavily damaged crystals for free, which replaces it with an empty space. The two have different symbols in the map legend to tell them apart.
Crystal conversion - Half the higher of the two crystal costs per conversion. (So if you build a feeler, than turn it into a refined, it costs half the feeler's cost, and if you convert that refined into an arms crystal, its costs half of the arms' cost, not the refined) If the two crystals don't share a base type you have to go down to a refined (or a storage crystal and then a refined or vice versa, you can't switch between the two for free) and then go back up. Excessively long conversion chains are probably going to get ignored and replaced with 'fabricate X crystal here if possible'.
Experimental Fabrication: First and least importantly, you need a color for this kind of crystal, and a name. Hex colors help (I can put them straight into paint.net), but aren't required. Not using the same color for two different kinds of crystal also helps, since most designs don't show up well in 10x10px squares.
Next, you need a Refined crystal at minimum. Low-Quality crystals cannot be experimented upon, however they can be modified to do one extra thing. They aren't as precisely alterable as refineds are however, so any changes to low-Q crystals will effect all of them, and will take a lot more energy because of that (250 * low-Q count). Changing the extra thing lows can do will overwrite the previous thing if there was one. Removing the extra thing costs as much as replacing it.
After that, its either a new crystal form, or a crystal with a different function & name. New crystal forms require either a lot of luck (d20, over or equal to 15 succeeds, rolls of less or equal to 5 will result in Integrity damage) and energy (use whatever significant amount you want of at least 10k, the important part here is the luck, not the exact cost.) to reforge them out of other sorts of crystals, or just new materials and an attempt to convert them.
All new functions require 1 point per improvement plus 1.5 * additional levels (ex. seeing an extra block takes 1, seeing two blocks takes 2.5, seeing three blocks further than normal costs 4, etc) except for energy production, which takes up 2.5 per level (starting at Refined level power, or Hi-Q power if its based off modifying a Hi-Q once we find a way to make those) and doubles in cost and output each additional level. Adding the ability to make it in empty space (like storage crystals) will triple the cost of energy production levels (pulling stuff out of nowhere is about as hard as you'd expect), but otherwise is a flat 5 points.
Removing functions makes things cheaper, of course (Ex: If you start with a refined, you start with its base energy production, which you can remove to get an extra 2.5 points to spend); other exceptions might be made later for exceptionally useful abilities. The cost to actually make the resulting crystal is half the point cost in thousands. (10 points is 5,000 energy, and so on)
Creating one of these crystals out of rock (or whatever else we find thats above Refined later) instead of a crystal halves the cost in energy to create. Once you're done adding things (or removing things), pick a general area so I know approximately where the new crystal should be, like 'below core, near the big hole' or 'over near the invincitite'.
If for some reason you want a very specific crystal to be modified or a very specific piece of material used, use the core as a center point and count out how many 10x10 pixel blocks there are to it from the core, and give me that instead.
Any crystal that costs more than 5k energy to make is too expensive for us to make in our current form. To improve that, we need to obtain materials that do better than the core at conducting and manipulating energy flows, and improve the core itself with them. Core cannot be modified normally, only with materials.
Example using a farsighted crystal
Name: Farseer
Color: Green
Base crystal type: Refined
No energy production (-2.5)
Freebuild (5)
Extended vision Lv.5 (7, 5 extra spaces)
Total cost: 9.5 points (4,750 energy)
Integrity: Intact
Stored Energy: 10000
Effect: You are glowing with heat (which might've been a side-effect of something else, not simply the energy...), but the rain is both hiding that fact and preventing you from getting hotter.
Energy Generation:
Core: 100/cycle
Location: Hole in the surface of an unknown planet.
Navy Blue - Crystal core
Black - Unknown
Grey - Rock
Dark Brown - Empty underground space
Light Brown - Dirt or other non-solid material
Sky Blue - Its a very descriptive color.
Core Crystal
Your core. If this can be replicated, you don't remember how.
Energy production: 100/cycle
Low Quality Crystal
Created by converting materials not able to become better tiers, like dirt.
Energy production: 20/cycle.
Fabrication cost: 100 energy, nearby material.
Refined Crystal
Created by converting solid materials, like rock. Also made by refining the structure of Low quality crystals.
Energy production: 50/cycle
Fabrication cost: 200 energy, nearby solid material.
Refinement cost: 400 energy, LQ crystal connected to the core. (300 if adjacent to another refined crystal)
Storage Crystal
A hunk of additional crystal, giving you more room to store energy without side effects.
No energy production
Fabrication cost: 200 energy and 1 empty space per section. Connected storage sections give greater results than scattered ones. In emergencies, the empty space can be replaced with 100 energy and a low quality crystal.
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Assimilated matter conversion cost: Remainder of the cost to crystal form +50 per cycle its been there.
Low-assimilation matter
Created by not fully converting low-tier matter.
Will crumble into dust in 5 cycles, leaving an empty space.
Energy production: 50/40/30/20/10 per cycle. Crumbles on the next energy pulse once it hits 10/cycle.
Fabrication cost: 50 energy, nearby material.
Medium-assimilation matter
Created by not fully converting matter eligible to become Refined Crystal.
Will degenerate into low-assimilated matter in 10 cycles.
Energy production: 150/140/130/120/110/100/90/80/70/60 per cycle. Degenerates on next pulse after reaching 60/cycle.
Fabrication cost: 100 energy, nearby solid material.
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Topic: Crystalline - Cycle 84 (Read 86071 times)