Blob
REASON: Needs reformatting. Page bloat reduction.
Blob
Superiors: N/A
Difficulty: Very Hard
Guides: [Advanced Blob Guide]
Access: Anywhere you can eat your way into.
Duties: Spread onto the whole station
Departmental Head
Unknown
| Abductor • | Ash Walker • | Blob • | Changeling • | Contractor • | Construct • | Cultist • | Guardian • | Lavaland Elite • | Malfunctioning AI • | Morph • | Nuclear Agent • | Pulse Demon • | Revenant • | Revolutionary • | Shadow Demon • | Slaughter Demon • | Syndicate Researcher • | Terror Spider • | Traitor • | Vampire • | Wizard • | Xenomorph |
| Combat • | Death • | Hacking • | Traitor Items • | Agent Items • | Crafting • | High-Risk Items • | E-maggable objects • | C-maggable objects • | Martial Arts |
It Came from Outer Space!
In the Blob game mode, the blob is controlled by a player, called The Overmind, with the objective to expand and take over as much of the station as possible. Blob events come in two flavors, either round start, where multiple people will start off infected, or mid round, where but a single mouse is. The infected have a set amount of time before they burst, the first step is to find a suitable place to settle their core.
Feeling bloated?
If you are a round start blob, you have a few minutes before you pop, minutes that you should invest in either finding a secluded space, shoring it up, so that people are less likely to find you too early, or, if you are feeling particularly bold, you could attempt to sabotage devices around the station that the crew would use against you.
Your chosen spot for your inevitable pop, should be a location relatively unexposed, ideally where you can funnel any hostile crew that would attack you, down narrow corridors, as the less surface area crew can attack at one time, the easier it will be to defend yourself. Space is also a great threat to you, not for lack of atmosphere or increased cost of making tiles there, but for the fact that crew can easily assault you from range, both with pods and emitters, so bare that in mind when choosing your location.
Blob Chemicals
After popping, blobs start off with a random chemical, which determines their color, what kind of damage they deal and any special effect they or their minions possess.
| Chemical | Visual | Damage Type |
|---|---|---|
|
Ripping Tendrils |
Deals 15 Brute damage, 10 Stamina damage and spores deal brute damage when killed | |
|
Boiling Oil |
Deals 15 Burn damage, sets the victim aflame and spores deal fire damage when killed | |
|
Kinetic Gelatin |
A gambler's chemical. Deals between 5 to 35 Brute damage and spores deal brute damage when killed | |
|
Sorium |
Deals 15 Brute damage, and both direct attacks by tiles and death of spores, launch entities away | |
|
Envenomed Filaments |
Deals 15 Toxin damage, causes Hallucinations, and spores deal toxin damage when killed | |
|
Lexorin Jelly |
Deals 10 Brute damage, 25 Respiration damage, halts breathing for 8 cycles and spores deal respiration damage when killed. | |
|
Cryogenic Liquid |
Attacking tiles deal 10 Brute damage, 10 Stamina damage, injects 10 units of Frost Oil and spores deal burn damage when killed |
Split Conciousness Power(100 Resources)
Split Conciousness Power
The Overmind also has the ability to split themselves once, making a new Blob Core, which will poll the ghosts/observers, allowing you to gain an ally blob, effectively doubling chemical generation. The other core can have a different chemical from the original blob, but you both gain from any linked resource nodes, making it the most potent ability the blob possesses.
Blobmunition
Blobs can attack players who are directly (not diagonally) adjacent to their tiles by expending chemicals (and Clicking on the target). The blob can also expend resources to manually expand, the expense of which is determined by the type of tile you attempt to expand on to, for example, expanding onto an empty station tile is relatively cheap, but if you want to expand onto a wall tile, you must first break that wall down, sometimes requiring multiple attempts. Space tiles cost double resource points to expand on to.
Blob Buildings
The blob has access to additional "buildings", that it can place on its blob tiles, all of which have important functions, however some have limitations on how close they can be placed to a similar tile.
Core Blob: The most important part of you, it is the brain of the blob and the heart. You cannot have more than one core so you must protect it at all costs, or you will die. It will regenerate health on its own, and you can keep track of its life from your HUD. Also produces one resource point per second all on its own, and allows placement of "building" tiles within 3 tiles of itself.
Normal Blob: The basic blob tile, which expands your influence and is required to place more advanced tiles.
Strong Blob: Created by upgrading a Normal blob tile (ctrl+click), they can absorb a great deal more damage than a normal blob tile, are fireproof and can block air, allowing you to protect yourself from station fires.
Reflective Blob: Created by upgrading a Strong blob tile, they absorb less damage than a strong blob, but have the ability to reflect laser shots and negate emitter pulses. Strategic placement of reflective tiles can negate a large amount of the crews offensive power and may lead to many incidents of friendly fire.
Resource Blob: Steadily produces resources, individual production speed increasing with proximity to a node/core. They are essential to resource income; defending your resource nodes is vitally important. The more resource tiles you have, the faster your resource generation and thus expansion. They cannot be built within 4 tiles of another Resource tile, but can always be adjacent to a node with optimal placement.
Storage Blob: Increases max resource point capacity by 50 for as long as it is up. While not useful to a newborn blob, these exponentially increase a large blobs fighting and staying power.
Node Blob: A Node will grow normal blob tiles around it, factories and resource nodes can be placed within a 3 tile radius around them. Necessary for expanding your territory, and will rapidly eat through any adjacent walls. Nodes are additionally used for the Split Consciousness and Relocate Core command. Can't be built within 5 tiles of another Node Blob. Ideal for breaching secure areas or defending choke points.
Factory Blob: Creates blob spores 
which will attack nearby food (read: people.), and convert the dead into 
Blob Zombies, which are tougher and stronger than spores alone. Can't be built within 7 tiles of another Factory Blob.
Blobbernaut! Sacrifice a factory to spawn a Blobbernaut. Blobbernauts are ghost controlled creatures that deal moderate damage to crew, can break down airlocks/machines, but constantly degenerate health if injured and not on a blob tile, they will however regenerate health while moving across blob tiles. They are immune to pressure but are vulnerable to loss of gravity.
Hotkeys
- Click: Expands Blob tiles to the target tile(needs to be adjacent and not diagonal to another blob Tile) and Attacks a human/cyborg on the targeted tile. Save up resources to quickly and rapidly kill borgs or humans.
- CTRL+Click: Create Shield tile, or on a Shield tile to create a Reflective tile.
- Middle Mouse Click: Rally Spores to target location.
- ALT+Click: Remove tiles, partially refunding some of their cost.
Kill That Blob!
The blob is a severe biohazard, and as such the Emergency Shuttle will likely be prevented from coming to the station to save you.
- Weapons:
Blob tiles are highly resistant to physical damage, meaning that crowbar or wrench you have to hand is going to do very little to help you. However blob tiles have no resistance to direct burn damage, so items such as welders, laser scalpels, lasers and flamethrowers will prove very effective in eliminating normal blob tiles, but always make sure to minimize friendly fire.
- Armor: Depending on the chemical the blob is using, different apparel will help you fight it.
Bear in mind, not all armor will be effective against all blob types, some will actually be a detriment, such as a hard-suit against a Cryogenic blob, which will amplify the chilling effect of the frost oil it injects.
- Emitters: Spare emitters can be found in Secure Storage inside Engineering. Set them up as far away from the blob as you can while still striking the core. If the blob reaches them, they're gone.
- IEDs: The modest explosion is enough to rip a bit of the blob apart without destroying the floor and ruining atmos for people. Throw them in when you see weakness in the blob's defenses to tear open an attack point.
- Flashbangs: Two flashbangs will destroy all weak blob tiles in a large area, allowing people to rush in and destroy the special blob squares. If you don't warn people you're using these, they might get stunned and eaten by the blob. Give people a chance to clear the area and if your flashbang stuns someone, pull him out of there before the blob sees the opportunity to make a zombie out of him.
DEFCON 1
Should the blob grow too powerful, there is a good chance that Central Command will okay the use of the station's nuclear bomb to destroy the blob if contacted via the Communications Console. You must have Captain level access to do so. If Central Command determine the situation cannot be salvaged, they will send you the nuke code in order to arm the bomb. Once armed, you should sit and wait for your death knowing you failed the station.
A Quick Note On Intent
As you know, your intent affects what you do when you run into people while moving. If you are on help intent, you walk through that person, and if you're on disarm intent, you'll push them out of the way or into the nearest object, like a wall, or a blob.
In other words: If you are fighting the blob, use help intent or everybody will hate you.
Triage
Crew will take damage progressively while in combat with a blob and there are only so many avenues of attack crew can exploit. If you don't want or can't engage a blob directly, you can assist by tending to the wounded, or by bringing additional assets such as weapon rechargers or fuel tanks adjacent to the front line(keep fuel tanks away from the blob).
Cargo
- Order guns. Energy guns have their place, and are nice, but the station already has plenty. Combat shotguns may be better if people are good with them and print as many shells as you can in advance. Why? If you print lethal shells between Industrial Welders, combat shotguns don't have the downtime of energy guns. A constant feed of lethal shells makes for the ability to print, shoot while printing, clear shell, take new shell, feed old shell in, repeat. It makes the metal cost extremely low, and does big damage. Besides that, you should already have enough laser guns on the station that unless someone loses them to the blob, you have barely enough chargers to charge them all at once.
- Order emitters. You may need to order emitters. Don't assume the ones in Engineering Secure Storage will last, or even that anyone will remember to use them at all. Point seven emitters at a blob and it'll regret everything.
- Order lots of metal and glass. Don't rely on mining to get back at all or on time. However...
You can make dozens of Industrial Welders from a single sheet each of metal and glass. They're 70 metal, 60 glass, or something like that, with a single sheet of material providing 3750 of each. An Industrial Welder is the exact same size as a normal welder but holds 40 fuel and comes pre-fueled.
Science
- Research & Development: If you haven't already, begin researching as fast as possibly in order to unlock upgrades and improved weaponry to fight the blob. Ensure the Protolathe is upgraded so that it prints faster and uses less materials and get upgrades out to the frontlines as quickly as you can.
- Toxins: Although not recommended, if you are confident in your ability to construct bombs, do so. Just be aware of the size and impact of your bomb, and make sure everyone is completely, one hundred percent aware that you have a bomb, and how large the impact will be. Inform the Research Director and the station at large that you have bombs to use. Be aware that you might be denied because of the risk to crew...
- Roboticist: Building medibots is a good, fast way to get some on the spot healing for crew fighting the blob. If you are capable of doing so, building a Gygax or Durand can turn the tide in a losing battle. However, it might be better to construct cyborgs, as they can serve multiple functions.
- Xenobiologist: Slime upgrades can be very useful, if you have them to hand. Sentient animals likely won't be of much use, but Golems are expendable and can be quite helpful in assisting to damage the blob. If you haven't got time to make progress in Xenobiology, consider assisting another Science department.