Latest Posts by sludge-cat - Page 15
Reminiscence
(More) Rain World Pearl Writings
Now with some hit-or-miss doodles I made to visualize the pearls. They might be incredibly compressed idk...
Bicker
Interesting… It is a debate forum on the punitive ruling of a homicide. To thrust an enlightened individual across the cycle was considered abominable.
However, the presiding Just Order decided that the perpetrator embodied “The Remorsive Luminance Within”, and recommended her for temporary exile to a temple.
The discourse over the sentencing is… vulgar, to say the least. Many of my citizens did little else but talk, and thus the political landscape mutated into a frenzy of dozens of quarreling factions.
Most systems were commanded by the dynastic Concepts, so the remaining scraps of governance were subject to vicious competition by these factions. Power changed hands constantly.
The perpetrator was lucky. Had it been any other cycle, the ruling Order would throw her in a sensory deprivation tank or wipe her memory. Or perhaps she would be declared unsalvageable and turned into fodder for ritual combat.
It’s a bit baffling that they rarely just transcended their criminals in a Void Fluid bath instead. Probably because it would defeat the point of their bickering…
Mast
Oh? This contains a very old intellectual offering to the 52nd Great Mind, or the Aetherial Mast west of here. It consists of a very flattering, complex riddle.
Since you’ve been to Five Pebbles, I imagine that you’ve seen those grand towers piercing into the sky. They once formed a communication network between iterators, but a few of them - such as this particular one - are actually older than iterators like me.
After the Void Fluid Revolution, people quickly discovered that if any construct got complex enough, it would gain sapience.
So they threw as much computational power as they could into these towers, and waited. They expected the Aetherial Masts to quickly discover a method to implode the cosmos into the earth, achieving global transcension.
It inevitably failed. The 52nd Great Mind was later connected to a larger, more deliberate construct, and underwent apotheosis to become Looks to the Moon. Which is me!
The first of us iterators were reborn from these Great Minds. Afterward, most Masts were created with an iterator already in control.
Thank you, little creature, for this memento from my distant past.
Brain Tree
It's a treatise on memorykeeping. There’s a crypt nearby here, under Five Pebbles - piles and piles of cabinets, holding the legacies of my departed creators.
Through a complex bombardment procedure, the storage components of a person's mind would grow a twin lump, which contained cherished memories. The "memory fruit" was then removed and placed in a cabinet.
When the crypts began to acquire a hefty pile of cabinets, my creators discovered that all the fruits had united via a network of roots. The formation bulged outward endlessly, breaking into a factory far, far away. The cleanup effort was monumental.
Now, a microbe system continually expels the fruits' boundless energy, and kills them if the defenses fail to keep the fruits from getting too large.
Rare as they are, mass fractal neural emissions are a worrying phenomenon. Please keep your distance if you see a fruit that has grown into a tree.
Don't touch it - I don't know what might happen to you.
Rain World - Original Pearl Writings
A short collection of pearls I wrote, read from the perspective of Looks to the Moon.
(Inspired by gr0mm.)
Pest Control
It's a deployment order confirmation from an agricultural pest control department, followed by a list of several dozen genome sequences.
This farm purchased a specialized virus to eliminate some kind of burrowing crustacean. However, most of the microbe specimens are for controlling the virus itself, to protect the other useful organisms that allow the farm to function.
My creators' technological dominance meant that the genetic arms race had arguably been won, but such a power had to be wielded with care. Industrial ecosystems were managed incredibly tightly, as the introduction or extinction of a single species could have catastrophic consequences without sufficient counterbalancing.
Outside of these carefully quarantined industrial ecosystems, the rest of the world was largely ignored, left to become wastelands of disease. Life prevailed, of course, even when my creators departed and all these ecosystems rapidly toppled...
...I can't imagine you cared for much of this. Sorry, little creature.
Rhino Pill
Amazing... this one is a neuro-spiritual stimulant. It records the experience of a moment where a monk lightly dips a finger into a stream of water, and then... his mind is flooded...
...with an astonishing...
...sense... of...
...enlightenment.
My apologies. The feeling is incredibly intense, even to me.
If I still had the equipment to allow you to read this pearl, you would share that same enlightenment. Experiences like these were impossibly rare, and maintaining the potency of the memory while exporting it into a mass-reproduceable pearl was incredibly difficult. The monk likely perished during that transfer process.
Still, the study of these pearls always led to breakthroughs in the karmic sciences, while public exposure to the enlightenment gave rise to...
...
Oh. The enlightening feeling has already worn off. This pearl's probably just the work of a con artist.
You
This one is a draft for an academic publication. It's probably a sham, as it seems to posit that the numerical accuracy of cusps in an epicycloidal model of karmic patterning correlates with dermal organization patterns. It is simply too unlikely that one's skin has anything to do with...
...This must bore you. Perhaps it would be more interesting to talk about you - the little critter in front of me!
With the life you live, I'm sure you're grimly aware that every animal is made of sacks of meat and circuitry. You, too, are no exception.
Like most of creatures around here, your skin emits surfactants to squeeze you through small spaces. Your brain is safely divided across tetrispheres in head, abdomen, and tail. Interestingly, I can see you have an incredibly hardy secondary gut, teeming with its very own ecosystem. Your body is supported by the help of many tiny, tiny bugs.
In fact - if you were to peer within yourself at a very, very small scale, you'd see that your whole body is a great swarm of simple little creatures, living and dying to make you possible.
I don't think your eyes have the ability to look that closely. Mine do, though - I'd say you're doing quite healthy for a wild animal!
type of guy who is always waiting for excuse or opportunity to go into exile
lowkey don't like quadreped-built slugcats
There's paint on the blueprint
I wanted to finish it more. What a bummer🥴
Rain World - THE EFFERVESCENCE and some various theories built off of it
EDIT: now that Watcher's out my actual reading of all this is a bit different. Once I look at that more I might post a new thing so... Watcher quasi-spoilers I guess?
Firstly, consider:
Anyways,
You know that weird shit James said on an art month stream last year or so I think? Someone asks him what the deal with Hunter being "karmically imbalanced" is and he says this:
"It takes a certain level of karmic alignment to sort of translate the barrier between realities."
Lydia chuckles because of this quote afterwards. Obviously, her subliminal pointer gives away that this statement is a Rosetta Stone-esque lore revelation that will educate a new, objectively correct model of Rain World's reality - and the coming story that will break it.
Remember the rambling in the Ripple trailer? To summarize: droplets fall upon a body of still water, which send ripples outward. As more and more droplets fall, these ripples form countless interactions and create a chaotic "effervescence."
Each droplet symbolizes a singular "unit" of the cycle. Each "unit" is probably either the life of an individual or an entire reality. For this particular post I'm going with droplets as realities.
Overall, I think this ramble can be used to visualize how the cycle behaves according to the perspective of a Slugcat. (Fair warning that it's basically a very loose adaptation of the timeline-based cycle theory that I know Some of you hate.)
Ripple Collisions and Reality Transfers
While each droplet and its ripples (each reality) initially exist as its own distinct entity, their ripples eventually collide with those of another droplet. Here, the barrier that separates realities is lessened, and transfer is possible. When you die and wake up again, your Essence™ (whatever comprises You™, not sure what) is carried along this collision to a living version of You, in a parallel reality. This transfer expends karma (or expels a Karma Flower, which also gets carried with you).
It may be initially strange to think that collisions conveniently occur at the exact same moment a creature dies; rather, it's important to remember that karma seems to exist on its plane and that the ripples do not sync with time in the same fashion.
"Karmic Alignment" and Hunter
You also need a certain degree of "alignment" to be properly carried through the collisions of these ripples. Hunter is misaligned in some way, which is correlated with their illness & general karmic fuckery (note: idk whether alignment or illness is the root cause).
This misalignment creates friction when crossing between the barriers of realities. Hunter outright cannot perceive the existence of Flowers and they live on borrowed time before this dealignment rips them from their life entirely; completely unable to be carried along the ripples.
After Hunter dies, it's a bit of a toss-up. A super-Karma Flower is created that persists in Monk and Survivor, and Hunter will apparently "wake up again" anyway according to Moon. Even in this truly dealigned state, Hunter's Essence™ will return somehow.
I kinda doubt Hunter simply turns into a Flower, because of the meta aspect of repeating runs as Hunter (which I see as a part of the experience) feels symbolic of a more "complete" return to form.
Perhaps their inability to translate the ripple barriers means that they're forced to persist and return within the same reality they were doomed in. Hunter's shambling Rot corpse in Downpour is actually a very decent analog for this, though I'm not 100% satisfied with this answer because the reset symbolism is lost.
Ok But What About Watcher
First, let's look at the words of the unknown-possibly-Pebbles-considering-where-the-voicelines-come-from-iterator from the ARG.
They greet their "shadow", claiming that they "have drifted, (...) dispersed in the multitudes of the waves and the ripples." This seems to suggest that this individual is unwillingly moving through these realities at speeds or distances beyond normal, or they're possibly even shattered between all these realities.
According to the iterator, the shadow has a "thread" that they can follow to eventually return to how they once were; their preferred reality or an unfractured Essence.
The shadow is most likely referring to the Watcher... assuming the Watcher even is the Slugcat we play as. After all, the speaker does say they've been watching the shadow instead.
I think the iterator and the shadow (our slugcat) may be the same being; they together make the Watcher. The iterator is fragmented across realities (which is possibly fucking up those realities in turn, i.e. the various references to "cracks and crumbles"), but the shadow acts as some kind of extension or envoy whose behavior can help reunite the iterator into their whole.
Going by teasers like the pink sky region, the clear lack of rain in the Badlands region (due to the locusts, which I presume are a new end-of-cycle threat), and the generally fantastical nature of what we've seen (especially in that weird whale), I think the Watcher DLC definitely takes place in an alternate reality. Or alternate realities, plural?
Maybe the shadow ferries together the fragments of the iterator so that it can perform something greater, when it is reborn whole.
It's 2am and I think it's fun to pretend that whatever I just wrote is a comprehensive thought, closed off with a nice little bowtie, so I'm just going to say it is
When ur mutuals w/ some cool ass people rb if u agree
Winter has arrived on Poob.
Start your 7 day free trial of Poob today, and watch smash hit Martin Scorcese's Goncharov.
When doing my alchemy theories, I questioned what 7 would represent in terms of Rain World, as there aren't really 7 of anything- aside from Red Suns. There's no hard proof or anything. And I even wondered why there wheresn't 7 urges
But I remembered, like in the image I posted yesterday, the urges are moreso like elements. The ability to destroy, reproduce, connect, and process, all coming together to be aspects of the 5th karma, Self Preservation
And like the elements, everything in the ripplespace abides by these rules. The strands, on an outside view, almost act like animals trying to keep themselves alive and going through a material body. I suppose its less that the strand is you, and moreso you are the strand(s)
let’s be blissfully unaware of our future with mama
(mama slugcat is not gourmand)
interesting observation: the hate towards scavengers from the playerbase (observed specifically from a couple of rw content creators on yt) goes beyond them being just an annoying enemy to deal with. yes they are difficult to fight but saying "they deserved to be genocided" for it is. hmm. why are we saying this about a group of intelligent beings with culture and societal rules. that are loosely inspired by native tribes. the slugcats are trespassing u know, its a dangerous world its reasonable that scavs are cautious. it's almost as if the invader feels entitled for special treatment from the "stupider native population" for some reason. which could mean nothing.
I'm not saying anyone hating scavs is racist but it's something to think about before saying smth weird
i got seven red suns it was totally on my first attempt and i didnt get nsh first why would you think otherwise
Iterators I drew to put on the results of this quiz I made (and also a bonus screenshot redraw):
can we stop misgendering seven red suns please 🙏🙏 please🙏🙏🙏
Iterators I drew to put on the results of this quiz I made (and also a bonus screenshot redraw):
ok here is a vague transcript of spinning top (watcher echo)'s voicelines. slowed down
says ascension = die forever
calls every precedent civilisation "the ancients" (not that bad but it's very confusing. it's like calling someone who lived in egypt 10 years ago an "ancient egyptian")
says the big problem was meant to find a way to ascend via means other than void fluid, to prevent echohood (when 1. there *were* implied to be means of ascension other than void fluid and 2. echoes were a ghost story and 3. multiple pieces of dialogue very clearly state that the big problem was to help the world ascend)
says only intelligent life is affected by the cycle when pebbles explicitly makes the point upon your first meeting with him that everything from microbes to iterators experiences it
he gets some things correct but he gets most things wrong
Does anyone else struggle to keep up/remember the lore of RainWorld?
I mean two years ago I was obsessed with this game and remember alot but now since I been getting into RW again, I have seem to forgotten a lot of the lore and I don't want Fanon to skewer my view of Canon. Does anyone else have this similar problem?
this guy makes pretty accurate lore videos
Does anyone else struggle to keep up/remember the lore of RainWorld?
I mean two years ago I was obsessed with this game and remember alot but now since I been getting into RW again, I have seem to forgotten a lot of the lore and I don't want Fanon to skewer my view of Canon. Does anyone else have this similar problem?