Could plant aliens fill the same narrative as Zerg/Tyranids? I am mostly afraid that they are not scary enough

Or more zerglike

...

Overrun by plants

Depends? Can the plants move? Are they somewhat sentient? Or are the just plants that reproduce fast and take over?

No one has mentioned Day of the Triffids yet?

The Mycon from Star Control 2 are a great inspiration for scary plant-like aliens (actually fungi).

wiki.uqm.stack.nl/Mycon
Much like the Orz from that game, how horrifying they are builds from the more you find out about them instead of the initial impression (but that would be fixable in another implementation too). It starts out where you think there's a communication failure causing conflict, then that they're warlike, then that they're just mindless - largely uninfluential spore-spreaders.

Then you find that they are absolutely ancient, psychotically religious, reproduce on a scale unimaginable to other races in the galaxy, and will send out a planet-wrecking Deep Child to any livable planet they discover the location of. They live to spread spores and can genetically modify things at-will just by thinking.

As an enemy in the current conflict, they're a curiosity. As a whole? They're a doomsday clock for the galaxy that will be physically impossible to stamp-out even if every race wins every actual battle against every mycon they see until they are surrounded by them.

Was the planet called Felucia or Corelia?
It's a planet filled with sentient force sensitive fungus-people.

And they are simply corrupted terraformers.

What ISN'T horrifying in Star Control anyway?

Tarrasque clones.

Cows injected with tarrasque DNA become deathclaws.

>Not scary enough.
You know how xenomorphs have to latch onto you to breed, and how tyranids have to eat you? All a plant has to do is exist, you can't tell but just by breathing you have already lost, the pollen is inside you, it's germinating inside. There's nothing you can do of course, microscopic invaders that you don't even realize have infested you. But you will realize eventually, weeks later, when you are home, or on a ship, when it starts to bloom. By the time you're a mindless mound of flesh acting as soil for a beautiful garden, you have doomed whatever world or ship your on. The plants will grow, and there's no stopping them

Ever watched the movie ''The Ruins''?

youtube.com/watch?v=ajMVBGbsL_E

Fungi. But that works fine.

youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8

youtube.com/watch?v=1CP1i0UKvb8

You could rip off some elements of tiberium:
cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Tiberium
A silicon-based plant might look like it.

What makes the plant powerful? Perhaps it is a type of strangelet-based spore fungus, capable of converting and processing all kinds of matter and energy?

You also could work a different kind of scary. The foreboding of that creep mass crawling all over the land, people seeking for a decisive moment while the vegetal goes on its own pace, pacient and constant. There is no enemy to face in a way that suits our mentality, just thorns and toxins making Earth itself inhuman. Carnivore plants turning lakes into collective digesting pools. When everyone realizes, it's too late, the Creeping Green dominates the planet. You can burn and burn, but its roots go deep into the crust.

If you want instant scare, make the vegetables just eaten grow. An orange tree isn't that tasty when it comes out of someone's armpits.

Read "Green Patches" by Isaac Asimov and call me in the morning.

Dude, just look at the Arborec from TI3.

Race sheet/description

...

Well yeah. They even made a video game series based on it.
It's called Halo

>I am mostly afraid that they are not scary enough
Make them ethereally terrifying; beautiful and terrible. You know, like True Fae, or Outer Gods.

Plant enemies are a good excuse to use non-standard threats, like mass-takeovers of the minds of races they encounter, subtle or unsubtle in its method/strength, either using their own action or by luring them into living on their planet (or even becoming a threat by being ingested). There are so many possibilities.

Maybe it's decent as a subversion but I don't like just ignoring that wide opening for interesting concepts by making them just green animals that maybe sleep and eat differently.

Space plants alien invaders in the form of beautiful women.

Fucking OF COURSE op, haven't you ever seen films like Jumanji and other films with hyper-aggressive plants? They can be super scary and intimidating if you make them right, so if you do some plant stuff don't make em pansies, make them full on carnivorous plant aliens that rip through the earth (and subsequently other things) to find food, and have them suck the nutrients out of every living thing.

TL;DR, yes, yes they can.

Nigga if you eat something it does not go straight to your arms

That one triplet race that get along cutely?

You could also use the Supox as plant aliens. They don't work like the Mycon or a Zerg rip-off, but it was nice characterisation that they will hate you if they think you're not purely carniverous.

Triffids a shit. The only reason they're threatening is because a random fucking meteor made everyone go blind.

The Flood aren't plants you doof. They are parasitic, hive minded abominations made to cause eternal suffering in the galaxy

Fine, it's a fungus instead of a plant. Close efuckingnough. It's fucking hiveminded cordyceps.

Sure it's very possible but it depends on what you want. The easiest way, of course, would be to have a basic shambling horror or otherwise deadly mobile menace as any tyranid or zerg...and then just claim it's plant matter instead of meat. Lazy? You bet your ass.

I'd recommend you look up carnivorous plants and cross reference with the other nasty shit plants can do to fuck you up, like poison ivy. They have a very wide array of defensive strategies. The ones that look pretty can often be quite troublesome. Creating the smell of rotten meat to lure in insects to feed off of? Sure you could adapt that to people with pheromone signatures or if you really want to be weird: psychic plants. At any rate I'm leaning towards the "hyperevolutionary" side where the plants would essentially be biological Borgs able to produce new defense/offense to adapt to whatever you throw at them. Nothing too the point of being totally op, mind you, but definitely making them harder to put down with each successive generation.

And of course zerg and nids have that habit of subverting, subsuming, or otherwise mutating environments. Your plants could be especially invasive essentially able to produce pollen that hijacks local plants and turns them into more plant monsters. When the trees, grass, produce, and your Grandma's garden are all trying to kill and eat you that's pretty off-putting, right?

And then you could do the whole fungus or zombie bit. You can have mobile plants without basically making shambling mounds. Have them "root" themselves into people and take them over, even producing spores or pollen that are infections. Think xenomorphs where they grow into your lungs and out through the rest of you.

Woah there moneybags we arent all oil sheiks.

They don't even have to be sentient to be horrifying. The great oxygenation event was one of the most significant extinction events. cyanobacteria evolved the ability to photosynthesize and started flooding the atmosphere with oxygen. This killed off loads of anaerobic bacteria.

Survey teams goes down to planet. Find basic algal lifeforms, have different metabolic pathway. Fairly interesting but nothing astounding. Samples are taken and the survey heads home. Some escapes and gets into the environment. Produces toxic byproducts from respiration. By the time people realize whats happening its beyond control.

Entire planet becomes uninhabitable over the course of decades because the survey team didn't decontaminate properly.

I'm partial to the insidious slow infestation. Space spores or meteorite radiation, pick your science fiction schlock, but it makes vegetables grow larger, more prolific, and thrive out of season, mysterious but beautiful plants that attract the eye and have alluring aromas so people take them into their home and begin gardening them with increasing obsessiveness.

From there it's a choose your own path horror story. Do you want a "you are what you eat" scenario where devouring the plants has an increasing infectious rate to the person? Sure! Why not. And it isn't just about carnivores versus vegetarians since eventually the cows, chickens, sheep, pigs will eat the plants and become tainted.

Or maybe play up the obsessiveness where humanity becomes slavishly devoted to the plants to the point of turning their homes into nurseries and eventually chopping up their pets and loved ones to feed the plants. You can find people cutting flesh off their own bodies to feed the plants. Eventually the cities and towns are choked with rotting corpses who nevertheless have these beautiful flowers growing, intertwined with the bones. A lovely little garden of death.

There's plenty of science fiction for inspiration. I recall a Batman The Animated Series episode where Poison Ivy supposedly reforms only she seduced her husband and was using his DNA (obtained the fun way?) to create plant person duplicates and grow her own perfect family, only the plants grew alarmingly fast and at latter stages of life became a Swamp Thing like horror. I have to admit I rather like the idea of a plant person duplicate where when they die they decay rapidly revealing wood bones underneath, but that's just me. Of course now I'm thinking of the Twin Peaks episode of Darkwing Duck where he had to team up with the plant villain Bushroot to stop alien cabbages from creating duplicates and the were ultimately helped by space cow police from the planet (Gary) Larson. Also just me.

Imperial Japanese bishido kamikaze rat-men, who reproduce with mouse-girls to produce more suicide pilots by the thousands from one male and a small harem. BONZAI.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The Orz would also like to "play".

aliens.wikia.com/wiki/Anaerobic_Lifeform_(The_Green_Marauder)

Well kinda. The way you get the females is kinda horrifying, because in order to get to that state, you buy the 10 females out of sexual slavery to the Vux homeworlder (and if you traded your unique thing for a Vux ship earlier without knowing, or on purpose because their ships are the best outside your story ship, you have to sell 100 of your crew into sexual slavery never to return). Then you basically whore them to this guy for a HUGE QUANTITY of babies, which is anatomically horrifying if nothing else.

Have you ever realized how fucking wierd and insane some earth plants are?
Imagine a plant the evolved on a death world
Imagine a species of sentient plants that have massive catalogs of different species to use to take over planets
Imagine dumb sentient flowers in a big dumb tree ship fly by a planet drop off war plant species XZ and come back a week later to get some spores or seeds

Earth is a death world, plants are what made it livable.
And to indulge my autism, THE CORRECT WORD IS SAPIENT, EVERY LIVING FUCKING THING IS SENTIENT INCLUDING PLANTS!

Zerg are already just bacteria that take over hosts and Nids are just sentient biomass.
If you really want invasive plants the Warlords of Draenor Botani are kind of like what you want.

Fuck me
Sorry
user, only certain parts of earth are death areas
I mean, look at iberia, america besides florida, britian, italy, most of europe

>bacteria
Source?
As far as I know from the fluff Zerg are a grub like parasite that morphs into whatever.
Their original form is actually just dinosaur like aliens.

But remember that all of earth was once a death area, plants and single-celled organisms are the only fucking things that made the environment palatable for life as we know it. And pray tell how is all of america aside from Florida a death area?

Captcha: Court Vert
Is Virt finally going to jail?

OP, read nausicaa of the valley of the wind.

No
Florida is the only death area
America is pretty comfy unless you live in californa(occasional droughts and constant riots)

we had a thread or two about this sort of idea in the past, I compiled a pastebin of some of the more interesting ideas;

pastebin.com/XgNzPb9d

Oh, the way you typed it implied the inverse, and California is pretty peaceful outside of LA, and even there isn't too bad depending on what borough you live in.

It might have been retconned but the original lore was,
Having giving up on the protoss the Xel'naga moved to a new home planet Zues. There they found a verity of life forms and climates. However looking past their last failure they turned to a small single celled life. This small organism invaded the spine of a host and took over the automatic nervous system. The host also seemed to grow armor plating around the bones and in vital areas of flesh along with sharp spikes and jaws.
Xel'naga improved there adaptability gave them more species to inhabit and linked them so they would fight together rather than separate.
That was why the zerg symbol was a spine with blades, it is what the zerg really are.

Frungy frungy frungy!

No, not dinosaurs although some of their later forms were acquired from absorbing the genetics of dinosaur like aliens. They just take the traits of others are recombine them to see what will be useful and provide adaptations. Well, I say "they" but that's the Overmind and to a lesser extent the Cerebrates when they're giving that much power. Of course after Starcraft II it's another pile of shit, now with Primal Zerg and Abathur was a specialized entity made by the Overmind to create for him designing, among other things, Kerrigan's infested form.

Im pretty sure it was a parasite grub the larvae you see around hatcheries is the catapillar like Zerg themselves.
This was sort of retconned and exanded on in Sc2 to the primordial Zerg which are more dinosaur like creatures that continually adapt by consuming prey.

You are legit full wrong.
Original manual page.

They were never single celled, just tiny bugs.

>The Xel’Naga were more successful with their second venture than they could have imagined. They labored to advance the evolution of the most insignificant life form on Zerus, a race of miniature insectoids known as the Zerg. Through Xel’Naga proto-genetic manipulations, the Zerg survived the torrential firestorms of their world and thrived. Although extremely small, worm-like, and possessing no ability to manipulate their physical surroundings, the Zerg adapted to survive. They developed the ability to burrow into the flesh of the less vulnerable species indigenous to Zerus. Feeding off the nutrients contained within the spinal fluids of their hosts, the Zerg learned to parasitically merge with their host creatures. Once they became capable of controlling the metabolic and anatomical processes of their hosts, the Zerg used their new bodies to manipulate their surroundings.

ftp.blizzard.com/pub/misc/StarCraft.PDF

>Zerg Hivemind

youtube.com/watch?v=rt76D4L6lZM
Wrong. They were expanded on to be literal dinosaurs.

The same company behind the Zerg in Starcraft also have an arboreal collective that's spreading out over territories around it and are known for gathering and using animals various sorts including humanoids as seeding and fertilizer for new growths. They have little mask-faced impish plant creatures that seem friendly when you first meet them but are revealed to be drawing in unsuspecting expedition members for ritual executions. The larger ones are a mix of gardeners, warriors and druidic-seeming mages who make up their "humanoid" aspects. Larger treants and the like make for good siege entities and their largest manifestations are essentially treated as nigh-immortal forces of nature that are best avoided unless you can kill them within minutes of their maturation.

Their native habitat seems to be in a jungle of sorts, and they thrive on the rampant growth potential within it, but they're also seen making use of fungal spore colonies in mushroom forests and trying to breach artificial oasis points into an otherwise rocky desert.

There was a near-crisis event inside that continuity where a handful of mages wanted to study the area and were overrun, nearly compromising security of their whole world when the plants started pouring through the portal back home.

You are talking about the Botani.

Are you trying to imply that we're going to take SC2 retcons as cannon?

>Botani will always be bitch boiz because they cut out their patch, zone.

Yes I am and I'm afraid I forgot to ctl+f to see that already had it handled.

Have a Zyra.

Since when were Zerg Bacterial parasites? They morph new life forms from larva, they don't latch on and mind control them. Where the fuck would they find so many host Zerglings and Mutalisks so quickly, let alone a stable source?

Unless I'm missing something obvious from the lore I think you might have the zerg confused with another race. They use other life forms genetic code and adapt it to create killing machines, sure, but they don't just walk up to a dog and take it over.

Infested Terrans are a whole different story if that's what you're thinking about. That's a mind control virus the Zerg send out to infect humans and essentially make them into freaky slaves who can't control their body, they're still conscious while they slaughter their family and burn their world but they can't stop it.

Primal Zerg are NOT the same as the original Zerg species, user. They're pre-Overmind Zerg that were for some reason left on Zerus to evolve on their own. They are not guided by the hivemeind, therefore, and merely evolve due to more natural pressures, the biological arms race between each other.

You clearly don't understand your own video thinking you're seeing their original forms when it straight up shows you how they've continued to change after being abandoned and left behind. They were not originally anything like dinosaurs, you're merely seeing their bigger and badder forms.

Yes and its easy to explain the old and new lore.
The larvae like Zerg is the earliest form of Zerg. Primal Zerg are the same species just wth millennia of evolutionary adaptation.
Xel'naga extracted the parasite larvae dna from the primordial Zerg. Reducing them to a basic lifeform.

They are. The dna from the larvae Zerg was taken from Zerus

user you are retarded.

>Yes and its easy to explain the old and new lore
No. Zerus went from a Char-like planet that happened to possess parasitic larva capable of adapting the features of the host creatures to some jungle bullshit with a natural species that somehow rapidly evolves in real fucking time making the xel'naga's accomplishments lesser as a result.

Don't try and make them scary. Make them a creeping danger. Let the villagers see them as weeds to be burned away, unaware that the spores have infected them and will consume them from the inside

>grim_fandango.png

You don't understand what you are saying. The reason their dna was take from Zerus was because of their rapid adaptation trait.

This said, I think a lot of the fluff was retconned and not just with the evil Xel'Naga dude they rammed into the plot. I think they ignored most of the original Terran history specifically by Brood War. They seem to have abandoned the idea that the Terrans who settled in Koprulu Sector were mutants, heretics, "unclean" who were slated to be purified, i.e. executed, but some goofy scientist redirected some of them to his plan to create off-world colonies instead. Hell, the ships didn't even reach their intended destination. The computer fucked up and forgot where they were headed and also where Earth was.

Their mutant origins is also why they have psionic potential due to aberrant genes that called for them to be purified in the first place. Of course the actual percentage of the population with psionic potential is still staggeringly small.

Neither of which were dinosaurs. It's like you guys haven't even bothered to follow the thread after the "bacteria" guy got bitchslapped.

Check or Primal Zerg are what you get when the Xel'Naga experiment is left unchecked and unbound by the creation of the Overmind. They're abandoned and left to become a Zerg offshoot, but they still are leaps beyond the actual original entity pre-Xel'Naga tampering.

>mutants, heretics, "unclean
Not necessarily all of them. Koprulu sector is just space Australia.

This is fucking SS13 blob.
It's more than suffice for a horrifying hostile xeno biohorde.

Actually, fungus are more closely related to animals than plants, they're just adapted for a niche that seems similar to plants to amateurs ignorant of biology beyond what "seems right" to them.

Also the flood aren't really fungus either, their design just borrows some thematic elements.

I didnt know this was lore for Terrans. I always thought it was that they were convicts and thats why there is such a big penal troopers and outlaws theme with Terran.

You're not listening. Larvae Zerg are not dinosaurs but they are derived from Primal zerg which are basically dinosaurs.

Convicts yes, but coming from a society where there was such a thing as thought and genetic crimes.
Add in that they were the pet-project of a spoiled coporate asshole and yea....

I'd heavily suggest reading the full manual at sys.Veeky Forums.org/derefer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fftp.blizzard.com%2Fpub%2Fmisc%2FStarCraft.PDF
It's a nice read and a good example of old blizzard work and writing.

Earth went Nazi, basically. You can read the original manual with the backstory here:

Man, that's just an awesome idea for shit like Exalted. Stolen.

Shipping off convicts/undesirables isnt nazi remember this is what commies love to do.

Tbqh this is ignorance since america was founded with a larger penal colony first.

>hasn't actually read the book

>Earth went Nazi
Well obviously. UED was ready to exterminate the entire government of a region which they had no claim to given that they fucking abandoned the lot of convicts. I still think UED coming back with full fleet rather than scouts would have been a much better plot than LEL ANCIENT EVIL
>nazis don't ship people off
You know the original plan was to ship all the interned peoples off to Madagascar before the allies shut down all routes.

Yeah, you aren't getting this. The original laval zerg, the wormlike entity that bonded to other organisms and attracted the Xel'Naga's attention were certainly not dinosaurs. They were insects. They weren't "derived" from Primal Zerg, the Primal Zerg were derived from THEM just as the Hivemind Zerg are. It's just that the Primals are the end result of being abandoned and left to unchecked growth and evolution and they have certain saurian traits after millions of years of unchecked and unguided evolution after being abandoned.

No. The plan was to create a jewish state in madagascar.
Ironically another thing commies love to do is create artificial ethnic states which is what the USSR was composed of.

The guy who shipped them off was uninvolved with the atrocities of Project Purification. As related here he redirected prisoners slated for the equivalent gassing to his pet project of creating off-world colonies.

There are different agendas. The government wanted them dead, not sent off to seed other worlds and given they hated them enough to want them dead would have been horrified at the thought of uncleans being given a chance to form their own societies elsewhere.

You are just flat out not reading my posts and are a moron.

No, I get it. You were proven wrong and are still pissing your pants angry about it so you're doing the whole, "No, you just don't understand me!" bit. Next you'll probably tell us you're only pretending to be retarded.

Relax, it's all off-topic to the original plant alien discussion anyway.

According to the Brood War manual the United Powers League that had started the mass executions somehow was aware of events on the Koprulu Sector despite whole secret colony bit and the navigation system fucking up mid-flight but they didn't care until alien races showed up. The United Earth Directorate was founded (more a rebranding of the UPL) because they didn't want to suffer the aliens arriving on Earth, which supposedly would have been fine since nobody in Korulu was supposed to know where Earth was given the computer on their supercarrier forgot. So the Zerg following DuGalle's fleet as they retreated to Earth probably isn't a good thing but what the hell it's not like Starcraft 2 remembers much of the old plot anyway.

dl2.loveroms.com/extras/m/PC Games/Manuals (USA)/P-T/Starcraft - Brood War.pdf