Death comes to us all, in one way or another. Death comes more frequently to peons – Fringe Planet is a harsh environment specifically designed to kill them after all. This week we have spent a lot of time refining some of the internal simulations, which unfortunately has had the side effect of drastically reducing the average peon life span.

The peon body is made of many different organs, all of which are linked together and simulate all the things that a body does – the heart pumps blood, the brain decides how efficiently the peon interacts with the world around them and the lungs process oxygen. All the organs have an amount of damage they can take and unfortunately for the peons, there are a lot of things that can cause this damage.

There are ways to prevent this damage (not impaling peons on spikes would be a good start). Various magic and use of plants will help heal heal the organs. Some organs will slowly heal over time, some parasites can be treated by expunging the contents of the stomach (messy). But when one organ fails, it will start damaging all the other organs – meaning that it is a very good idea to keep an eye on your peons health.

However, if either the brain or the heart fails the damage this will cause to the other organs will be catastrophic – a head or heart injury will normally instantly kill a peon.

Unfortunately (for the peons), organ damage is not the only way a peon can die. There are several situations where massive multipliers are applied to organ damage which means (as it happens so quickly) – that the situation is instant death for the peon :

• Abject terror – massive damage caused to brain and heart – seeing something incredibly unholy will literally scare a peon to death
• Fall damage – massive damage applied to all bones and all organs – this is scaled by the height fallen so smaller falls are survivable
• Major parasitic growth – what if an insect exploded out of your chest? that would cause some internal damage
• Freezing to death – being inadequately protected against the cold is a slow death, however a sudden temperature change can kill a peon instantly
• Being killed by an elder God – will only happen with admin commands, but does massive damage to every organ
• Falling into The Void – this is generally a really bad idea

Life is brutal on Fringe Planet, but life, does, uh, find a way. In the coming weeks we will talk more about these systems, and how you can heal and look after your peons. Or even bring them back from the dead…

And finally, we did hook up Fringe Planet to our new Discord server (more details will follow about that soon) – which enabled us to leave a message on discord every time a peon died – it was as depressing as it sounds!

There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try:

• What is inside a peon? – Dev Blog 12
• Peons, and how to make them happy – Dev Blog 38
• The Peons – Skins – Dev Blog 93