Bestiary
Over 150 mutants, and they all want something
The wasteland is busy. Husks shamble after your glow, Brutes wear their armour on the inside, and Glow Eaters skip the flesh and go straight for the dose. Here's who you'll meet, sorted roughly by how they'll ruin your afternoon.
01
Fifteen families, fifteen weak spots
Every creature belongs to one of 15 families, and every family has something it hates. Fire burns through ghouls, fungus and bugs. Shock fries robots and most things that live in water. Cryo slows down the fast beasts. Explosives shatter crystal things and bring down flyers. Learning the wasteland mostly means learning which button goes with which silhouette.
The weakness shows up as an icon on the target frame and on your item cards, so you don't need a spreadsheet open. You'll still want a Rigger when the husks come pouring in, and a Scavver when something turns up wearing a car door.
- Ghouls: the irradiated dead, in hordes
- Mutants and beasts: casters, freaks and fast hunters
- Raiders and soldiers: guns, bombs and grudges
- Robots: pre-war machines still on duty
- Cultists: wasteland sects, each odd in its own way
- Plus bugs, fungus, crystal things, flyers and worse
02
They hunt the brightest light
Most mutants find you by your glow. The more dose you carry, the further it reaches, and packs go for the brightest survivor they can see. That's great when it's the Glowstick, and less great when it's the Scavver who ate every crystal on the map. Weather helps a little, because blizzards, sandstorms and fog make you harder to spot.
Packs aren't all equal either. Some have a champion with a blue name and an extra trick, and now and then a rare leader turns up with a gold name and two. Glow Eaters ignore the usual rules entirely. They come straight for whoever is shining brightest and bite the dose right out of them.
03
The usual suspects
You'll meet these four early and often. None of them is subtle, each one has a counter, and each one punishes a crew that forgets it. Under all of them, always, are the husks: once commuters, now a slow hunger that follows the glow of the dosed, usually in numbers you'd rather not count.
Brute
scrap plates grew into its hide, and it no longer remembers which parts are metal.
Spitter
its throat sac brews whatever it drank last, which is usually the bog.
Glow Eater
it does not want your flesh. It wants the light inside it.
Sporeling
pop one and the cloud pops the next. The bog loves a chain reaction.
04
Local wildlife, local talent
Every biome breeds its own trouble, and some of it was never alive to begin with. Frost things walk the Frozen Ruins, shimmering hunters cross the Glass Crater and the Salt Flats, raider gangs work the roads and junk gets up off the scrapyard floor. Sentry bots are still walking patrol routes that ended two hundred years ago. Nobody told them.
Frostbitten
froze in the first winter and kept walking. The ice is the only thing holding it together.
Dust Stalker
the heat shimmer moving against the wind is not heat.
Raider
owns a rifle, a gas mask and a grudge against anyone with more than that.
Scrap Golem
a junkyard that learned to stand up. Every plate you knock off is one less wall.
05
Mini-bosses guard the hotspots
Out in the wastes, 32 named mini-bosses sit on the good spots: hot pools, crystal patches and lairs worth the detour. Each one is tougher than a whole pack and has one simple, memorable habit. Their drops beat anything else nearby, which is exactly how they get you to walk over and say hello.
- Grub the Gnasher: ate a whole caravan, wagon wheels included
- Sgt. Icicle: froze his company so they would never desert
- The Tallyman: keeps an abacus of skulls, and you owe him
- Magnet Mags: pulls the whole yard toward her when she's cross
- Old Greenteeth: still has a boat hull stuck in his back
06
The codex fills as you go
Every creature you run into gets a page in the codex, with its model, its family, a line of lore and where it lives. Kill one and the page fills in properly, with field notes a survivor might scribble down after a close call and the elements it hates. Bosses get their own tab, with the class skills that counter them.
There are over 150 regular creatures to find, plus the mini-bosses and the bosses, spread across ten biomes, the dungeons and the towers. Filling the whole thing is a long project. Some entries you'll only get by standing somewhere you really shouldn't.
See it for yourself
The Bible only shows you the edges. The rest you find out in a run, with friends, under a green sky.