Enemies

The steppe is not empty. Dust creatures live in burrows far from the spawn, and ancient War Golems sleep in the rubble of ruins. The creatures leave you alone until your factory gets loud. Then they come for the machines that make the noise. See Noise and Unrest for how that works.

Dust creatures

Three kinds of creature come out of the burrows. Which ones you meet depends on the world's unrest (0 to 100 %).

	Dust Crawler	Dust Spitter	Dust Brute
Appears from	Start	20 % unrest	50 % unrest
Health	20	15	150
Attack on players	Bite, 6 damage, close range	Spit, 5 damage, from up to 12 blocks	Smash, 25 damage
Damage to buildings	6 per second	4 per second	20 per second
Top speed (blocks/s)	7	5	4
Chases players up to	16 blocks	18 blocks	14 blocks

You have 100 health without armor, so a group of Crawlers is dangerous early on, and a Brute hits hard. The Spitter keeps its distance and stops to spit.

Creatures only attack what players have built. They leave terrain, ore fields, the bunker and landmarks alone.

Nests

Creatures live in Dust Burrows. There are no nests near the spawn (500 blocks by default). Further out they get more common, and large burrows appear. Nests never sit on water, mountains, ore fields or ruins.

	Dust Burrow	Large Dust Burrow
Size	3 × 3	5 × 5
Health	250	500
Healing	1 health per second	1 health per second
Guards	3 Dust Crawlers	4 Dust Crawlers
Extra guards from 20 % unrest	1 Dust Spitter	2 Dust Spitters
Extra guards from 50 % unrest	none	1 Dust Brute
Noise it takes in	60 per minute	120 per minute

• Guards stay near the nest and attack players who come close. Killed guards come back after 60 seconds while the nest stands.
• Healing: a damaged nest heals slowly. Finish it in one go, or it is back to full in a few minutes.
• Destroying a nest stops its attacks for good, but raises the unrest a little.
• Spreading: a nest that keeps hearing a lot of noise founds a new small nest every now and then, about 50 to 80 blocks away in open ground. New nests never appear right next to your buildings.
• Nests you have seen, and nests a powered Rangertower spots, are marked on your map.

Attack groups

Every nest in a noisy area takes in noise from its chunk. Once it has heard enough, it sends out a group:

1. The group sets off towards the loudest source of noise within 1000 blocks of the nest and picks a running building there as its target.
2. It marches at the speed of its slowest member. Anything in the way, such as a wall, it attacks until it breaks through.
3. At the target it attacks until the building is destroyed. Then it looks for another loud building nearby, then for any building within 32 blocks. If there is none, the group is done.

How big the group is depends on how much noise the nest heard and on the unrest:

• At least 3 creatures, at most 5 when the unrest is 0. The limit grows with the unrest up to 12 at 50 %.
• From 20 % unrest, every third creature is a Spitter, and from 50 % every sixth is a Brute.
• The same nest sends at most one group every 90 seconds.

Groups march and fight even when no player is near. Your towers shoot at them all the same. When you come close, the creatures appear and fight you too.

When a building is destroyed, its contents fall out. The building itself is lost. When the first group of a world sets off, players nearby see a short scene of the dust cloud (others get a notice and can watch it at the bunker terminal), and an attack warning goes off whenever buildings take damage (see Defense).

War Golems

Every ruin in the steppe has a guardian: a War Golem lying in a pile of rubble. When you come close for the first time, the rubble rises and the golem wakes up.

	War Golem	Elder War Golem
Where	Ruins closer than 800 blocks to the spawn	Ruins 800 blocks or further out
Health	500	1000
Attack on players	25 damage	40 damage
Damage to buildings	25 per second	40 per second
Healing	2 health per second	2 health per second
Drops	1 Research Capsule	2 Research Capsules

• Golems are territorial. They attack players within 4 blocks, chase you only up to 14 blocks, then walk back to their ruin.
• They attack buildings within 16 blocks of themselves, but they never march on your factory.
• A defeated golem stays defeated, and its ruin is free. Your map shows guarded and freed ruins.
• Redeem the capsules at the Outlander Test Site for alternative recipes (see Research Capsules).

Towers that reach a golem shoot at it, so building a tower in range is one way to wear it down.

Peaceful mode

A server operator can turn on peaceful mode in the world settings (Peaceful, see World Settings). In a peaceful world:

• Nests send no attack groups and do not spread.
• Nests have no guards.
• War Golems do not wake up and do not attack buildings. You cannot get Research Capsules from them.

Noise and unrest are still counted. The setting is read when the world starts.

See also

• Noise and Unrest
• Defense
• Weapons
• Armor
• Death and Respawn