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Pinaceae v1.5

“Long before there were flowers, there were plants bearing cones.”

You know those common trees that you have seen around? The ones with the thin needle-like leaves and the intricate cones? Those are members of the Pinaceae, the ancient order of conifers that once were the only kind of seed bearing tree in the world. However, mutations will inevitably occur, like the first moss spore that grew into a vascular plant that could pump water throughout its body effortlessly, or the first crop of seeds on a spore bearing plant, or the first flower that was shown to the world.

And like that very strange event.

It all started when a couple of protons collided inside a star. A generation one hypergiant, to be more exact. This nuclear reaction produced a neutrino, which was soon after ejected out of the star at nearly the speed of light. This nearly massless particle flew at its enormous velocity through space, occasionally hitting a planet or two and going right through, for about 13.2 billion years.

This is when Earth comes in. At this time, life on the planet was flourishing. There was a huge diversity of organisms, and the first flowers were opening up, showing off their sweet nectar and fantastic colors to hungry insects.

There was a plant in present-day Australia (at that time Earth had just one continent) known now as the Bunya-Bunya pine, and its buds were ready to burst open with this season’s growth. Several buds were forming seed cones.

And then our neutrino came sailing by.

It struck a certain bud that had already been damaged by a parasitic wasp. The cone still maturing inside was hit particularly hard, its very DNA was rewritten entirely.

This cone only contained one seed that grew quickly, until it became about the size of a soccer ball, which is when it launched itself off using a modified pulse jet engine. The seed then angled itself upward and shot straight up into the atmosphere.

Soon after leaving orbit, the seed began to become remarkably intelligent, sending electrical impulses around to certain ports, and building large amounts of cellulose and other materials, gathered through an intensely efficient version of photosynthesis that could operate in the vacuum of space. When it was done constructing its new body, it began to build more of itself inside large modified cones. But when these seeds matured, instead of sending them off into the infinite void, the parent plant sent a pulse of neutrinos at its offspring. Instead of phasing through their targets, the neutrinos were stopped by a strange organ that interpreted the neutrinos as a sort of signal, a form of communication. These plants began to colonize the galaxy, and haven’t stopped since.

Then came the time of the other factions. The terrans were exploring the galaxy for the first time, and had just found out about the reds. Feeling confident about themselves (are all factions this weak?), they flew into the territory of the plants with the goal of taking readings and learning more about them. However, one of the ships had been damaged slightly, and had been leaking neutrinos for a while.

When the plants, now named the Pinaceae to show how similar they are to Earth’s conifers, picked up this leak, they interpreted it as a hostile threat. They flew and ejected huge globs of bosons at the small terran fleet. The small white vessels were completely unprepared for this level of hostility, so they attempted to get out as quickly as possible. But that one ship was still leaking, so hundreds of small plants rooted on nearby asteroids quickly became alert, and fired upon their enemy with explosive seeds.

This destroyed several vessels, including the one with the leak, which immediately cancelled the attack. The remaining ships kept on fleeing, with rumors of deadly space pines tagging along.


Hopefully my lore is not complete garbage.

Anyway, this mod adds a plant faction into the game called the Pinaceae. They regenerate very quickly, have immense resource capacity, and have almost all useful items suspended in cones. They are unlocked from the start.

The Pinaceae don’t have a great diversity of weapons, but the weapons they do have are quite dangerous if used correctly. Keep in mind that this is in no way an overpowered faction, and almost all the weapons in the arsenal are not too mainstream.

Here are some of the featured modules:

--Boson Condensation Annex: Holds large amounts of bosons, and ejects them out at the same velocity as the craft. Dangerous if it hits. (Have fun breaking tournament mode AI :P)

--Mycorrhizae: Gathers resources efficiently, but without it, the plant is unable to gather resources.

--Acceleration brick: A unique and simple shape of thruster.

--Cellulose: Basic hull that can store many resources. It regenerates very quickly, but is unable to tile (Everyone loves heptagons and GEM_2's!).

--Flak: Fires a modified seed that explodes, scattering glowing hot cotyledons everywhere. Not too reliable on large ships, but works wonders on swarms (Try it on teleporting factions!).

--Bark: Slow to regenerate, but is very light and durable, and is made of squares instead of heptagons.

--Center: Basic command module that cannot gather resources on its own.

--Piercing Shot: Fires a potent boson that penetrates deep into ships hulls. It has a very high mass, and takes a few seconds to reload.

--Ultra-Purger: Causes a massive explosion, dealing severe damage to anything nearby. Takes a very long time to reload.

--Pollen Gun: Fires great volumes of short ranged pollen at the enemy. Low damage, good for distracting point defense.

--Taproot: The ultimate weapon of the Pinaceae, this multidimensional root cuts through ships' hulls instead of dirt. It's also an incredibly efficient resource gathering machine. It CANNOT fit in a cone.

And finally we come to cones. This faction does everything with their cones. You can’t put most weapons and other non-hull modules on the basic hull of this faction, they must be put in cones. Yellow ports can connect with blue ports (not including Acceleration Bricks).

In more technical terms for you modders out there, I put WEAPON_OUT ports all over a long rectangle, and made all weapons small rectangles with WEAPON_IN ports, since neither WEAPON_OUT or WEAPON_IN ports can attach to normal ports (Think of Tinkrell modular cannons. In fact, the modular cone weapon functions exactly like one).

To start a cone, pick up a cone shaft. If you want to increase the length of the cone, take another one and scale it up enough. Next, connect the blue ports on scales and other things to the yellow ports of the cone shaft.

There is only one weapon that doesn't fit in a cone: the Taproot.


To do list:

--Add more weapons

--Add more ships and plants

--Await feedback


This is my first modded faction, and I couldn’t have made it without the Reassembly Discord (it is fun to lurk). If you want to join, here’s the link: https://discord.gg/BM4eeqS

Want to make plants for the mod? Message me (my name is Debris) on discord (see the link above) and I will send you the local files so it is easy to add the ships.

The comments section is always open for constructive criticism, bug reports, suggestions, and other things.

You may notice that several of the plant names given to ships are in different families than the Pinaceae.
Shhhh.