The developers at Wube Software are finally showing off some enemies from upcoming expansion Factorio: Space Age, and I'm going to go ahead and say that they're one of the best alien monster designs I've seen in years. Radially symmetrical like starfish, the five-legged crawling Pentapods are alternately disgusting and delightful to watch in action.
Moving something like Factorio's already-extant Spidertrons, the pentapods have their own gruesomely gooey ecology and style of movement that makes them very disturbing to watch. There are wrigglers, smaller immature pentapods that squirm along the ground at you with teeth and claws. There are Strafers, mature specimens that keep at a distance and fire flying wrigglers at you. Finally, there are Stompers, huge armored mature pentapods that want to do just that to you.
The Pentapods will live on Gleba, the gooey morass planet matter first revealed a couple months ago. In a video released alongside the blog post on them, a decently well-armed engineer exhausts a small armory of bullets and rockets taking
a swarm of them down.
Gleba is just one of the five new planets that make up Space Age, an expansion that'll more than double the size of the base game while rearranging its content into a bigger, more impressive multiplanetary factory-building experience.
Wube says that the Pentapods will hunt you down not because of your pollution—like the base game's Biters—but because the organic crops you'll need to grow and harvest on Gleba are their favorite food source. The spores and smells of your factory are what will attract them. You'll also need to collect Pentapod eggs to make valuable biochambers, a kind of bioreactor for producing Gleba's industrial products.
Factorio will also get a free 2.0 update for all players alongside the release of the Space Age expansion. The update will feature smarter worker robots, new rails, a remote view, a new fluid system, and a raft of other upgrades and improvements to the already pretty dang upgraded-and-improved Factorio.
You can read the full Gleba Pentapods blog post on the Factorio website, which also lists where you can buy Factorio.
