Corrupted obelisk

Corrupted obelisk

A large metallic pillar that emanates a putrid psychic energy. The pillar hums ominously and appears to be increasing in activity. It's not clear what will happen when it reaches its full capacity.
You can send colonists to suppress the obelisk to prevent it from activating. You can also mark the obelisk for study to try to learn its purpose and perhaps make use of it.
You can attack the obelisk to destroy it, but doing so may unleash unnatural and dangerous phenomena.

Base Stats

Type

Entity – Advanced

HP

3000

Flammability

0%

Building

Size

3 × 3

Passability

impassable

Cover Effectiveness

75%

Destroy yield

 1

Containment

Knowledge Gain

2 Advanced

Study Interval

120,000 ticks (2 in-game days)

Min Monolith Level For Study

1

Technical

defName

WarpedObelisk_Duplicator

The Corrupted obelisk is one of three Obelisks that can appear in the Anomaly DLC. It is able to clone your colonists.

Occurrence

The corrupted obelisk can spawn in the map as a Major Threat.

Summary

Like all Obelisks, the Corrupted Obelisk can be studied for advanced anomaly research, and must be regularly suppressed to prevent its full activation. While being studied or suppressed, there is a chance the Obelisk triggers a cloning event. The chance of this event occurring is on average, once every 24 hours of either suppression or study.

There are 4 possible occurrences and one is selected randomly when the obelisk is triggered:

• Hostile Duplicate: The duplicate is hostile and will immediately attack. The stronger your colonist the stronger your foe. Can be captured and recruited!

• Cloned colonist with Multiple Organ Decay: Several of the duplicate's vital organs have "Organ decay", which causes increasing pain and reduced efficiency and will eventually kill the pawn. Known cure: Replace the decaying organs.

• Cloned colonist with Duplication Sickness: Both the original and the duplicate suffer from lowered consciousness, gets worse over the course of a few days, with the final stage being max 10% consciousness while both are alive. Known cures: Terminate one of the two, Unnatural Healing from creepjoiners and Healer Mech Serum.

• Cloned colonist with Crumbling Mind: The duplicate will begin losing all their skills and have a locked consciousness of 60%, After 2-3 days the condition becomes permanent and incurable. Colonists that reach the final stage will be unable to do Skilled Labor, Dumb Labor, Caring or Intellectual Jobs. Known cures for Crumbling Mind: healer mech serum; Unnatural Healing from creepjoiners; killing them, removing their skull, and reviving with resurrector mech serum or death refusal. The bioregeneration cycle from biosculpting pods is not a cure; however, pawns can be placed in cryptosleep caskets to prevent the crumbling mind from progressing until a cure can be found. Once the condition progresses to Crumbled Mind, it cannot be cured.

The duplicated colonist will have identical mood thoughts, Ideoligion, xenotype, injuries, and any ongoing illnesses or drug effects (including pregnancy), but will have no equipment and no artificial body parts except for psylinks and fleshmass organs. Any artificial body parts will be replaced with the healthy, natural form, including all subparts that may be removed by the artificial part (e.g. a prosthetic arm will be replaced with an organic arm, including the hand and fingers).

Notably, no social opinions are copied to the duplicate, not even familial relationships. There is also no special relationship between the original and duplicate.

If the Activity Level of the Corrupted Obelisk reaches 100% it will explode, dropping a Shard and causing hostile duplicates to spawn all around your colonists. These duplicates will spawn with the same traits, backstories, skills, and health conditions of your own colonists, but without any gear or bionics. Duplicate spawn randomly in proximity to any colonist. This process will not duplicate children unless child raiders are enabled in storyteller settings, in which case a minimum age of 10 still applies.

The amount of duplicates that spawn is based on raid points. The obelisk has a budget equal to 0.6 times the colony's total raid points. The cost of each duplicate is calculated as follows from the colony's total raid points (without the 0.6 multiplier).

Graph	Raid points	Cost of each duplicate
	35	50
	500	50
	1,000	100
	5,000	200
	10,000	200

Raid points	Total duplicates
35	1
167	3
500	6
1000	6
2000	10
5000	15
9667	30

After 10 Anomaly research at the obelisk a duplication button will appear (30 day cooldown). After 30 Anomaly research at the obelisk, a deactivation button will appear. The obelisk costs 2 Shards to deactivate. A deactivated obelisk will not need to be suppressed, but can no longer duplicate pawns.

Creepjoiners cannot be duplicated, and will instead show a message to that effect.

Analysis

As the most desirable of the three obelisks. The corrupted obelisk is ideal for duplicating colonists to convert to ghouls. Hostile duplicate can be captured and turned to ghoul without recruiting. Ghoul infusion would cure organ decay; crumbling mind and duplicate sickness can be cured by killing the ghoul and resurrecting them. Be wary of using this solution for a duplicate where the pawn is deathless, such as a Sanguophage as they will just go into a coma.

If you decide to keep the duplicated colonist human, such as those with high psylink level, have organs or prisoners ready in case of Organ Decay. A Cryptosleep casket can be used to preserve a pawn with Crumbling Mind if you lack a Healer mech serum. In case of duplicate sickness however, the only solution is to kill one of the pawns.

In case of a hostile duplicate, you can use a psychic or shard shock lance to avoid accidentally killing them. Alternatively, you can make the duplicator wear a war mask and damage them beyond their pain shock threshold before wearing it. As the duplicate doesn't have any mask, they would be immediately downed.

Alternatively, you can use the death refusal ritual to cure Crumbling Mind, Duplication sickness and Organ Decay. Simply put Death Refusal on the new pawn, kill them (destroy their brain in case of Crumbling Mind via rip scanner or extract skull) and resurrect them. They will come back healthy.

If you attacked the obelisk, it's activity level will rise. When it reaches full, it will duplicate up to 30 of you colonists depending on raid points, all of them being hostile to you. However this can be abused to mass cloning good pawns by following the method below:

• Have your good pawn anesthetized
• Send all other pawn (except ghouls and prisoners) on a caravan resting right outside your colony
• Have a ghoul attack obelisk or wait for it to reach 100% to trigger the duplication
• Since the only colonist on the map is anesthetized, all clones would appear unconscious.
• Have your caravan come back and capture all the unconscious duplicates.

When duplicated, the effects of void touched, psychic abilities, and xenogenes are preserved. Therefore, it may be worth waiting to complete the Anomaly DLC and gaining all psychic abilities, before massively duplicating one colonist and destroy the obelisk. In this way, you can get a lot of incredibly powerful colonists.

Like all obelisks, the pawn studying and suppressing the Corrupted obelisk should be the pawn intended to receive its effect, not necessarily the main researcher. This is to take advantage of the random interaction effect when suppressing or studying.

Counterintuitively, nether the intellectual skill, the Entity study rate, or the Research speed affect on the speed of dark study due to the 2-day cooldown. The only things that affect this speed is the Study efficiency, how quickly you study after the cooldown expire, and the obelisk activity level. This means the best possible (but very risky) study speed for the obelisk is to study it at 99% activity level, suppress it down to 59%, and come back exactly 2 days later to study it again at 99%. This method gives 2 advanced/day research points (2.5 advanced/day with voidsight serum, scaled by difficulty level).

Brute-force Destruction

While obelisks generally have a positive effect on your colony, it is possible to destroy them by dealing enough damage before they take effect. You can do this with pawns wielding frag grenades. You'll need 4 pawns to destroy the Corrupted obelisk without triggering adverse effects.

• Suppress the obelisk down to 0%.
• Melee attack the obelisk until its activity level increase (not the activity level itself) rises above +20%/day. The obelisk health should be at 80% or lower by this point
• Suppress the obelisk to 0% again.
• Melee attack the obelisk, this time until it almost reach 100%.
• Move all pawns to a safe distance and start throwing grenades at the obelisk at the same time.
• After 1 or 2 throws, the obelisk should have been destroyed.

Alternatively, you can use high-explosive shells or a diabolus to destroy the obelisk.

Version history

• Anomaly DLC Release - Added.

---

Entities

Basic

Void monolith • Harbinger tree • Fleshbeast (Fingerspike, Trispike, Toughspike, Bulbfreak) • Sightstealer • Shambler • Ghoul • Gorehulk • Death pall

Advanced

Pit gate • Dreadmeld • Fleshmass heart • Fleshmass nucleus • Chimera • Devourer • Noctolith • Noctol • Revenant • Metalhorror • Nociosphere • Blood rain • Twisted obelisk • Corrupted obelisk • Warped obelisk • Golden cube • Unnatural corpse

Ultimate

Void structure • Void node