Harbinger tree

The harbinger tree is a tree added by the Anomaly DLC that consumes meat and corpses to fuel their own growth.

Occurrence[edit]

Harbinger trees can spawn randomly from an event after activating the void monolith, spawned by the void provocation psychic ritual, or can be planted via a harbinger seed which can be acquired as a quest reward or bought from traders.

Summary[edit]

Harbinger trees consume corpses, meat, and skulls placed around them. They can eat both rotten and fresh corpses, as well as all forms of raw meat (including insect, human, twisted). Harbinger trees will not consume pemmican or meals of any type.

Items fed to the harbinger tree are covered in fleshy roots, although this effect is merely cosmetic; they can still freely be hauled away or picked up. Every 5,000 ticks (1.39 mins), valid targets within the tree's consumption radius will be partially consumed:

Corpses will have random body parts digested, and will eventually be destroyed when no parts remain. All gear worn by consumed corpses is destroyed alongside them, similar to cremation.
Meat will simply be destroyed outright, with anywhere between 4-12 meat being consumed in any given interval.

Harbinger trees will consume nutrition even during their resting period. Growth rate is increased by 150% while the tree actively consuming something, regardless of the quantity or variety of targets. Its consumption radius increases as it grows, linearly interpolated from 3.9 tiles at or below 15% growth to 5.9 tiles at or above 85% growth.

	When you select a harbinger tree, a UI button for creating a corpse stockpile appears. This button creates a dumping stockpile around the tree, within the consumption radius of the tree. By default, it accepts almost all corpses, whether fresh or rotten: Humanlike corpses, except unnatural corpses Animal corpses Entity corpses By default, it does not accept: Mechanoid corpses

When fully grown and harvested, harbinger trees provide 30 twisted meat and a base amount of 15 bioferrite. Trees that are destroyed through other means will still yield twisted meat, but no bioferrite. Twisted meat yield scales linearly with the tree's growth progress and is unaffected by harvest yield modifiers from difficulty or a pawn's individual Plant Harvest Yield, but the amount of bioferrite harvested is affected by both.

Harbinger trees are not dangerous in any way and, despite their flavor text, do not cause any events or phenomena beyond consuming corpses and meat.

Despite both being dendrovores, thrumbos will not eat harbinger trees, while alphabeavers will.

Reproduction[edit]

Each harbinger tree tracks the nutrition it has consumed, setting a random growth threshold between 70 and 100 nutrition upon first creation. When a tree reaches its threshold, it will immediately spawn a new sapling, regardless of whether the original tree is fully grown. Its total consumed nutrition is then reset to 0, and its threshold is rerolled. This can be used to build large forests of harbinger trees to destroy corpses and gain resources. Note that rotten and desiccated corpses have 0 nutrition and thus do not contribute to the spawning of new trees. As a result, waiting too long to dispose of the corpses from a raid can lead to a massive loss of potential nutrition.

A fresh adult human corpse with no missing body parts will provide a harbinger tree 5.2 nutrition, meaning that between 13.46 and 19.23 corpses are needed for each new harbinger tree. A single piece of meat has a nutrition of 0.05, requiring between 1,400 and 2,000 meat total to spawn a new tree. The new tree will attempt to spawn near the one that created it, but it will appear elsewhere on the map if a nearby tile is not available. The closest a new tree will spawn is within 4 orthogonal tiles of the original. The new tree will not spawn within 2 tiles of a wall but can spawn adjacent to player-placed floors.

Analysis[edit]

Harbinger trees provide a low-tech, resource-free way to get rid of corpses without using fire or an electric crematorium. No labor is required except for that which is required to haul the corpses to the tree itself. Tribal or low-tech settlements may find it useful for reducing the number of potential shamblers on the map if a death pall occurs; while shamblers can still reanimate from corpses in the process of being consumed, they will often be weakened due to missing body parts that will not regenerate upon reanimation.

Later on, harbinger trees can be used as a source of twisted meat for mid- and late-game recipes like the juggernaut serum without having to fight and butcher dangerous entities like fleshbeasts. It is impractical to farm harbinger trees using meat farmed from ranching or hunting, although colonies experiencing massive raids may be able to meet their serum production needs off the yield from harbinger trees alone. A single fleshmass nucleus produces significantly more twisted meat in a more consistent manner, but requires regular suppression and defeating a fleshmass heart to acquire.

Typical growth times and daily bioferrite yield for an unfed harbinger tree can be found below:

Ground Type	Gravel	Soil	Rich Soil	Hydroponics
Fertility (%)	70	100	140	280
Real Grow Time (days)^[1]	21.72	18.46	15.38	N/A
Base Yield/day^[2]	0.69	0.81	0.98	N/A

↑ Actual days to grow, taking into account rest time.
↑ Per plant, assuming Crop Yield Multiplier of 1.0.
Note that Difficulty settings change the Crop Yield Multiplier.

Keeping the harbinger tree well-fed will dramatically increase overall yield. The fastest theoretical growth time - attainable by planting a harbinger tree on rich soil and feeding it constantly - would be 10.26 days, for a total yield of 1.47 bioferrite per day and 2.94 twisted meat per day.

Gallery[edit]

Each stage of Harbinger tree's growth cycle including a chopped stump. Note that a neighboring tree immediately starts consuming the dropped Twisted meat.
A freshly planted harbinger tree, with the corpse stockpile and consumption radius.
Harbinger tree consuming the desiccated corpse of a hare.
Harbinger tree consuming the rotten corpse of a turkey and a tortoise.
Harbinger tree consuming two stacks of muffalo meat.
Harbinger tree at 25% growth consuming a stack of muffalo meat.
Harbinger tree consuming a variety corpses and displaying the small blood splats effect
Harbinger tree now displaying the large blood splats part of the animation
The chopped stump of a fully grown Harbinger tree

Version history[edit]

Anomaly DLC Release - Added.
1.5.4083 — Harbinger trees now give bioferrite instead of wood when harvested.
1.5.4104 — Fix: Harbinger tree provocation not working on ambient horror mode.
? - Description changed from "[...] a flesh-like covering. [...]" changed to "[...] a flesh-like covering around a bioferrite skeleton. [...] The tree can be harvested for twisted meat and bioferrite. [...]".

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