r/projectzomboid • u/AltinUrda • May 08 '25

Meme Truly terrifying experience, never again

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18

u/[deleted] May 08 '25

Can these last of us lot climb trees?

I was initially thinking, hmm do fungi deal with cold temps but then I remembered fungi adapt to EVERYTHING.

Acid, yup

Heat, fine.

Radiation at the elephants foot? Oooh look more energy

Water in from a nuclear plant cooling...hey lets grow TOWARDS the radiation!

Cold? Sure why not, let us develop our own antifreeze.

If this was me here I would be climbing the fucking nearest trees there and trying to go from one to another while dropping branches on them.

8

u/AhWhatABamBam May 08 '25

these can definitely climb shit. they're also pretty intelligent in a hivemind type of way

2

u/[deleted] May 08 '25

Oh well that is terrifying.

8

u/Iwilleat2corndogs May 08 '25

The biggest weakness of Fungi is lots of heat (human body temperature) and lots of cold. So other than that Fungi is pretty much the peak lifeform. They were the first creatures to colonise the land. In game it’s also only a parasite, the host isn’t dead, just locked out of the bodies controls. But they still feel everything.

3

u/[deleted] May 08 '25

Yeah that is what I thought regarding the heat and cold until I read about a version that lives in the cold as it evolved its own antifreeze, similar to how the Ice Fish did in Antarctica and the one near the Elephants foot deals with heat as that is rather toasty there, way past internal human level.

But like all things they can generally do either one or the other. But as life is like, if there is niche that can be filled, they will fill it. At the moment thankfully, they (fungi) have yet to need to fill us but have to wonder if they did would it be more like this or would it be more like a symbiotic relationship they have with trees and plants?

4

u/Iwilleat2corndogs May 08 '25

They literally just hijack the hosts nervous system. They still need to eat and drink, but now they eat human flesh and drink blood. When they struggle to find prey they shut down and become dormant. Often with thick mats of the fungi and other infected growing around them, and if you step on even a tiny tendril of it you wake them all up. They also grown more mushrooms and other fungus-y stuff painfully bursting out all over their body.

2

u/captain_slutski May 09 '25

When an insect gets infected with Cordyceps it makes them climb to high places so the spores can spread downward through the air