So I’ve been playing a lot of a really good game called Pacific Drive recently. And you might be familiar with this game and if you are, you at this point are probably wondering “well wait a minute MK, you literally do not have a body in this game how on EARTH do you have a mod idea that fits on this forum” and to that I say “you’ll see” uh and by that I mean you’ll mostly hear, but either way bear with me.
and to anyone who isn’t playing along at home… allow me to get you familiar with the basic gameplay loops of Pacific Drive:
Mostly… This game is about driving a car:
As you can see its very much in the vein of games that make you manage your inventory manually, forcing you to think about how to squeeze the absolute most out of the space available to you! And if you remember the title of this post, I’ll give you THREE guesses as to where I’m going with this. Got your guesses?
So the first thing you see when you put that weird lil VR headset on at the beginning of a new game with this theoretical mod is this:
Yeah you eat the stuff. You gobble up every item you can see and then you suffer the consequences [horny]. Uh and if you’re familiar with this game you might be thinking “damn! thats a REALLY big inventory to start the player with!” and yeah, it is. because it gets no direct upgrades. making the larger backpacks upgrades your arm bag, because yes, I imagined that the player’s arm is fat enough to like, have a fanny pack strapped to it and for that to actually work, in this scenario. it goes from the fanny pack size, to one of the small backpacks you can find in the world, and finally it upgrades to the smallest backpack you would ordinarily start the game with as a tailbag. (yes, the player character is TF’d into a fatfur upon entering the zone) And that would be a LOT of storage for the player to have that much unfettered access to. Well, its not unfettered. Because this mod would take the very direct approach to inventory management that this game has and mmmoostly strip it away from you. You interact with the inventory directly by swallowing things into it. where it goes after that happens is mostly up to gravity and chance. You can still assign stuff to quick slots and use those things as you’d expect, but putting items away does come with a nice, hearty Gwlrk when you do. back down the hatch it goes, right back to the spaces it took up when you originally assigned it. Where anything else lands when swallowed is non deterministic, and you can’t move it directly unless its to, or already in, your more conventional arm/tail slots. Here’s a visual demonstration of this that I mocked up:
As you can see it’s a bit of a mess in there. LOTS of wasted space, though the bottom of that gut of yours looks pretty well packed. This is what happens when you just swallow stuff down without giving it a second thought! And that second thought is the “slosh button” you might have seen, bound here to the “S” key for demonstrational purposes. I’ve actually since thought better of it being an entire new keybind, it functions as sorting a normal inventory… kinda… and so it would probably work fine as the sort just being contextually different depending on if it’s your own stomach or a tube steel shelf. maybe “slosh/sort” for the alliteration? idk. ANYWAY when you do this “slosh” action, your stomach makes a shitload of noise, all of the items that aren’t tightly packed in already slosh around, also making noise, and slide into a hopefully… usually more efficient configuration. I imagine it taking at most three sloshes to get a good packing. Um but I hope you like burps because every time you give your stomach the plaintive rubbing needed to achieve good inventory management, all that trapped air, (the areas in purple):
assuming it’s actually freed up, is all added together, and that determines how long you burp for. Up from teeny lil suppressed -urp- 's up to like earth shaking, anomaly attention grabbing, seconds long belches if you ate fast and didn’t take time to make more room.
On the topic of sounds, thats what makes up most of this mod’s actual fetish content. Swallowing sounds every time you gobble up an item, a distinct mix of sloshing sounds depending on the contents of your stomach, belches of varying power, groans, moans, bubbling and gurgling depending on how full your stomach is, the aforementioned sounds that play when you slosh, belches for when you burp up an item involuntarily, growls for when you’re getting hungry, AND gurgles and groans for when you’re actively digesting things, AND and burps when an item or stack of items finish digesting. Yeah those last three things are also stuff this mod would do, and that I am going to discuss here, in the order they were mentioned.
Starting with! Belching items up involuntarily. That sounds like it kinda sucks, right?? Well the base game isn’t afraid to just take shit from you normally, so if you really feel that way, then the people you should complain to are Ironwood, and not me. Regardless! They exist to force you to engage with the inventory sorting system, and act as a sort of inherent risk/reward system for reeeeeeeaaaally stuffing that fat gut as full as you possibly can. Yeah, the liklihood you belch stuff up increases as you get more and stuffed. Like so:
Now, these are just the probabilities for instances of involuntary item belching outside forces instigate. These numbers are lower for when you’re… say, rolling your car side over side as you plummet off a cliff. if YOU slam on the brakes, or. say. exploit a quirk your car has to get a LOT of acceleration, then like. You know what you have done, and you might lose some items if you’re not careful. And they aren’t like. Deleted or anything, when you’re outside the car, the item just spawns at your face level, gets flung away from you by the force of the belch, and you can just waddle over, pick it up off the ground… maybe wash it off first… and then swallow it back down and go about your looting. If you’re inside the car, the first thing a belched item (or stack of items) does is go into your hands if they’re empty. If they are not empty. They appear just out the driver side window, inherit the current velocity of the car, and then physics takes over from there. So try not to swallow anything important before you, for instance, make a break for a gateway. I have some math I came up with for handling items that occupy multiple regions of likelihood, and also I have a vaugely logic based sense of how your stomach “chooses” to regurgitate items while it is under duress. And some other numbery stuff, like cooldowns between chances to belch items up, but I have written too much as it is, I won’t bore you with that level of specifics unless you like. Ask me to.
Moving onto the last major mechanic that this mod dreams of one day being real:
hunger. You need to eat now, to not die. Pacific Drive’s survival mechanics are pretty damn thin and while I don’t per se have a problem with that; (I think too much depth would sincerely detract from the intended experience of this game.) I saw an opportunity to add another mechanic that depend survival a bit and gives the player more direct stomach based interactions with the world. One new bar to manage aint gonna kill you. In fact, if you’re collecting diligently enough, it will for the most part be a… admittedly very mild… buff. Your hunger will tick down at a commiserately fast rate, compared to the normal flow of time in the game. It will not stop ticking down while you’re in the garage, but like time in the garage, it also will decrease MUCH more slowly. So what happens when you start to digest stuff? Well the digestion slot itself behaves kinda like a second hand slot. it can hold up to one stack of items at a time, or one item of any size. And when you put something in it, it starts to dissolve and become… more you. If you are not at full hunger already, as the item loses durability, fractions of a percentage point of your hunger bar fill. Digestion is relatively quick for stacks of resources, but if you decided to wolf down a whole tire or a car panel and churn it up, you might be working on that item for a while. This has its ups and downs. You can’t belch out anything being digested, so it might come in handy as a pinch hitter item slot, especially if it’s something REALLY big like a door, or an engine. or… say… a storage item. Thats a pretty out there concept but if you bring some repair materials, you might just be able to manage bringing a roof rack storage along for the ride, hork it up whenever you need the room, touch it up w/ a torch or slap some repair glop on it, gulp it back down and get moving again. But, be careful with that strat. If you DO churn up that whole roof rack storage? Everything inside it is getting belched out all at once, no dice rolls to get out of jail free. and uh. Good luck figuring out how to store all that it if you really had it full. One hell of a belch comin out of you too. Also, the damage type your stomach deals. Probably to the suprise of no one… is corrosive. So yes, that means you can churn open goldshells of the correct type. If you ARE full when you digest items, they will instead give you weak health regeneration for the duration of their digestion. Its not powerful enough to out heal even mild radiation, but if you really gorge yourself on everything the zone has to offer, you will DEFINITELY use fewer medkits over the course of a playthough. Oh and that reminds me. Food still heals you directly when you eat it. Putting it in your digest slot basically just uses it as normal but hands free, and it will restore a chunk of your hunger meter per item, more if it’s an MRE. Medkits however. will just be destroyed by the digestion process, netting you little or no healing at all if you’re not already full.
And thats about it, the. EXTREMELY long and short of it. As you can tell I’ve given this a lot of thought. And I wanna close my opening post of this thread with some fun facts about this mod that have occurred to me in the process of cooking up this wild ass idea, but I couldn’t fit anywhere else in this post:
- I originally wanted the stomach to be even larger than this, like, comparable in total block count to the roof storage racks, but space limitations in the UI and me wanting other mechanics in the mod limited how huge it can be. Maybe a difficulty option? upgrade tree? Lose your arm/tail slot for an even more cavernous stomach to store stuff in? Pneumatube style hammerspace belly?
- really this mod is like, an eructophilia and stomach sounds fetish generator powered by object vore.
- If you are electrocuted and have a conductive goldshell in your belly, you take slightly reduced damage, and the goldshell is opened!
- this game really loves customizable difficulty settings, so maybe there could be tweakable factors for this mod? I’ve thought about like, total hunger meter size being adjustable, whether or not you can throw things up at all being toggleable (even though it would always sound like belching, the implication is kinda unavoidable) how much hunger items give you per tick of digestion. ect.
- not all items are digestible, but any object you can carry in your hands, you can also put in your gob and swallow. This includes stuff like anchors, upgrade kits, that one anomaly from the DLC. anything
- Dumpster pearls wont nourish you, but they will slowly break open if you digest them. Like any other storage item tho, you belch up its contents all at once when they break
- cosmetic items like paint, garage decorations and decal kits all digest for more hunger meter and last longer in your stomach than normal resources.
And thats it! Thanks for reading my ramblings, I hope you enjoyed them if nothing else ever comes of them.