Enfilade's Way of the Mush

Introduction and Objectives

Being Mush is the hardest job on the ship: you are outnumbered, despised, and are subject to a number of restrictions intended to limit/eliminate your ability to propagate. It only takes a moment of lapsed judgment or bad timing to expose your true nature, after which you will probably be violently assaulted. Inactive or detrimental comrades make your mission even harder than they do for the humans.

But all of those chains and burdens are necessary to restrain the sheer awesomeness that is a Mush. It is the most important role in game, and embracing it when it is forced upon you will improve your voyage significantly. Herein you will find my thoughts and suggestions for how to make the most of a moldy situation.

Mush (the game) is a kinda-cooperative endeavor in that the humans are trying to make it behave like a PvE (player vs. environment), but the Mush make it a PvP (player vs. player). Your job is to sustain the PvP for as long as possible - you create the chaos that disrupts the order necessary to survive into the late game.

You can achieve victory through two avenues: Destruction of the Daedalus or infecting Sol or Eden. The former is achieved by either compromising the hull (not something you can do directly - caused by hunters and bad takeoffs/landings) or having only Mush on board. The latter is achieved by surviving until game end. You will earn more glory with a fast win, but it will usually require more risk.

Basic Abilities

First, let's look at the tools at your disposal. There are a suite of skills available only to you, little mushling.

• Extract (2AP): This creates a spore (ex nihilo?) and stores it for later use. It is Secret, which means that the action won't appear in the logs unless a person or a camera is in the room at the time. The action will make you dirty, even if you have the apron in your inventory. The entire mush team can produce a total of 4 spores each day (until certain research is completed), and each one can carry a maximum of 2 at any time. Spores are how you convert other players, so you need a steady supply if you want to subvert the human team this way.




• Infect (1AP): This uses one of your stored spores and transfers it to a targeted human in the same room. It is a Covert action, which means only cameras or a person with the Observant skill can detect it. In order to convert a human to Mush, they need to be infected 3 times (4 after certain research is completed). However, each Mush can only infect once per day (twice with a certain skill), so coordinating targets is important.




• Sabotage (2AP): This action has a chance to make a targeted piece of machinery in the same room malfunction and require repairs. It is a percentage chance that improves after each failure; there is a certain skill that improves this chance. Note that this is secret, so any spectators will log your attempt. Use this ability with caution: NERON will not announce sabotaged equipment, unlike randomly damaged equipment, and if someone is on call to fix it immediately, they will see that you were there at the time. One way to camouflage a sabotage is wait until there are several breakages not yet located and time your action at the beginning of a cycle, when random breakage occurs.




• Mutate (3AP): The ever-popular "transform into a repulsive killbeast" trick, this irreversible action sacrifices your cover and makes you a huge target. On the plus side, you will immediately heal a bit, and your hits will do some extra damage (probably +1-2); plus, you get a permanent guarding stance, which means humans must exit the room the way they entered. The downsides? You lose all spores stored on you and can no longer extract; you drop all items in your inventory and cannot pick anything up again; you lose access to all of your skills except for Sabotage; and you remove all doubt as to your identity. This should generally be a last resort, as humans will not hesitate to attack and kill you afterward. Although, it could make a great distraction under the right circumstances...

Furthermore, your physiology makes you immune to hunger and morale loss (this means you need to eat and seek morale boosting regularly to appear human). You can see the properties of fruits and drugs regardless of your human skills. However, you have a strong reaction to water: showering causes you damage.

Advanced Mush Skills

Additional tricks and traits can be accumulated as you advance up the Mush skill tree. Some give you new actions to use, some make your basic skills better, and some open up strange situational opportunities. Spread some mycelium and get comfy - there's a lot to cover here. See the page on Mush skills for specific information about each skill.

• Phagocyte: Other than sleeping, receiving missions from the captain, or spending cycles with someone who has the Logistics Expert skill, this is your only way to recover AP faster than usual. You are essentially converting the 2 AP you spent creating the spore into energy and health. It's not a bad trade, especially if you've taken damage from showers or combat. However, this skill is not strictly necessary. The aforementioned energy-gaining methods can be used instead, and you can get healed either in medbay or with a medkit or bandages. Plus, sacrificing a spore becomes more costly as the game progresses; every one you eat is one less infecting the humans. Take this skill as a young Mush just in case, but with experience you can cope without it.




• Fungal Kitchen: Infecting by hand is a slow process because you can only do it once a day, generally. However, Fungal Kitchen infects a ration so that the person who eats it will gain a spore. The neat thing is that to the humans, all rations look the same, and when they go to pick one up, they will get a trapped one if it is available. (Mush will see two piles and can choose which to pick up.) You can target standard rations, cooked rations, alien steaks, fruit, coffee, and pills. You can also place more than one spore on a single item.
  
  Note, however, that cooking will kill the spore, as will freezing a standard ration. Furthermore, if Chun or a fellow Mush eats the trapped item, the spore is lost. This method is not guaranteed to work as well as manual infection, and it can require more social engineering; however, it poses a significant threat to an efficient ship by making all energy- and morale-restoring items potential infection vectors. People may not let Stephen use his Chef points if they think he's Mush, or they may put a camera in the refectory rather than a dorm or research location. Pills are often gobbled without thought, and medbay is not a priority camera room.




• Traitor: Successful ships will need to find and explore planets in order to restock oxygen, fuel, and food, as well as find star map fragments (more about that later). Each encounter on a planet has a list of possible outcomes, each with different probabilities. This skill makes it more likely for the bad stuff to happen to the away team - alien attacks, random damage, getting lost, losing items, etc. This is good because you're denying the humans vital resources and potentially injuring/killing them. Plus, you don't have to do anything else other than be part of the expedition. That's also the downside - you, too, could get lost or perish. (This can be partially mitigated by carrying stuff like the rope and the compass, but be careful about looking too eager!) Plus, in order to make this skill worthwhile, you would need to be a likely candidate for expeditions, which means having access to relevant skills such as Pilot (Hua, Jin Su, Roland, Terrence, Frieda), Survivalist (Frieda, Chao, Hua), Botanist (Ian, Hua), and Diplomat (Janice, Finola, Andie). The more you have, the more likely you'll have a seat reserved on the Icarus; note that pilots often take priority because unless the BIOS crew lock is changed, only they can launch the shuttle.
  
  More problematic is that if you are part of enough bad missions, the humans will start to suspect that one of you is a traitor. This is bad because it provides them with a very small list to check against other suspicious behavior on board, and if they're organized enough, they may start to rotate people off in the hope of finding the bad luck charm. This isn't concrete, however, because the RNG is the ultimate power here, but you risk giving the humans another piece of the puzzle when you use this skill. Special note: This skill takes effect if you part of the away team but do not actually go (e.g., when you lack a spacesuit on an oxygenless planet).




• Anonymush: That colored bar at the top of the screen is an omniscient announcer letting everyone know how many humans and how many mush are alive and dead. The game starts with 14 humans and 2 Mush, but from there, the Mush can spread throughout the ship. Each time a green icon turns yellow, the crew's anxiety cranks up a notch, and the hunt intensifies. But what if you could convert people unbeknownest to everyone? This skill has the potential of lulling the humans into a false sense of security, unaware of the growing fungal threat. It should never be taken at the beginning of the game. Everyone knows that there are two Mush, and taking this informs the humans that you just wasted a slot. Instead, newly converted Mush should take this - but only if they are online shortly after being turned. This requires careful timing to limit the chances that a human sees the change in the crew bar before the mushling can pick the skill. If the humans notice and report it, pick something else because the opportunity is gone.




• Hard Boiled: In your line of work, you are likely to trade blows at some point. This trait makes it harder for those humans to eradicate you - pretty straightforward. It might stack with the Plastenite Armor item, so if you can grab it, you'll be a hard nut to crack. (Note that it might also cancel your skill. It is a little buggy.) The biggest downside is that it only stops combat damage, so showers, random injuries, and expeditions will take their full toll. It has limited use, however, in that it doesn't expand your abilities and is only useful if you're directly attacked, which often means that your attacker(s) are fairly certain about your ill intentions and will kill you anyway. A safe pick for novice Mush, but it has only situational usefulness.




• Saboteur: Another straightforward bonus, this one's utility depends on how much you plan on meddling with equipment. If sabotage is an important part of your plan, then take this for sure. All of the caveats I mentioned in the action description apply here; the advantage this perk provides is that you're more likely to succeed with less energy expenditure. It's entirely random, however, so don't depend too heavily on this. [I wouldn't recommend taking this except for experimenting.]




• Demoralize: Humans are such weak things; they require regular feeding, medical attention, oxygen, and morale. Sure, we appreciate the first two things and grudgingly require the third, but the last thing is what separates us from them. Their fragile minds can only take so much distress before they snap and are driven to self-destruction. Thanks to this skill, we can help them with that. Demoralize is useful because as the game progresses, crew morale erodes - they lose two each cyle (only one if Mankind's only hope is alive), one for each death, and possibly some from certain foods. If you can determine that someone is low on morale and can make contact with them away from cameras, you can likely kill them with this ability. There are limits, the first of which is that death is not instantaneous when morale hits zero. They have until the end of the current cycle to recover some sanity, whether from food (such as bananas), comms bonuses, item usage, or character skills (Janice, Kuan-Ti, and Jin Su). So, try to drain right before the cycle ends. The other downside is that even if there is no camera in the room, your target will know that you did it. If they inform the others, that could be your death warrant. Make it count.
  
  This is a neat trick that gives you another way to threaten the lives of the humans, and it punishes them for not maintaining high morale throughout the crew. However, an efficient human team can minimize this tactic's effectiveness. Plus, it can be energy-intensive to use, especially if you don't have a good idea how much morale your target has. (A Mush Janice with this ability is dangerous because crew often share their morale level with her.) If you want to rely less on sporing people or just want another tool at your disposal, this is a great choice. It can also work well in late-game situations.




• Trapper: Human paranoia is well justified: Mush have the potential of making it dangerous for them to go about their daily routines. This ability takes advantage of the fact that humans have to interact with items in order to achieve their goals. Rooms like the refectory and the Icarus Bay are also tempting because important items are regularly stored there and often not under camera surveillance. The best part about this infection vector is that you don't have to be in the room as your target, which makes it harder to trace. Plus, even if you perish, your trapped spores will remain on the ship, possibly converting a human from beyond the grave.
  
  It's not all fun, though. If Chun or a Mush accesses the shelf first, the spore is wasted. Plus, you can't select who gets infected without some social engineering. It's also less hidden than manual sporing, so you have to be more careful about when and where you do it. Negatives aside, this is a great skill - it gives you another subtle way to spread spores that doesn't count against your 1 manual infection/day. Highly recommended.




• Transfer: Think less Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and more Freaky Friday. You become your target's character and vice versa. The following things will remain with their respective characters: glory earned, inventory, communication items, health and statuses, titles, action points, private and favorited conversations, knowledge of personally hidden items, commander-assigned missions (if any), and equipped premium outfit. Things that tranfer with the player include vanities (hearts, storm cloud, etc.), gold/silver/bronze standing, and the character level. Note that you will remain a Mush agent and keep your Mush skills; however, all spores the two characters had will be removed.
  
  Why do this? (a) You can deprive the humans of a character of your choosing, possibly two, including your original character. (b) You can escape imminent death/conversion with good timing. (c) You can earn a ludicrous amount of glory. Also, only the target knows for sure it happened, so it's the stealthiest ability available. Downsides? If your target is aware of this tactic and online when it happens, they may be able to kill you or convince others to do so, which leads to the next (potential) problem. (b) You have to kill your target afterward; otherwise, they will find a way to reveal you. Having to physically eliminate your target afterward to maintain secrecy does raise your profile and may be harder depending on the presence of certain skills (Ian's Pacifist, Chao's Crazy Eyes). (c) If you plan on living a while in your new skin, you need to pass yourself as that person. (d) If you transfer into an inactive character, the character will wake up painfully, which reveals the transfer in the logs.
  
  This is not a must-have skill, but it provides you with a way to substantially harm the humans that doesn't rely on conversion. No research can stop or slow this skill.
  
  

  My suggestions for how to best prepare for this transition are as follows: (a) reduce your health as low as you can (risky because damage can occur randomly during actions or at cycle changes) and spend as much of your AP/MP as possible. These will make it easier to kill the target after transfer and prevent retaliation. (b) Drop your radio in a different room. This will make it harder for the target to notify more than a person or two. (c) Conduct the transfer in as crowded a room as you can, and before switching, attack the target physically. After the transfer, kill the target (in your old character) in "self-defense". That way, the target dies silently, and the humans will think it was griefing or sloppy play.




• Splashproof: If cleanliness is close to godliness, then dirtiness is close to mushiness. Being unclean often can draw attention to you, but cleaning regularly can kill you. This skill removes that weakness entirely. This saves you 3-4 dmg per wash.
  
  There aren't any drawbacks to this ability other than the opportunity cost of another skill you could have taken instead. Note that being dirty often builds suspicion, and people may kill you regardless of how many showers you take. Furthermore, you could take Phagocyte as an alternative, thus healing the damage at the cost of a spore (this is a waste if you only spore once before cleaning, though). Alternatively, you could heal yourself/get healed and limit the number of times you need to shower.




• Doorman: Sabotaging is usually inefficient and easy for crew to trace. This skill is a partial remedy to both of those drawbacks by letting you break one door every day at no cost. Doors are good targets because they can be targeted on either side, thus making it less conclusive that you broke it than, say, an oxygen storage tank. However, you're still present when it breaks, which raises your profile. Timing this at the cycle or day change is probably your best bet to mask this as a random event. This skill, much like Saboteur, has limited usefulness, especially when compared with others.




• Slimetrap: Mush are rightfully wary of getting dirty because it can make the humans suspicious. However, humans are just as concerned, if not more so. Being dirty makes them look shady (and makes it harder to spot Mush) and prevents them from using terminals. This skill lets you soil a human of your choice. It is useful for implicating humans, slowing down research, and forcing the crew to waste more energy on showers. Plus, because it is on a time delay, it is harder to trace back to you (unless you were the only one to enter the room). However, a string of unsubtantiated dirtiness may raise suspicions, and in some cases this skill may be counterproductive (e.g., when the Super Soaper is available, washing with it removes a spore). If you're planning on preying on a crew's paranoia, this is a great pick.




• Nightmarish: Sleep is an important element because it doubles energy gain, and managing energy well is how this game is won. This ability lets you disrupt sleep's benefits and deprive the humans of precious APs. However, it's so conditional that you may not get much use out of it. First, you have to be alone with your target in a room with no camera; second, they need to not log back in for some time (they get different sleep messages, and if they get up and lay back down, the effect is removed); third, you need other people to pass through the room so that you are not the only person who could have done it. This will often mean the medlab bed is your best bet, though you may get lucky with the Swedish Sofa. This could be devestating for the science team, especially if you can disrupt Finola right after she logs off for sleep/work. However, I don't generally recommend this skill due to how niche its effect is.




• Ninja: When converting is too slow or expensive...when you just want to reach out and kill someone...Ninja is there for you. Normally, when you attack someone, you are named as the assailant, but witht this ability, your name is replaced with "Someone". Cameras can't even see through this. The benefits here are obvious, especially in a crowded room (harder to determine who is the attacker) and if you know the person is low on health.
  
  However, don't assume this is foolproof. Obviously, if you are alone in a room with your target, it will be simple to determine who's doing the attacking. Also, if you do something in a room right before or after (such as lying down), you will become a prime suspect. Finally, physically killing a human, even anonymously, draws a lot of attention. Expect things to escalate quickly afterward.




• Bacterophile: Diseases are nasty things and can cause a variety of impairments. Being able to spread them at will at a reasonable cost is pretty cool. Not only will medical staff have to spend energy and pills to cure sickness, targets will suffer energy, morale, and health effects that make them easier prey for other attacks. They could become dirty, which would disrupt research and cause more energy to be wasted on showering.
  
  That said, it is random, so you can't guarantee you'll get something that will need immediate attention. Plus, just like real outbreaks, you may get traced if enough people contract illnesses and they start going over room logs for similarities. This skill is great for eroding crew cohesion and readiness, but it won't win you the war.




• Fertile: Extracting spores can be energy intensive - wouldn't it be nice to get one for free? This ability is pretty simple, and it even becomes more useful as the humans progress. Initially, you're saving 2AP each day you pull a spore. After the constipaspore serum is finished, you're saving 4AP. Mush don't have a lot of ways to regain AP outside of Phagocyte and sleeping, so this skill frees up energy for other things.
  
  On the other hand, by the time you earn this rank, you've had to learn how to ration your resources. You can get by without the savings you earn here. Also, you need other abilities that give you new ways to spread to get the most out of it. Fertile is a terrific support skill, but only if you are Gold mode.




• Mycelium Spirit: This ability is the generous twin to Fertile - you have to spend full price for all of your spores, but your team can extract an additional one each day. Both are useful throughout the game, becoming even more important in the late game....
  
  Just take it. This is so good, you could find circumstances where a Bronze-level Mush could take this to help power a high-level Gold Mush. This ability messes with the math and hastens conversions faster than expected. Granted, you can only carry 2 spores at a time, which means you'll need to find an opportunity to use one and then extract another. But yeah, this skill is almost always a good choice.




• Nimble Fingers: Humans put a lot of stock in Cameras, and anything that lets you subtly undermine their sense of security is valuable. Normally, installing and removing cameras is logged for all to see; however, if you can be alone in a room with one, you can take it down without any evidence. After that, you can hide it/carry it around so that the ship is less defended. Not bad, right?
  
  Note that you cannot have other people in the room when you do this - otherwise, it will be noted. This scenario is difficult to find in rooms that are typically guarded by cameras. Not to mention that anyone who returns to the room afterward and notices the missing equipment might raise an alarm. Furthermore, you have to dispose of the camera afterward - hidden items could be found later.
  
  This ability has the potential to really mess with the security that successful ships rely on, but it's risky. It works best when used early on; however, its limited application makes this a niche choice.




• Radio Pirate: I can't say much about this ability due to never using it personally. I see it as a way to suddenly sow chaos by having a human appear suspcious/bloodthirsty/transfer victim. It's another situational tactic that has potential, but it can be thwarted.




• Infector: Yes - another straightforward upgrade to one your key abilities. Manual infection is the way to select who becomes a Mush, as opposed to the randomness associated with contaminating food or trapping shelves. Getting a second hit each day can rush early conversions, again throwing off human expectations. However, this benefit suffers later in the game if the human research keeps pace - you may not get to extract more than one spore a day (assuming there are at least 2 Mush and both get a spore). Combine this with Mycelium Spirit for the best results.




• NERON Access: Another one I haven't personally tried, the benefit to this is that you can really mess with human expectations. Lock down research to only qualified crew, and it will be harder for them to finish antimush advances; open (or close) piloting to derail expeditions or steal the Pasiphae; etc. Furthermore, only the real NERON Administrator can undo the damage you've done, so the crew may be stuck with unwanted settings for several cycles.
  
  The biggest problem is that there's only one room where you can do this: the Nexus. And if there's a trend of faulty settings, the humans will start to examine the logs for who enters. If the current admin is really active, or if you become the admin, this skill seems practically useless (unless the crew believes the admin is the one doing it).




• Pyromaniac: Haven't used this one, either, but it's effects are obvious: fires destroy stuff and hurt those who are stuck in them. They can spread if left unchecked and threaten the stability of the entire crew. Note that you have to be alone to do this without being logged; even so, NERON will announce the fire immediately. Other considerations: (a) do this right after the cycle change to hide this as a random event; (b) hide the extinguishers beforehand; and (c) wait until multiple threats are plaguing the ship to increase the panic. Bonus points if you can act before the Sprinklers and/or Fire Tracking NERON projects are installed. This is one you should only use once unless your cover is blown (to minimize suspicion), at which point...burn 'em all!




• NERON Depression: Untested by me. If you're going to mess with NERON, this looks like the upgrade to take over NERON Access - you sacrifice getting to choose the settings in order to do it remotely. This is a welcome trade-off because it reduces your visibility while still screwing with the human's order.




• Massive Mushification: No idea on this one - it's really costly, but it affects everyone. It will be a while before anyone gets to use this.