#artificer msc

[streetcleanrr]

bwuh.............

[lilyblackdrawside]

So, Module abbreviations. Most of them make sense, some don't.

There are three categories: 1st three letters, no vowels and those that don't match their English names.

Long.

1st three letters

BEA, TAC, AGE, DRE, CEN, LOR, INS, SWO, REA, CRU, PRO, GUA, FOR, MAR, ART, DEA, HUN, COR, BLA, CHA, INC, DEC, SUM, BAR, RIT, PUS, HOK, EXE, AMB, GEE, MER

No vowels

CHG, FGT, SBL, SPT, SPC, PLX, MSC, WDM, TRP

No Match

Pioneer is SOL which could be like Soloist? Cause they're the first to get on the field? Doesn't feel sound. Maybe they're bad guys.

Juggernaut is UNY and I got no clue.

Duelist is HES and I got no clue.

Heavyshooter is ARC and that's probably Archer but none of them use a bow so I remain sceptical.

Spreadshooter is RPR and I got no clue.

Besieger is SIE which is probably Siege Sniper.

Flinger is BOM which is probably Bombard Sniper.

Mech-Accord is FUN which I want to say is Funnel Caster, because in Mecha, a funnel is sometimes a little option you use to add covering fire to your attack.

Medic is PHY which is probably Physician.

Multi-Target Medic is RIN which is definitely Ring-Healer, as evidenced by that time when one of the IS hands wasn't translated properly and mentioned a "Ring-Healer" branch.

Therapist is WAH and I got no clue.

Hexer is UMD and I got no clue. I thought the Abjurer one could give me an idea, since they're counterparts, but no such luck.

Abjurer is BLS which is probably Black-Luster Soldier Blessing.

Artificer is CRA which is probably Crafter.

Dollkeeper is PUM and I got no clue.

[ihateartificer]

Hello friend, it is me, the person you walked off into the sunset with to destroy Artificer together //silly

I wanna share my personal reasoning for hating Artificer (besides the stuff you've already mentioned) as I have a reasoning I have not quite seen yet (full disclaimer, I'm gonna be using she/her, which is what I am most familiar with)

Artificer doesn't feel like an actual slugcat in-universe to me

Like, if you're gonna do a "slugcat that can't ascend due to mortal attachments" you could've done it WAY better (coming from a Buddhist), like it would've been WAY better if it was, say, a slugcat that needed to eat excessively so you would have to kill and eat much more, or a slugcat that kept being drawn back to a certain place through events and cutscenes that had a time limit before they could ascend

Those would've been so awesome! But ARTIFICER? She just… feels like someone's edgy ha ha murder kill death blood gore bombs knives!!!!!!!! OC

Like she does NOT feel like she fits in the Rain World universe. She just seems… bad and out-of-place

She doesn't convey the same beautiful message the other slugcats do, she just seems like the kill-death-murder scug

Nice to hear from you again!

To be fair Artificer DID start as someone's edgy OC. Not even Andrew's creation, someone else suggested it when he was making 1.01 MSC and he liked the idea enough to incoroporate it into the mod. It's just that adding a ~tragic backstory~ only made it worse. Could've turned out much different if the development team for the remake didn't feel the need to retain the gameplay and justify it with a story or if the slugcats had their stories planned from the get go.

I like your ideas better, I even had a similar one. Hunter is already implied to have developed its illness from "pushing against the confines of its place in the ecosystem" (paraphrased from a Kickstarter post), so why not use a variant on that? Hunting constantly because you're sick, and sick because you're constantly hunting. The scavengers just happened to be an easy target, as humans are for maneaters, until they weren't anymore...

[the-real-rain-world-confessions]

I'm an oldster in this fandom, relatively speaking. started playing in 2020. I remember when the msc mod became hush-hush. i remember when Hunter was the favorite. i remember when shipping was scarce, a cute little side thing no one minded. there was so much more room to live and breathe the real language of the game. The depth of the lore and the characters was boundless. i remember the day the official discord server hit 15k members.

I love Downpour. I love everything downpour brings to the story of the game (except one thing, fuck Survivor OE ending. it ruins the campaign). I fully believe Downpour is canon, I believe Downpour successfully expands on everything set up in Vanilla. I'm beyond grateful i was able to experience Rain World truly Vanilla, and see the world and characters deepen and expand in such thought provoking and significant ways. Downpour is good. I dont even think the campaigns are that overpowered. With the exception of Gourmand and Rivulet, i think the DP campaigns have really high skill floors, with ceilings even higher. i think it's fine. and i dont care because the stories are worth it.

No, my issue is with the community, the fandom, if you will. I am as gay and allo as it gets. Fuck the shipping scene in this fandom. its fucking oppressive, its boring, surface level junk that actively detracts from the depth of the game. iterator shipping i can tolerate, i still dont mind, its the fucking slugcats. shipping Artificer and Hunter is stupid because they dont live at the same time, arti is probably dead by the time Hunter is made. shipping Artificer and Saint is mega stupid, arti definitely died! i think all these characters, slugs included, have fascinating parallels and reltionships ripe with conflict and intrigue, there's tons to talk about but no who fucking cares, muh fucking artihunter look theyre red and orange they're lesbians. enormous groan. if it was just a silly joke, i wouldnt care, but it's way too much of the fandom now and it blows chunks. unfortunately i love and respect canon too much to be willing to fucking obliterate it as required to actually engage with the slugcat shipping.

i miss when you could just talk about the lore and not have to throw in a big caution sign that you do actually think downpour is canon and good, sorry fellow old guard. i miss when you could just talk about the characters and not have to throw in a big caution sign that you take the game seriously and not as fodder for shipping or warrior cats oc bait.

it begs the question: why are you 1.9 people here? are you here because you love this game for what it is? or are you here just for the fandom? dont ruin this for me like you did to undertale.

- Sliverist

.

[elsa-rain-world-stuff]

Ship ask: regicide ship (arti/scav king)

If im allowed 2 asks: saint & Sinner (arti/saint)

ehehh

i ship both

regicide:

Mostly because of @its-the-sa 's AU and art, because it looks like they can be very great example of enemies-to-lovers dynamic. But i was thinking about it even before, but it didn't go further that that joke comic lol

enemies to lovers dynamic hell yeah! And Arti's redemption as well. And abusive shit. Drama! Angst! Killing each other as an act of love!

the ship is unpopular itself lol. but.... how to put it... abusive ships are fine as long as they aren't real???

Artisaint 💚💚💚❤️❤️❤️💚💚💚❤️❤️❤️(i love how you call them saint and sinner, i literally have a song with this name)

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH i started shipping it WAAAAYYYY back in 2021 when i just got into rw fandom and was told about MSC (aka More SlugCats). i was told that Artificer is a fighter, has explosive powers, probably a woman, locked on karma 1 and hates scavs, and that saint can't hold spears (and hurt anyone), fragile, vegan and looses all karma when dies (that was a thing lmao). And then one of my friends asked like "i want to ship saint with someone but i don't know with who" and i said "the explosive one" because HELL YEAH OPPOSITES GO TOGETHER! and yeah since then they are my main ship in RW

THEY ARE SO DIFFERENT AND YET SO SIMILAR! Arti is violent, full of hate, her life is an unending fight, associated (and locked on) karma 1. Saint is pacifist, refuses to hurt anyone and eat meat, associated with karma 10. And yet, they both can't leave this world. Their reasons are different, but the result is the same. They both stuck here forever. Arti can't let go of her grief and hatred, saint can't ascend because they're chained to the cycle itself. Yeah...

evil saint/arti. just. yeah. idk, i don't know what else unpopoular i have about them...

[birch-soda]

I'm getting all acension endings for the MSC and base scugs, but I can't decide which one to do next so I'll let Tumblr decide for me.

[doodlepede]

msc still feels like that funky mod to me sometimes. it's canon. fuck you. but sometimes.... ah, artificer... what a cool oc........ so cool...... they should make her a playable mod someday.....

[fadebolt]

Oh boy, I was waiting to see how spicy things would get when I noticed which two ships got matched up against each other here. As you all may have noticed, cherry pie and boomstick both have a pretty large following, and it's pretty easy to understand why, since not only are both ships very plausible due to the canon timeline, but they also have very interesting dynamics.

Gourmand/Hunter works because of the contrast between the happy leader slugcat who is all about eating and enjoying life, and the artificially created one, who has to hurry to complete their quest and ascend before the sickness becomes too much to handle. It's actually the one I picked myself, and I in fact have quite a few interesting headcanons for it. (The most notable one is that Hunter actually would have had way more than 20 cycles after reaching the Farm Arrays, but they decided to spend as much time as they could with the colony and Gourmand, only leaving when they were essentially forced, due to the remaining time getting critically short. Also, this accounts for one of the new in-game assists, as players that put the cycle count higher make Hunter leave earlier, while ones that put it even lower make them leave later)

Funnily enough, the Spearmaster/Artificer pairing is something I was mostly seeing before Downpour's release. This was mainly due to the fact that they were the only two new slugcats that were essentially forced to be violent, while also having a strong contrast on how they approach the act of being violent (one being a silent immobile calculative ranged assassin that kills with lots of cuts, while the other is a loud explosive rage filled lunatic that rocket jumps all over the place while blowing everything up). To me, it seemed like the ship kind of phased out, after we got the see Artificer's story, and we figured out that Gourmand and Saint aren't quite as peaceful as we originally thought. (For those who came into the fandom after Downpour's release, Gourmand's ability to eat corpses was a surprising revelation that we've only seen in a trailer that came out shortly before the DLC's release, and we actually didn't know about the huge spear damage, the slide slamming, or the singularity bombs. While with Saint, we had absolutely no idea if the ascension powers would actually be brought over from the original MSC) But it's a pleasant surprise to see it still going strong, especially because these two are both suffering from quite a lot of trauma, and it's nice to think about them lightening up each other's moods. And not to mention, they have quite a lot to offer to each other due to their drastically different life experiences. The only reason why I didn't pick it here, is because I find it more fun to imagine old mentor Spearmaster trying to help a mischievous child Artificer. I just think it's a fun underrated idea, that I'm personally more into, than the romance (... and this is probably because of that little fanart where Arti goes through the alphabet, but every letter involves the word 'arson').

As for the contest itself, I have a gut feeling that most voters here are looking to be funny, and are deliberately trying to keep the numbers on 50/50. I don't want to go around accusing people of using a bunch of alts for this (especially since it would most likely be an incorrect assumption), but the numbers… they do be quite sus, don't ya think? Sorry that I rambled even more in this one, but this is the most important matchup of this round, so it was an obligation.

(Survficer/Full Moon) | (Solar Eclipse/Cherry Bomb) | (BloodMoon/Kebab) | (Spearmonk/Reversal) | (Lagspike/Supernova) | (Candy Cane/Seafood) | (Spearhunter/Lanternfish) | (Gourvivor/Scrambled Eggs) | (Survaint/Barbecue) | (Nachocheese/Spearvivor) | (Counterstrike/Rivusaint) | (Nightlight/Artisaint) | (Monkhunt/Gourmonk) | (Speedrun/Piranha) | (Artimonk/Error 404) | (Fishstick/Godmode) | (Survulet/Cherrybush) | (Nightspear/Saintmonk) | (Nightsaint/Rivmonk) | (Bathbomb/Spearsaint) | (Saintmand/Paprika)

[bewilderbark]

artificer 

[ihateartificer]

This suggests that Artificer cares so little for its own children that it can't even be bothered to properly remember what they looked like.

(Reminder: DragonPropaganda here is a MSC developer. We can't take what they say as canonical fact but it's safe to assume that they'd know more about Artificer than the average player.)

[pyrrhuria]

more slugcat art (because thats all i draw anymore apparently) !!! these are from the drawtheslugcats event on the rain world discord back in august. downpour when

[streetcleanrr]

btw

[flecks-of-stardust]

i’m a little obsessed with r/place right now mostly because of how many things i’ve noticed about it. a non-exhaustive list:

- the free hong kong banner that kept getting dicked over by people, changing the ‘free hong kong’ text to various iterations such as uoog kong, hong roog, hong hong, huog konc, etc until they just removed the text altogether

- right under the free hong kong banner, that gorgeous star wars poster. i hope no one’s messing with it, because it’s so pretty. (*immediately goes to check and sees a pixel change color* bruh)

- that huge hornet silksong banner with the bonus grub someone added later

- whatever the hell is going on with canada’s flag

- the mini rain world banner near the bottom left

- the other rain world banner underneath the ori banner that is also coincidentally next to the taiwan flag. this one has the MSC slugcats, though for some reason artificer is awol. maybe it’s blowing some other flag up

- the absolutely gigantic ukraine banner with tons of stuff on it. kudos to coordination on that front

- the earlier trans/usa flag war that has a truce now, apparently

- the omori banner and the celeste banner

- and most bizarrely to me, someone is making a banner of my university’s logo. or whatever the fuck it’s called. the pride flags and country flags were odd enough, but no let’s rope universities into this as well. what (minor edit after i checked: it appears there are multiple university banners on here. all american universities too, as per the ego americans tend to have.)

[ersatz-colubridae-888]

i did very much enjoy it! i love hearing people express their love for the DLC. it always makes me very happy. i want to try and respond to all these little things said about it, because rivulet is also a favorite campaign of mine (behind saint, of course):

i also never played the original MSC, and honestly never really knew much about it at all. i just knew that they were funny colors and had funny abilities. the concept of grappling in games is SUPER fun to me so i think i would've loved saint back then too, though.

rivulet's campaign is definitely VERY strong in all aspects, yes! rivulet was my third slugcat to get to because i played them all in unlock order (torturing myself with artificer on the way, but whatever, lol) and man i was EXCITED. i really wanted to play saint, but i just had to get their naturally... i felt like i wouldn't do them justice otherwise!

rivulet's movement is very fun. i personally prefer saint's but it's very hard NOT to love the intense speed and jumping power of rivulet - pretty much any predators become trivial, but it's necessary in a world like rivulet's. i'm glad rivulet helped you with that hesitation to approach!

i love looks to the moon too and also find myself often thinking about their story - even more so now with the extra depth added by context with spearmaster and extra events added with rivulet. we always saw a lot of moon's side, but pebbles not so much, and i'm really glad the DLC gave more in that aspect and we could really understand his situation.

at that point i had seen people tell me the order and i knew rivulet was in the far future, so i was very excited to see the way the world had decayed at this point, especially considering the past two slugcats were earlier in the timeline than survivor. so i had no hesitation to go straight to memory crypts no matter how many times i might die. and oh man it was a GREAT experience. even though i died a ton of times in underhang, but i would never trade it for going up the wall. i've also seen a lot of people that went up the wall, too... i suppose this is the universe giving back after i accidentally went up the wall on my first playthrough...

as someone very invested in sci-fi horror i found a morbid fascination and deep sadness with the Rot. seeing a different perspective in pebbles was both extremely interesting, but also very worrying. it was like seeing someone's exposed vitals - if you see it, it's probably not going to be working for very long. i understand that feeling of feeling like your arteries are clogged when you look at it. it's like your body's trying to empathize with this decaying body. the combination of buzzing and sputtering machinery and organic, pulsing masses of organic matter unknown to anyone was both beautiful and horrible. when i reached the soul of the superstructure, green flashes crackling around me, i couldn't help but feel like i reached the eye of the storm. and it really was - i felt so calm in the center of his chamber, and i like to think he feels the same, even when faced with his own doom, listening to that same song. i recognized halcyon memories immediately from the mod config menu, but i'll be honest i just thought it was ambience... i was so focused on pebbles i didn't even realize he was playing a music pearl. i only realized after i finished the campaign and started talking to people about it.

i will never forget visiting her memory conflux and hearing that song. such a well lit, life-filled room as compared to the dark, grimy, flooded interior, i had never felt as connected to the world as i did then. it felt like i was right there, experiencing and living alongside the creatures and life blooming in her collapsed being.

i really couldn't have said it better myself with helping moon and pebbles. this is really all that can be done for them - it was an eventuality for pebbles, so he did what he could for his sister in the end. speaking of sister... oh my god. the entire ending sequence i was absolutely distraught. seeing how broken they both were felt so saddening but so fulfilling at the same time as she found similarities between their situations. but i wasn't crying until she said the line about being protective of him because she's his big sister. it's just... it's so, so much. it shows just how much love she has for him, and how her care for him never deteriorated over the cycles. i very, very rarely cry from video games - this is like the second time ever. my first time was with OFF's ending. rain world is really important to me, and this ending just means so much in terms of everything.

i didn't recognize a whole lot of the community members as i was never really involved until recently... but it really is amazing to see how many dedicated fans came forward to help work on this. i'm so happy to see just the sheer amount of amazing content everyone made for this dlc. it's beautiful.

thanks for sharing your thoughts :-) i like talking to people about what makes this game awesome

not that anon but who's your favorite sluggy

so i never played the original MSC, but originally my favorite was the saint. i loved the idea of being able to just Leave situations and have a grappling tongue at all times as a newbie. i really struggled with platforming and survival back then, so i really liked them. fuck losing all karma upon dying, i could just Leave!

out of the vanilla scugs, monk was also my favorite back then. i REALLY hated the lore removal, but my gaming skills were already just Piss Poor in general so rain world was almost nigh impossible at first. also i liked being friends with lizards and scavs and i couldnt bring myself to attack scavs back then.

so, between then and now, my favorites have changed. between the MSC slugcats...

this is one of those few times i can answer from Every Possible Aspect of the candidate, like gameplay, campaign plot, etc. Which is really cool! when MSC dropped, Riv was the one  I played first using the "unlock all campaigns" cheat. I REALLY wanted to play saint first, but knowing from the start that the slugcats were ranked by difficulty and saint was locked behind 2 slugcats as opposed to 1, I curbed that urge and went for Riv since they were my second favorite.

now, their super exaggerated movement was hard to get a handle on, i will admit- but i hadn't played this game in a long time so i was just rusty on top of that. but i can confidently say im used to them! i love using their abilities to see just what i can do. there was a time i was playing with a randomizer and it was really fun having to adapt to each new situation like an opportunist. i wish i recorded it! but riv really helped me get over my hesitance when i was faced with predators, which was a bad habit I'd had for a long time.

campaign gameplay tested my lay of the land as well; especially by starting out in drainage system. i practically never set foot in drainage system back in the day, so i didnt know where in the world to head. I luckily detected the garbage wastes gate like, right away. trying to navigate the parts of the game more beaten off the main path of vanilla was difficult but fun! having only so much time to get from place to place was a fun challenge. then, after getting the rarefraction cell, trying to see how far i could go in 1 cycle was even greater.

now the plot is really where riv got me for sure.

looks to the moon has been a favorite character of mine for years. i never really stopped thinking about what happened between her and pebbles; every few months or so i would think about it. just how... hopeless things were for moon. It really made me sad. i think i speak for a lot of people when i say i wished that i could help her in some way. but the only thing i could do is bring her neurons, really. i never really made sense of pebbles side of the deal, like i knew what was going on with him and i felt bad, but it never really hit me how horrible things were for him. it all just felt so... tragic, yknow? that things ended up the way they did for the two of them.

exploring their superstructures was an experience. i originally planned to go to pebbles through shaded citadel after visiting moon on my first playthrough, but plans changed when i considered dealing with memory crypts, and the leg, AND underhang with my cycle limit (i had already sort of guessed that riv was after monks point in the timeline, but i didn't know that those areas got worse for riv so i was just thinking in terms of vanilla) so i went through the wall.

I kinda wish I saw at least memory crypts, but thats ok because the low gravity in the normally zero-gravity access shaft, plus the proto dll at the end, told me everything I needed to know before facing Pebbles chamber. Floating through his decayed structures... it hurt. I remember my first encounter with him in vanilla felt just a word away from being downright incomprehensible. he really came off as some god I couldn't percieve. but now, seeing the walls corroded by nothing but Rot, only small parts I actually recognized just barely peeking out amongst the decay, I just couldn't look. I felt like... like my arteries were clogged just by seeing his condition. Hearing him listen to Halcyon Memories, a favorite (previously) unused track of mine created a special kind of somber that I will Never re-experience.

Then, Moon's structure. This one is special. I got suuuper lost in here, but im glad I did. Up until a certain point, I had been taking the scenery in with a kind of reverence you would have while walking around a graveyard. I wandered for a few cycles, and at some point, Random Fate started playing. I didn't recognize the bass line yet, but when I had stumbled into what I immediately recognized as Moon's Memory Conflux, the Sundown melody kicked in.

Recognizing both things at once, I got all... like, choked up. Like... I'm finally helping Moon!  But... what about Pebbles? Why can't I help him? ...And like, I knew why; he brought this fate upon them both. But that didn't make it hurt any less. He asked me to do the only thing he wanted: to give all he had to redeem what he did. So in the end, this was all I could do to help him; in the same way that this was all Pebbles could do to make up for what he did to Moon.

Don't get me started on the ending. Seeing Moon restored to even a fraction of what once was had me so happy! It was exhilarating to say the least. But I was tearing up on the edge of my seat when she reached out to Pebbles. Watching the messages roll in slowly, seeing what she had to say, all the while praying that Pebbles could hear her.

Seeing Moon call herself Pebbles big sister is what broke the dam. From what I saw back in the day, people usually skirted that title of hers when it came to Pebbles, or never really acknowledged it. Even I did, for some time. But it never made sense to do that! Moon and Pebbles would never feel such anger, betrayal, or regret over everything that had happened if they weren't very close. I found it very important that that's who Moon was to him. Not just a great friend, but a big sister. I'm so glad the MSCteam felt that was important as well.

Speaking of which, seeing the names of community members and fans that I recognized in the credits got me sobbing again when I thought I was done. This expansion was a loveletter to the game from the fans, brought in officially by the actual developers. The Rivulet campaign especially enforced that feeling of love for the game- by having compassion for the tragedy two iterators and finally helping them reconcile.

I finally felt satisfied, not only because I was able to help Moon- but because I had also realized the tragic life that Pebbles had led. Those two things had never really left my mind.

anyways WOOOOO that was a lot of rambling. hope you enjoyed......

[ihateartificer]

Don't mind me here. I'm just sharing my collection.

(For those who don't know DragonPropaganda is a MSC developer. We can't take these Discord messages as hard canonical fact, but it's safe to assume they'd know more about Artificer than we do. Not that there's anything surprising about this.)

[ihateartificer]

I was gonna say something against artificer hate because I like artificer but then I realized I don't like artificer, I like artificer 2.0 aka the version of artificer in my head that I fleshed out a little more.

I do think that artificer is a fan creation and shouldn't be treated as something that messes with vanilla. They're from an alternate universe that started off as and still is a mod from people who aren't the creators of rain world who were just trying to make a fun addon to rain world about funny slugcats with superpowers.

It's become a lot more than that, sure, but it's motive wasn't purely to fit in with rain world lore, it was made for fun and I don't see a problem with that just because it has the official label now.

I liked MSC a lot before it was ever announced that it would become part of an official DLC and I viewed the MSC slugcats the same way i viewed any other modded slugcats or ocs. After release, it was like watching a beloved neighbor get abducted by aliens and slowly dissected piece by piece and judged by how they compare to the perfect human specimen.

I think that artificer does mess with their AU's lore an absolute ton and I don't really like the version of them that doesn't reside in my head, so it's quite relieving seeing that pointed out so I don't feel insane about it, I just think the MSC dev team did a really good job all things considered and deserve better.

Also the small but extremely loud crowd of people that are really weird about artificer and scavengers are genuinely one of the most insufferable and annoying group of people I have ever seen in a fandom. They are our rent lowering gunshots. I could go on and on about them but you've already done so for me.

I am a little too harsh towards the dev team I'll confess, but it comes out of a place of passion you understand? Nothing's immune to criticism and there are still plenty of aspects about Downpour I like. Though, things might've been different if Videocult gave more of their input when MSC became official DLC, or if it hadn't become one at all. Would it have attained the same level of popularity, or would it have been lesser known? We'll never know.