Nightmare Fuel / Gigastructural Engineering And More

• The Blokkat Harvesters make the Prethoryn, Unbidden and Contingency look like rank amateurs in the apocalypse business. These creatures are more advanced and alien than anything the player has ever faced. They're not interested in political conquest, wealth, or power as you know it. They're simply interested in gathering energy - all energy, everywhere. A hundred thousand years ago, they decided to implement a long term plan to ensure their own species' survival and longevity at all costs. They were well aware of the inherent nature of entropy and the inevitable impending heat death of the universe, and they decided that this was an unacceptable obstacle to their plans. Henceforth, they designed and built a Dyson Sphere that was one lightyear in diameter called the Blokkonstrukt. They employed higher dimensional engineering to enable it to eventually contain all the energy of the universe - they have currently achieved exactly one percent of this total goal, which in itself amounts to the mass-energy of 300 billion galaxies. To achieve the goal of absorbing the energy of the entire universe, they have sent out a wave of self-replicating harvesting machines called Vesters to consume all free matter and energy in an ever-expanding sphere around the Blokkonstrukt. These Vesters primarily vacuum up all the ambient energy between galaxies, but they also consume every galaxy they reach. The crisis that the player faces is the arrival of just one Vester and its accompanying fleet of dismantlers and scout ships that will methodically consume and destroy the galaxy over the course of a couple of decades. The following is a comprehensive list of reasons why they are truly terrifying:
  • They cannot be harmed. The Blokkat Vester is surrounded by an impenetrable shield that cannot be brought down with raw firepower, making them a truly unstoppable force. The player is forced to research a way to bypass this shield, but it is difficult and time-consuming, and meanwhile the Blokkats will chew through a significant chunk of the galaxy before the player can even figure out how to hurt them.
  • They consume everything in the galaxy: All planets, stars, black holes, all dark matter and dark energy, everything down to the last stray photon and neutrino. No matter how terrible any sci-fi race from other media is, the Blokkats are worse. At least the Unbidden, Contingency and Prethoryn will leave behind a galaxy to inhabit where life can evolve anew. The Blokkats, being the ultimate Horde of Alien Locusts, leave nothing behind.
  • They are also The Assimilator when it comes to the mind energy of sentient beings: They consume psionic/neural energy, essentially the "souls" of other races, and they use that energy to manufacture more of their own neural patterns or souls as their method of reproduction. Nothing of their victims' personalities survive the process, making the Blokkats into the ultimate consumer of everything.
  • They even consume the shroud and its entities as part of their operations. Not even dimensions outside normal space are safe from them. They look upon extradimensional horrors and see just another source of fuel.
  • The Prethoryn Scourge are terrified of them, as they well should be. The Blokkats were after all, created by the mod author to be the very thing that the Scourge are running from that they tell the player about in the vanilla game.
  • They work slowly and methodically. They're not interested in actively targeting threats or victims and destroying them. They slowly proceed from star system to star system in an orderly fashion, dismantling everything and storing the energy for their own use. They always arrive at a star system that is furthest from the player, but eventually they will chew through the whole galaxy until they reach the player's empire.
  • Their ships that accompany a Vester are at best a minor scouting force. The Blokkats don't actually send major military forces to pacify galaxies. The largest Blokkat ship a player will face is actually only their smallest scout ship, despite each one being a hundred kilometers long and is by itself more than capable of wiping out the mightiest fleets that a player will build to defeat the vanilla crises like the Unbidden or Contingency. The Blokkat crisis which puts a threat like the Unbidden to shame is essentially a tiny fraction of the total power that the Blokkats possess. If the player's empire was an ant colony, the Blokkat Vester and scout force would be a single kid with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. A visit from the actual Blokkat military would be akin to the entire armed forces of a major country arriving to wipe out said ant colony.
  • They are not inherently evil. They are well aware that what they're doing is also destroying trillions of sentient species, and they do not feel strongly one way or the other about this fact. Upon their arrival in a galaxy, they broadcast a message inviting all sentient species to flee into intergalactic space to preserve themselves, promising not to pursue them directly. They take such a long view of universal events that they expect all other species to go extinct in the course of time, so they happily allow their victims to flee because they'll all die out eventually anyway. This is also why the Blokkats have no reservations about destroying sentient species as part of their operations. When a species protests that they're not advanced enough to travel outside the galaxy, the Blokkats' only reply is that this is "unfortunate", and it does nothing to convince them to cease their harvest. They are the very definition of a Lovecraftian Eldritch Abomination that is going to consume the entire universe and is utterly indifferent to how this affects anything else that lives in it.
  • Destroying their Vester and ending their threat to the galaxy is no guarantee of safety or survival. Yes it is possible to defeat their harvesting operation and rescue the galaxy, but losing a single galaxy out of the trillions on their list of targets isn't even a setback for the Blokkats. The player's advisors believe that the Blokkats will leave the galaxy alone after this defeat because the player can disable their invulnerable shield, but if anything this upgrades the status of the player's galaxy from a mere resource to a threat. Threats require more attention than resources. And the entire Blokkat empire is still out there harvesting away, and its mission statement is to leave no galaxy behind. Even in the best possible victory scenario where the Blokkat Vester is defeated and they leave the player's galaxy alone for all time, that still leaves the rest of the universe to be eventually drained dry, and entropy is still going to burn out the player's galaxy in the end. Then the Blokkats will move in and harvest the remains.
  • Consuming the player's universe may just be the beginning of their plans. They are currently a universe-scale destructive force, but once they're done with our native universe, they could conceivably add all other parallel realities to their expansion plans.