Oolite Bulletins

Does anyone have a list of the taunts and insults the Thargoids use?

I think they're generated randomly from a database of suitably weird words.
A sort of Thargoid Dictionary

Ask Thargoid

OSH wrote:

Ask Thargoid

Oh, I thought you meant there was a search engine... hehe

AskThargoid.co.uk

Is the database readily accessible? Within the Oolite download?

ThyroidBugz wrote:

Is the database readily accessible? Within the Oolite download?

Yes. It can be found inside the descriptions.plist. If you open that file, you will find a very long array consisting of 36 sub-arrays, titled "system_description". Each sub-array is referred to by an index, starting at 0 (for reference, the index 0 sub-array contains the strings "fabled", "notable", "well known", "famous" and "noted"). The thargoid curses are generated by these four strings:

"Guard your [4], human [18]-[31]!",
"Eat [24], [5]!",
"We’ll use your [20] [27] for our [33]!",
"%R! %R! %R!"

The first three use references in the system_description array. Each number [n] in square brackets corresponds to a random selection of one of the strings found inside the sub-array of system_description with index n. These strings may contain further references to system_description's sub-arrays. Oolite resolves all these references until a final string has been generated and that is what is printed as a Thargoid Curse. Obviously, there is plenty of randomly generated material this way.

The %R! %R! %R! type curse is using the Oolite %R modifier, which basically generates a random name from the base digrams string, also used to produce the planet names.

Hope this explains it without making it sound like rocket science. It's very simple once you have a look inside descriptions.plist.

Thargoid, sorry I had to give the secret away

Eat grub, housemaid!

... I mean thanks! What a great answer, that's exactly what I was looking for