Gonna respond to your points individually under a read more, this post is getting pretty long.
I too was imagining the mycelia to be akin to dendrites, but I certainly hadn't thought about the way the coral stem design could lend to miscellaneous data sampling
Couldn't there also be the possibility of it taking on both roles? Of data delivery and sampling?
Yeah, the axon analogy need not be precise. And I suspect it's not quite that clear-cut even in real life, biology rarely is.
Also, where I could get a list of all these internal names?
I mostly get them by reverse-engineering the code itself, but many of the names I use also show up in the official level editor. This page seems to include a number of them.
Btw I've noticed you like to refer to these organic growth with fungus terminology, is there some reason besides the similarity with mycelium networks (and the way they interact with trees)?
Ah, this is another nod to internal terminology. In particular, "wall mycelia" is a term taken directly from the game's code and the similar growths on overseers, inspectors, and coral neurons are also referred to as mycelia internally. It seemed natural to refer to the individual strands as hyphae in keeping with this, although that term is never used inside the game's code. But these are just names I'm using for convenience, I'm not arguing that the growths are literal fungal networks. They might be, given the resemblance, but they might not.
The segmented body seems to be something it forms over itself as it grows, making me think they might be actually a bundle of specialized mycelia whose role brings it to develop both exuberant length and encasing for organization and protection
Notice the difference in size and coloration of the segments as they go towards the tip, and some of these even have individual mycelia strands coming out of the crevices
Oh, that's an excellent point about the coloration! Definitely supports the notion that coral stems lengthen and develop more segments over time, like a hair follicle.
I wonder why this room from memory conflux specifically has three extremely large coral stems, and if it would lend more towards data sampling or data relay (could the mysterious red structures be related in some way?) (are they repair scaffolding? They remind me of how blood attempts to fix open wounds)
Every active memory conflux seems to have at least one coral stem. I'm not sure what implications that has for the directionality question, but this room has three active confluxes, so the number of stems makes sense to me. Why they're so long, I'm not sure. Maybe coral stems simply grow to fit the size of the room they're in?
As for the red structures, they appear specifically in operational memory confluxes, so I don't think they're a response to injury. The rooms they appear in have names like "SS_LAB9", and one of them these rooms seems to have been the site of Five Pebbles' ill-fated "breeding program". Perhaps the red structures are some kind of modular, reconfigurable hardware used for experiments? Like an FPGA or an optical table, but organic. Internally they're referred to as "coral circuits", which would support the notion of a functional rather than structural role. They seem to be important enough for Five Pebbles to have set one up outside his rotting memory conflux during Rivulet's time, at least.
I also realized the halo isn't necessarily the coral stem reading info as it could be the rest of the structure reading into it instead, as implied by spearmaster and the way the pearl seems to be automatically read whenever possible, this same halo following it all over the place
Ah, I was wondering what made you call it the "reading halo", but now that makes sense. I never paid much attention to the halo that tracks the pearl during the cutscene in Five Pebbles' chamber before (does it appear elsewhere too?), but I guess it stands to reason that it would be involved in reading it somehow—pearls are an optical technology after all. Maybe the halos track objects with an optical interface in general? The flashing blue spots on coral neurons and stems seem like a good candidate for optical sensors or signaling devices that the structure could use its projectors to interface with.
Another thing I noticed about a different structure (I think I've seen it be called coral neuron?) is that it is possibly the central network of the structure, or at the very least a number of the largest ones connect to the puppet's chamber, potentially the umbilical specifically
Yeah, those are coral neurons. They seem a bit too thin and scarce to be networking the entire structure together to me, and there are plenty of actual cables around. Given their ample hyphae, I'd propose that at least one of their functions is extending the mycelial network into empty spaces that wall mycelia can't reach, like the huge room outside the puppet chamber.
Talking about the chamber, a neat detail that is only seen for a split second is that its exterior is the same as the cuboid object in recursive transform array, as in the same multiple panels of numerous flashing symbols
Indeed, it's easy to miss this.
theartofmadeline
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
stormborns
snowghoul
prguitarman
kaledo-art
