Mindweaver

A mindweaver firing at the player.

The mindweaver is a cybernetic spider-like monster introduced in the Legacy of Rust expansion and is further specified within the ID24 editing standard. It is a smaller, weaker version of the spiderdemon, comparable in size and health to the arachnotron.

Combat characteristics

The mindweaver emits a scream that sounds like a slightly higher pitched version of the spiderdemon's roar when it becomes aware of the player. Its chaingun weapon behaves like the spiderdemon's, despite its scaled-down size, shooting three pellets at a time due to using the same attack function as the shotgun sergeant. When it dies, its death sound is again a higher pitched version of the spiderdemon's, but a different, smaller explosion sound is heard at the end. Its constant walk sound is again similar to the spiderdemon's, but its roaming sound, when heard, is like a sped up version of the arachnotron's rarely heard roaming sound.

Tactical analysis

The mindweaver is a blend of the arachnotron and spiderdemon. It has the health, mass, and hitbox size of the arachnotron, but the attack mode, rate of fire, and pain chance of the spiderdemon. It shares the same movement speed as the other brain spiders.

Due to using hitscan attacks, mindweavers can infight among themselves, as well as with other enemies. A crowd of mindweavers is capable of inflicting extremely high damage, but are also likely to thin itself out very quickly. Their relatively low pain chance makes them harder to stunlock than the arachnotron.

Inspiration and development

The sprites for the mindweaver were an intermediate step of development for the arachnotron: they are the sprites of the spiderdemon already rescaled to arachnotron size, but not yet recolored and edited to have a different face and a different weapon. A later version of these sprites with the face redrawn but still possessing a chaingun weapon and the more saturated brain could previously be seen in a series of Doom II beta screenshots from John Romero's demo of the game at the Austin Virtual Gaming tournament, and the behavior of the arachnotron as coded in pre-Doom-II-release versions (such as v1.4) of the executable file matched the behavior of these sprites as well.

Like other Legacy of Rust monsters, the mindweaver's sound design was carried out by id Software audio designer Chad Mossholder. It uses some modified versions of the spider mastermind's effects.

Notes

• The name "mindweaver" is a play on "spider mastermind".
• In Legacy of Rust, the mindweaver has an editor number of 3009 and uses the MT_EXTRA02 / Deh_Actor_152 slot. The data below corresponds to the ID24 specifications.

Data

Data
Thing type	-28670 (decimal), 9002 (hex)
Enum	9000 0002
Appears in	Legacy of Rust
Hit points	500
Speed	12 map units per frame (140.0 map units per second)
Radius	64
Height	64
Mass	600
Reaction time	8 tics
Pain chance	40 (15.625%)
Pain time	6 tics
Flags	4194310 (decimal) 00400006 (hex)
Flags list	1: Obstacle 2: Shootable 22: Affects kill %

Sprites & sounds
Sprite name	CSPI
Alert sound	DSCSPSIT
Chase sound	DSCSPWLK
Active sound	DSCSPACT
Pain sound	DSCSPPAI
Death sound	DSCSPDTH

State	Frames
Idling	2 [AB]
Chasing	14 [AAABBCCDDDEEFF]
Attacking	A [AGHH]
Hurting	2 [II]
Dying	7 [JKLMNOP]
Resurrecting	7 [PONMLKJ]

Damage done by the mindweaver's chaingun

Shots needed to kill1,2	Mean	Standard deviation	Min	Max
Player (100% health, no armor)	12.29	2.16	4	19
Player (100% health, security armor)	17.86	2.79	13	26
Player (200% health, combat armor)	44.18	6.03	37	59
Barrel	2.93	0.83	2	6
Trooper	2.93	0.83	2	6
Sergeant	3.91	1.04	2	7
Wolfenstein SS	6.37	1.39	4	11
Imp	7.43	1.53	5	13
Chaingunner	8.80	1.74	5	15
Lost soul	12.29	2.16	9	19
Commander Keen	12.29	2.16	9	19
Demon	17.86	2.79	13	26
Spectre	17.86	2.79	13	26
Boss brain3	29.78	4.39	25	42
Revenant	35.44	5.22	30	50
Cacodemon	47.41	6.88	40	64
Pain elemental	47.41	6.88	40	64
Hell knight	58.95	8.61	50	82
Arachnotron	58.95	8.61	50	82
Mancubus	70.57	10.22	60	96
Arch-vile	82.52	12.01	70	114
Baron of Hell	117.61	17.02	100	159
Spiderdemon	351.57	51.06	303	473
Cyberdemon	468.91	68.19	405	631

1. This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, and backfire checks are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
2. Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.
3. Hardcoded exception to infighting negates damage (excepting indirect damage caused by exploding barrels).

Appearance statistics

In Legacy of Rust the mindweaver is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

Single-player
Episode	1-2	3	4-5
The Vulcan Abyss	MAP04: Descending Inferno	MAP04: Descending Inferno	MAP04: Descending Inferno
Counterfeit Eden	MAP09: Falsehood	MAP09: Falsehood	MAP09: Falsehood

Multiplayer
Episode	1-2	3	4-5
The Vulcan Abyss	MAP04: Descending Inferno	MAP04: Descending Inferno	MAP04: Descending Inferno
Counterfeit Eden	MAP09: Falsehood	MAP09: Falsehood	MAP09: Falsehood

Legacy of Rust contains the following numbers of mindweavers per skill level:

Single-player
Episode	1-2	3	4-5
The Vulcan Abyss	35	38	42
Counterfeit Eden	2	3	6

Multiplayer
Episode	1-2	3	4-5
The Vulcan Abyss	35	38	42
Counterfeit Eden	2	3	6

Trivia

• A monster similar in concept to the mindweaver previously appeared in Scimitar, called the "arachno gunner".