Blink
The next evolutionary phase...
Blink is a popular travel mutation that allows the mutant to teleport from zone to zone at will, with some restrictions.
Blink is a movement mutation. It is upgrade of Phaser, which is incompatible with Flight and Medium and their associated prerequisites. While technically functional, most players also consider Blink to be incompatible with Hooligan.
Location
Blink is located a very short distance inside the Labyrinth (which does not exist). It is most easily accessed by landing at the Water's Edge landing site in the Necropolis' Heart zone and making the rest of the journey via foot or skateboard, but the precise path is a spoiler.
Effects
The blink ability, which can either randomly teleport the mutant or teleport them to a specified zone. Probably.
Advantages
- Extreme mobility. A blink mutant can cross the game world faster than anyone else in the game, and can hop from zone to zone at their leisure, limited only by their cooldown and possible danger. This is useful for anything from resurrecting dead friends to scavenging to coordinated PvP attacks, and cements Blink as a very popular and desirable mutation.
- Allows great PvP aggression. Blink gives little warning of its use; if other players are very close, they may hear a faint buzzing sound, but aside from this a blinker's arrival is completely unannounced. Flight mutants and those with planes, on the other hand, can easily be seen coming in the sky.
Disadvantages
- Restricted zone use. Just like Phaser, some zones completely disallow blinking in or out, which leaves blinkers with zero mobility options inside those zones. Crafty zone management can mitigate this, but it's still a problem.
- Dangerous. If blink is poorly managed, it has the capacity to instantly kill its user.
- Stiff focus requirements. Targeted blinking requires at least 30-32 focus to use consistently, and more is much, much better. Some builds have difficulty reaching this requirement.
- Incompatible with Hooligan. Technically, taking these mutations are compatible. In practice, the results are so penalizing that nobody does it.
- Messes with phase. Blink has a chance of disrupting normal phase use; see the relevant page for more on this.
Abilities
Blink only grants one ability: blink. There are two variations on this. Using blink alone will randomly blink you to any viable tile in HellMOO, which sounds like an exciting adventure. In practice, it's some tile on the Necropolis El about a third of the time, since that zone has a massive amount of empty outdoor tiles. This usage of blink requires about 20 focus.
Targeted blink is the real draw of the mutation: blink zone will teleport the blinker to a random, valid tile in whatever zone is specified. If the zone name is incomplete, the game will fill it in; blink a will become blink abandoned highway. Specifying zones with numerals works just as it does with Inventory Management; blink 2.nukem will target the upper floor of Nukem Academy.
This ability is subject to several caveats:
Targeted blinks require 30 focus at minimum, but will still misblink regularly at that level. Past 38 focus, misblinks become very rare. Blink's cooldown also scales very hard with focus. At 30 focus, blink's cooldown will be about two minutes; at 45 focus, it's about 43 seconds.
- Several zones are blink-blocked.
- Only outdoor tiles with no NPCs or players on them are viable blink targets (some NPCs, like plasma turrets, don't count).
- With low focus, there is a chance of teleporting to a zone adjacent to the zone that the mutant targeted, rather than the intended target. This is called a "misblink".
- If a player or NPC enters the targeted tile after the ability has begun casting but before it completes casting, the blinker will explode upon entering the tile. This is called "telefragging". Silicone Skin mutants will die but not explode, and max-health zombies can survive a telefrag.
- Too much psi interference can stop a blink. This is usually caused by repeated blinking or phasing in and out of one tile, though it can also be caused by psyflares and lingering projections.
Any use of blink has a high stress cost, and the ability's cooldown varies greatly depending on the user's focus.
Blinking Smart
It is possible to be a bad blinker, and being a good blinker relies on map knowledge and some situational awareness. Critical knowledge includes which zones are blink-blocked and which are not, which tiles within a zone are viable and which are not, whether those zones have any adjacent zones which can be used to circumvent that limitation, which zones have a high, mobile NPC population (and are thus likely to telefrag), and sometimes, which zones are populous at particular times of the day or not. Practice, it's fun!
Appearance
This mutation makes no changes to a character's appearance, though it does have a giveaway message that other players can hear which signifies someone blinking in nearby:
You hear a faint hum from <direction>, like a swarm of gnats.
| Mutations | |
|---|---|
| Racial Mutations | Abomination • Chud • Hideous Freak • Vampire • Zombie |
| Focus Mutations | Carrie • Chiller • Fuck Machine • Salamander • Screech • Writhing Smoke • Empath |
| Movement Mutations | Leapfrog • Phaser • Clairvoyance |
| Flight • Blink • Medium | |
| Soak Mutations | High Density • Firewalker • Rubberskin • Snakeskin • Yeti Skin |
| Lithodermis • Solar Sponge • Silicone Skin • Eelskin • Yeti Fur | |
| Miscellaneous Mutations | Billygoat • Bleeder • Bloodhound • Brainslug • Brute Strength • Camelfat • Enigma • Fibrocartilage • Hooligan • Hyperimmune • Iron Liver • Junkrat • Mule • Nimble Fingers • Plant Whisperer • Stench • Twitchy Nerves • Superclot • Xray Vision • Cat Ears |
| Ripperlikes | Carcinocudgel • Horrorspike • Ripper • Tendrils |
| Joke Mutations | Third Nipple |
| Defunct Mutations | Jammer |