Fungus

Pathogen Adaptability

Fungus has the characteristic of being much more effective in wet environments rather than arid ones. Countries such as Indonesia are much easier for this plague to infect, while countries such as South Africa find it difficult to spread in dry climates.

In this particular case, Fungus takes an extra month to reach approximately 6000 cases in an arid country than in a humid one. This video was tested on normal difficulty without the use of genes or cheats.

Fungus Basic Stats (Screenshot taken in January 29, 2024)
(Source: Plague Inc. Official Scenario Creator - PC)

DNA Costs for the Bird Transmission in Bacteria and Fungus
(Screenshot taken in February 9, 2024)

Fungus is a special pathogen than the other standard plagues, where the DNA costs for some traits are altered such as the Bird transmission, where it is much cheaper than Virus or Bacteria, making these traits much more accessible to the player in order to quickly increase transmission across land borders.

Fungus: 7 (1st Stage) + 8 (2nd Stage) | Total: 15 Points
Bacteria: 12 (1st Stage) + 19 (2nd Stage) | Total: 31 Points

Cross-Country Infection Limitations

Fungus has certain limitations when spreading through different countries, so it is important that the player evolves traits such as Water, Air or Bird, which in this plague the DNA price is much lower than other pathogens. In case the player does not evolve good transmissions, the Fungus outbreak will have much difficulty in spreading in nearby areas even if the country has a large number of infected people.

In this gif you can see that even when the Fungus has a good amount of infected people in Bolivia, as there are no specific transmissions to spread to other places, the disease only stays in the initial country and does not spread to other places in South America.
(Screenshot taken in March 28, 2024)

Mega Brutal Observations

Genetic Code

DNA: Catalytic Switch - This gene is useful in the later parts of the game where you can obtain additional DNA while developing the cure, allowing you to perform more actions such as evolving anti-cure abilities as well as more lethal symptoms.
Mutation: Genetic Mimic
Travel: Teracyte
Enviroment: Extremophile
Evolution: Ionised Helix

Early Game

It is necessary to use some spores at the beginning of the game, in this case the spores had arrived in Argentina, China and South Africa, allowing the plague to spread rapidly around in these regions, which are somewhat distant from each other.

Well during these months, I've been trying to figure out how Fungus works internally when I have to beat the game with it on Mega-Brutal difficulty. As mentioned above, Fungus has remarkable difficulty in spreading out, so we should prioritize Water and Air in addition to Bird.

This is one of the somewhat complicated parts of the strategy as it involves RNG of the game, at the time of testing some strategies, I saw that depending on where the spores fall it can help to facilitate the information process gradually but at the same time it can also be a loss of a lot of DNA, if these spores fall in countries close to where the disease started.

So at this point, I recommend saving/loading when using spores in order to make the most efficient use of the spores. Generally, you would be lucky if one of these spores landed in specific regions where the plague has not yet arrived such as Eastern Europe, the Americas or a country without ports/airports in Africa or Asia.

In case you start in a country with a warm climate such as Saudi Arabia, India or Egypt, it is mandatory to evolve the two Cold resistances, trust me, because infecting Iceland and Greenland will be a headache, causing the infected to die on the island before time.

During the course of my game, I noticed that if I did not evolve both Bird 1 and Bird 2, I couldn't get to infect landblocked countries such as Kazakhstan, Morocco and Bolivia in time.

A common occurrence if you do not evolve Bird flu transmissions where Fungus will take a long time to move to other countries by land even if the other neighboring nations are well infected. I generally recommend that the spores land in an Eastern European country and a Latin American nation in order to infect areas away from Saudi Arabia more quickly.

Making you to spend additional spores in order to infect countries in the center of the continents and the process goes much slower in the case that the world starts to panic with the disease, causing local governments to close the land borders, further limiting the infection. This costs a lot of game time, which is somewhat irritating and the scientific community will make advances while Fungus makes small advances in cross country transmission.

Prioritizing these transmissions will make it possible to avoid these problems but remember that Bird also increases mutation, so remember to return any lethal symptoms that are mutated while infecting the rest of the world. If you do not do this, the governments of the world will become very panicked and begin to close all access routes in the country.

Speaking of which, the symptoms that we should prioritize at the beginning of the game are the branch of traits that affect the skin such as Rash, Sweating and Skin Lesions that will help us to increase the infectivity without having to increase the severity and lethality too much.

After you have evolved Bird's transmissions, it is time to evolve both Air 1 & 2 as well as Water 1 & 2 in order to help Fungus spread to more continents.

Mid Game

An important aspect of Fungus is that you will need to evolve spores but remember not to use all of them, mainly because it makes the other skills such as Cold/Heat Resistances and more importantly the Anti Cure abilities much more expensive every time you acquire a new spore so try to use only the necessary ones.