Famine

This article is about the Star Seeker. For the Horseman of Unicron known as Famine, see Terrorsaur (Armada).

Famine is a Star Seeker from the Transformers Online portion of the Aligned continuity family.

Do not steal.

Famine (饥荒 Jīhuang, aka Starquest) is a Star Seeker spy who can seamlessly blend in among the Autobots and Decepticons. He turns into some manner of winged beastie, and is protected on his missions by a pack of mechanical dogs.

Fiction

Ask Vector Prime

Optimus Prime and the Earth Protection Taskforce unsuccessfully attempted to capture Starquest and Thundertron. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/17

Games

Transformers Online

Famine was placed undercover among the Cybertronians by Thundertron, and secretly fed his pirate comrades information on the Autobots and Decepticons' plans, including that they were sending missions to the Star Seekers' base on the Moon.

Later, while the Autobots and Decepticons were focused on preventing the Star Seekers from repairing Tyger Pax's sunken space bridge, Famine launched his own attack on an Autobot facility in Siberia, taking its resident Protectobots captive and obtaining intelligence that the Autobots were developing combiner technology at a hidden laboratory beneath Steel City. Famine correctly predicted the Autobots would send a rescue team for their comrades and laid plans to capture the reinforcements, but did not expect the Decepticons to attack as well, seeking revenge for his espionage among them. The Star Seeker deployed some of the pirates' domesticated alien creatures to defend the base, and the region's inclement weather provided a further degree of natural defense, but the dual assaults quickly overwhelmed him. Finding himself at the mercy of Megatron himself, Famine traded the captured intelligence on combiner technology for his life. Transformers Online

Notes

Name

For a time, this character was known by a Mandarin name, Xún Xīng Zhě (寻星者), a literal translation of "Star Seeker". He received an English language name thanks to Ask Vector Prime, which idiomatically localised this somewhat generic descriptor into "Starquest", where this wiki article stayed for years... until latter-day internet spelunking discovered that he may have been given a proper name in Transformers Online, in Mandarin as Jīhuang (饥荒), and translated into the Latin alphabet as "Famine". The same page on the website described the backstory of the game, and called out Famine as being an original character joining the ranks of the Star Seekers alongside new versions of established characters Grotusque and Iguanus.

From a breakdown of the game's levels, we know that Famine was to be encountered by the player during the third level, set in Siberia. A contemporary report describes the character pictured at the top of this page as being a Star Seeker boss in one of the first three levels, implicitly tying the artwork to Famine (since he sure ain't Grotusque or Iguanus), and a banner used on the Transformers Online site placed this boss character alongside Optimus Prime and Megatron—perhaps as he was the closest thing to a main antagonist that had been programmed into the game before it closed...?

Unfortunately, as Transformers Online never made it out of closed beta testing—with all the NDAs and the lack of online gameplay footage that would imply—we don't know for certain that Famine is Starquest is Star Seeker is the artwork above. If the artwork is Famine, the character would prove to be a neat parallel to Scourge, who cuts a similar figure and is named "Plague" in China!

(Incidentally, if the character were ever actually named "Star Seeker", it wouldn't overlap with the Star Seekers faction, which is called the Thunder Fury in Mandarin.)

Other notes

• Another report from a contemporary news source revealed that the enemies of the Siberia level would be monstrous robot dogs, implying them to be Famine's mooks.