I think with the macroscopic stage, a cool aspect of non-LAWK can involve the loosening of biological constraints placed on certain adaptations. For example, tentacles as we know it on cephalopods are largely dependent on the presence of water to be effective in gripping, but what if that isn’t necessarily true in a given playthrough? It could enable certain interesting tropes in Thrive, like more fantastical land-octopi and the such.
I’m sure we’d end up adding some cool unique parts, but a big avenue of non-LAWK could just be loosening some constraints on existing parts to enable adaptations in settings that otherwise might not be fully realistic.
Could be a modification placed on a jawless mouth to increase ingestion rates on certain mediums. I’d imagine it not to work like the tooth editor concept, where you specifically design and place certain tooth parts, but instead an alteration to the mouth structure itself. A big innovation with teeth is the presence of oral structures without modifying the mandible itself, while for arthropods and jawless animals, adaptations would universally involve changing the shape of the mandible.
It seems that in practically every early bird in the progression between teeth and beak, instead of there being a beak with teeth on it, parts of the jaw would keratinize and lose teeth, while the parts with teeth are not yet keratinized. Here is a decent source: https://dinogoss.blobelgium.com/2011/04/youre-doing-it-wrong-birds-with-teeth.html
So I’d imagine that transition would involve the player specifically losing teeth on segments of the jaw, turning that segment into keratin, and then furthering the process until the entire beak is keratin and toothless. The exact manner of converting part of a mandible into keratin isn’t something I have a concrete vision for as of now.
I think that would exist as a modification to a teleost jaw rather than the placement of another jaw inside your mouth. I struggle to immediately conceptualize some sort of benefit to it, and since it evolved twice, I think it would be something that wouldn’t be much of a priority to implement unfortunately. Xenomorphs are a really significant sci-fi icon however, so if enough of the community really advocates for it, perhaps it might be more legitimately considered.
Good point to bring up, made me think of an additional stat concept! Kind of like in the Microbe Stage, I imagine that if your mass significantly dwarfs the mass of another organism, you can swallow it whole, which would lessen the need to chase and damage smaller and more agile prey. I can imagine such an adaptation would significantly reduce raw damage of your jaw, but would reduce the size discrepancy needed to consume an organism whole, meaning you can swallow larger animals more efficiently. I guess a sort of “Maximum Engulfment Size” stat.
That could be a stat I bring up on the development forums, though it’s somewhat niche enough that I wonder how useful it would be if implemented: if the mass of an animal is that much bigger than another’s, wouldn’t a single hit be enough to take it down, thereby making the implementation of a whole new mechanic completely unnecessary? Then again, it would be annoying to have to hit a really small animal multiple times if damage doesn’t scale like that in Thrive, so such a feature could be useful.
I obviously am gunning a lot for a future stage, but this is something that I genuinely think would be best to consider when we have a better idea of the actual gameplay in the macroscopic stage.
That seems to be a modified chitinous beak, which actually could be a variation of the chitinous beak I mentioned on the forums. I guess it can work in a hostile resource transfer matter similar to a probiscis if it was to be implemented. Could be worth cataloguing on the forums, though I’m not sure on how much it would be prioritized. Parasitism is more prevelant and better understood in the macroscopic stage, so I do think giving it some more love than we have given it in the Microbe Stage is worth it; so this might be an avenue for that.
Certain animals, like whales, do adapt their teeth for filter-feeding, so that would be one possible avenue. Manipulating the jaw or mandible can also create shapes better suited for filter-feeding. I imagine an ingestion rate to be a useful stat in this matter, where animals with jaws better suited for filter feeding are able to absorb more of a plankton cloud.