What if when doing the basic attack of running into another cell and having them disappear, you can steal their cytoplasm and partis inside of them and that is why they died.
…?
We have engulfment, which you can do by pressing g and moving over a smaller cell.
Next update, we should have predatory pilli, which are basically spore’s spikes but not spore.
We should probably also have toxin collection fixed next update, so you can shoot bad x’s at other microbes.
I don’t know how stealing cytoplasm would work, but organelle collection shouldn’t be out of the window.
Sorry about my last post and it being a bit undefined in what I was referring to.
But today I come back with a new idea, what if when coming into contact with a toxin it enters your cytoplasm and damages your organelle overtime for a bit.
I would also like to encourage other people to use this thread to discuss their own ideas on these subjects so the devs can have more to go off of to make the microbe stage increasinly fun.
This is planned. You’ll have the ability to synthesise agents, specialised chemicals for completing certain tasks. Some may be used for inter-cell communication, some for digestion and some for attacking specific organelles.
There are two other main methods of microbial combat: predatory pili and engulfment. Pili allow you to stab the membrane of other cells. If their membrane isn’t strong enough, it will rupture and the cell’s compound stores will spill out into the environment. Engulfment is as you would expect - a bigger cell swallows a smaller cell and takes its compound stores directly.
I’ve always wanted to set up these three strategies in a rock-paper-scissors kind of way. Pilus cells beat engulfing cells, engulfing cells beat damaging agent cells and agent cells beat pilus cells. There would be some noise in there though, so this wouldn’t be a hard and fast rule, just a guide.
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That sounds like a cool idea. I’d like to see something like that, maybe behaviour could be adapted to follow this rule, e.g large microbes that specialise in engulfment would naturally be deterred by a pilus, while a pilus cell would be more inclined to attack the large microbes specialised for engulfment.
For engulfment how would taking in a toxin cell affect you, as within that cell there would be toxins being produced, would those cause damage to the engulfment cell while taking them in.
Yes, this would probably be the case. If we do want a rock-paper-scissors relationship we’ll need to find a way to balance it.
I guess ramming too, since the cell’s barrier is weak, by ramming you swim at high speeds into another cell and, depending on your shape/weaponry, pierce it’s cell barrier, after that the cell’s cytoplasm is spilled out, along with it’s nutrients
One nice thing would be to have a “mouth” on the cells. Several microbes have this and while not the most effective as escape is possible, it allows cells with hard walls to be predatory. It is also much slower than standard engulfment.