Players often mention that a problem related to predator gameplay is that unless you engulf something, you’re losing a ton of compounds. The organelles fly around rapidly and disappear, the compound clouds disappear, and components as a whole do not sustain you. So as a result, toxin, spike, or general non-engulf based predation is very unrewarding.
Would it be possible to have it so that instead of the cell bursting upon death and spawning numerous components, one or two chunks representing the cell’s torn-apart remains spawn in, with all the compounds in it akin to engulfment?
I think that should reduce clutter and open up many new strategies of predation. Though I’m not too sure how difficult this would be. It would likely need a new model of sorts as well, or atleast, reusing one in a different way.
However, why this hasn’t been done is that it completely removes the cell wall predator type build as with that you can only stab or shoot cells to death and then passively collect the leaking out compounds. So I wouldn’t recommend removing this microbe gameplay option from a completed stage.
Even without changing anything besides merging 7226 it should make the scavenger gameplay bit more reliable, because the chunk count is much lower, and the chunks no longer randomly adjust their stored compounds: they would then literally just have all the compounds decided to be released upon death divided by the chunk count.