Processes must have outputs, in theory it could be changed that processes with no outputs are allowed. But the reason they are not allowed is that it is weird to have a process that just makes stuff disappear.
If we make up an output for it, the cell will eventually become full of it, so the process will stop. Like oxytoxy synthesis will stop once the cell is full up on toxins.
This is the direction I’m leaning towards, as long as the physics shape index stuff doesn’t turn out too problematic. If it turns out problematic then it’s not possible to tell which part of the colony took damage and we’ll just have to have one single health bar for the entire colony. There’s an open issue in Godot repo about it, but seems a fix hasn’t been finished yet:
From code perspective it is easier to keep so that the original Microbe object the player controls is the colony leader, and also the cell the player controls after disbanding.
Also it’s probably also easier to just make it so that if the colony lead cell (in the player’s case, their original cell) dies, the colony is disbanded and it acts just like if the player had died.
This gives some benefit to forming a circular colony around your original cell to protect it from damage (assuming of course we are able to keep individual health for each cell in a colony).