Slime

[Oliveriver]

@NickTheNick

Since mucilage is predominantly just made of complex sugar chains, I don’t think we need to create a new compound for it. We could simply make consumption of it yield glucose, and vice versa a Mucilage Jet would directly consume glucose.

I’m not really a fan of this to be honest. As a player I just like the idea of having a separate store for agents, and I can see it getting very confusing for people to constantly translate between two compounds in the environment that aren’t two compounds inside cells.

That being said, I have noticed it’s annoying that producing mucilage can sap quite a bit of glucose when you don’t want it to. I think that might be covered by a more general feature for turning agent production on and off in the environment, since oxytoxy sometimes causes the same issue (albeit with ATP instead of glucose).

@NickTheNick

Also, since it’s a thick gooey complex sugar, it cannot be digested by non-adapted cells, so we could make Cellulase (from Lysosomes) a requirement to digest Mucilage (a large part of mucilage is comprised of cellulose). Which means though most cells will see mucilage trails as a nuisance, some cells can adapt towards a niche of feeding off of the mucilage trails.

I like the sound of that. The world has filled with a lot of unusable green goo in my testing so far, so a way to evolve mucilage harvesting makes sense.

@NickTheNick

If that would be too much effort that we don’t have the manpower to produce right now, would probably be easier to represent it via repurposing compound cloud code or the toxin cloud code for now.

While I agree it would look better as clear gel, that’s way beyond our capabilities right now. At least, it certainly is for me, and I don’t want this feature to creep up in scope until it spirals out of my control.

I think I have functionality mostly there. There are a few holes that I’ve listed in the WIP PR, most notably ejection based on slime jet orientation and integration with Auto-Evo. But as it stands, I’m having a lot of fun with it already, especially now I’ve told the AI how to use it.

I’ve discovered slime jets are just as useful for predators as they are for prey, since they open up the possibility of ambush predators that lie in wait, building up stores of mucilage, then pounce. Watch below some examples of the AI and myself fleeing and chasing.

Slime test