The RNG that is mutations is frustrating as it is rewarding. The loss of deterioration can be coupled with the loss of that nifty quick trait. Thus, there should be special mutation locking drugs that prevent a present trait from being affected by both purifiers and mutagens, similar to how Darkest Dungeon locks quirks. On one hand, you don’t lose your traits. On the other, you can’t upgrade them either.
To balance this, these locks should be more expensive than purifiers and not protect against outside sources of mutation (ex. yuggs and radiation). Maybe these locks could act like smart purifiers, locking multiple traits in, but that would screw over some survivors (ex. locking in deterioration).
The problem (?) is with balance: late game survivors will be unstoppable genetic killing machines. In fact, Chimera would be even better due to keeping all the cool mutations it has without Genetic Chaos losing them.
They’d probably have to be at least a little restricted as tedious as it can be sometimes to lose your favourite mutation to genetic chaos, that’d be one hell of a powerful thing. On the plus side mutations seem to soft lock atm, once my character gets a mutation once he seems to always cycle back into his cohesive whole despite genetic chaos. Swap between two faces twice a day, randomly lose 4 tiers of mutations in one direction because he swapped to rough skin, fly straight back to the top over the next 4 consecutive chaos procs. This is my third long lived genetic chaos and like all the rest he really formed an identity with his mutations that have lasted the whole run. Sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, but I figure mutations are supposed to be, it’s part of their charm.
I’d lean more to a way to make certain traits more resistant to but not immune to change, and more likely to come back if lost. A softer way to keep on track then the hard lock which sounds a little too strong to me.
I mean, isn’t the point of mutation that it’s random? And that there are drawbacks? I don’t typically play with mutations for this exact reason, I prefer more control so I go with CBMs.
It would be neat if I could play with more controlled mutation, but I think that’s against the spirit of things. I think it’s meant to be something of a gamble. Even purifier is a gamble.