As a disclaimer, I am writing this mainly in relation with the newly added Living World project for the next experimental, which right now is geared towards further expanding on how the blob will do flesh factories and how the overall world will become ever more alien and hostile the further into the Cataclysm Earth goes.
I think that a big part of it will probably be to figure out a way to somehow have a progressively mutating flora, as, sure we do have a lot of fancy mutating critters, but we do have the issue that a pine tree in a New England forest so far will stay a perfectly normal pine tree in a New England, no matter if half a decade has gone by and every single mutant line has reached its apex form, which doesn’t make a lot of sense because plant mutants do show that the blob isn’t somehow incapable of messing with parts of plant genetics.
This is something that I imagine would probably be ressource intensive if every tree and flower is somehow given a ticking mutation meter, and would probably need them to be handled as something different to what they are right now by the code, would probably lead to weird transitions if handled on an overmap tile by tile basis, and would probably be unsatisfying if the plant mutants are just another monster creature that’s just given a plant looking name, description and sprite.
If none of these features are ideal, maybe a mix would be better?
In short, this is mostly going to be a thread for people to throw ideas and see what sticks, and make those boring trees grow rainbow leaves, exploding shrapnel fruit and violently poisonous bark.