Mutations [Spoilers]

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Intolerance
Make the opposite intolerance lead to their associated categories (Meat Intolerance -> Herbivore, Hates Vegetables -> Carnivore). No, Saprovore cannot come from lactose intolerance, but I suppose you CAN argue junkfood intolerance does (processed food with preservatives vs rotten). Right now the traits intolerance/hates are actively working to cancel out progression in certain ways regardless of what sort of dietary trait it is. This makes no sense, particularly that they’re supposed to be negative traits. Or make them a separate line with “x rejection” being the next logical progression.

Health
Add tough to post-threshold Cattle and Ursine. Add durable to Lizard in post-threshold. Give Chimera Unbreakable in post-threshold. Strength compensates decently for having an increased health total. However, it feels more appropriate to have those groups have them. Chimera also has absolutely massive problems. In the case of Lizard, it’s simply because it feels a little weak right now.

Slime
Replace Hollow Bones with Light Bones and Thin Skinned in Slime. Melting bones do not translate to hollow bones. Omnicellular: Having an average decreased health total (sum of limbs/head) but giving a single large health pool. My pre-edit suggestion was making limbs grow back and having headshots be nonfatal while decreasing total hp by either 25% or 50%.

Alpha
Add junkfood intolerance. Add the unique trait about “Absolute Perfection” which causes you to suffer morale penalties for having your stats negatively affected or being actively sick (coughing/vomiting), but grants a good bonus to social interaction. Alpha just feels a little strong and is focused around being absolutely perfect. While this may strike envy in nonmutant NPCs, you can probably use it as social leverage.

Elf-a
Downgrade Radioactivity, Disintegration, Hollow Bones, and Vomitous. Add Lightweight, Junkfood Intolerance, Meat Intolerance, Mood Swings, Frail, and Lactose Intolerance. Make Fey Eyes and Full Night Vision a prerequisite for Fey Nightvision. Remove Fey Nightsight from existence. Creating mutations that are functionally identical is pointless, unless you are specifically trying to create stacking or don’t want people avoiding it by simply purchasing that negative attribute in character creation. “An attempt at hybridizing mutagen lines to remove negatives and make them more useful. This has had mixed results.”

Chimera
Give Chimera both Fast Healer and Disintegration. Add Regeneration to post-threshold. Having mutations that cancel each other out with Genetically Unstable feels very appropriate for this mutagen line. I’d like to see Genetically Unstable become a fixture of the line along with something akin to Extreme Mutation. Instead of “progressing,” traits are instantly adapted instead of moving up or down one grade. The rapidly changing feature of Chimera is something I’d like to actually see made.

Edit: After a conversation with a coder this post has been heavily altered.

2
Edit: After a conversation with a coder this post has been heavily altered.

That would be me. Hi there. In general, these are decent thoughts but I’d suggest taking a look at the code before issuing directives.

On duplicative traits: Several traits in-game duplicate effects of other traits. That’s intentional and with good reason. In some cases, yes, they stack. In more cases, they specifically don’t stack. The major problem is with the category-enforcement system: if a trait is part of multiple categories–such as High Night Vision–having it contributes an equal amount of category-strength to every category that’s involved.

This allows random mutations to cross into those categories, which is perfectly fine in moderation (after all, mutation kinda lends itself to biological Weirdness) but, pre-category-enforcement, led to Crawling Chaos where people would do their damndest to game the system and get All The Positives From Every Category. Lots of purifier and mutagen flipping, save/load where available, and generally a situation that was more tedious than fun.

A more immediate problem for our Ursine folks is that significantly-shared traits also add a lot of threshold-blocking if most of your category’s mutations have this sort of thing. Ursine turns out to be more of a culprit than I’d thought: if you miss the first few shots at the Threshold, you may mutate back out of Ursine as your primary category altogether (!). In general, if a mutation is in more than four or five categories, I’d want to break that up.

So, going back to High Night Vision, as I write this HNV makes you part bear, part fish, part Beast, part insect, part rat, part Chimera, and part wolf. (+8 to URSINE, +48 to Not-URSINE. Yikes.) I’m going to remove Ursine from that (and from Nearsighted) and combine those into one URSINE_EYE mutation; that strengthens Ursine for threshold-breaching purposes, at the cost of (marginally) reducing the crossover prospects.

[hr]

Intolerances will be revisited when I get the next chance to work on digestion. The general ideas seem worth consideration.

Making the tank classes tougher can be considered, though I’d do that with separate mutations. There are OVERSIZE variants of the Survivor-type gear, so HUGE folks can get later-game armor and storage. Powered suits, well, those are for the 225-pound weaklings. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Truth be told, I’d rather futz around with Weird Redirects on slime HP than give 'em a full rework to make one HP pool. Slime bones may as well be hollow; if there’s no serious (Threshold-blocking as with Ursine, for example) need to break stuff out, I prefer to leave some room for intercategory crossover. (NV mutations were such an issue.) Slimes get great IN/PE/DX, but at the cost of ST and taking significant IN penalties from pain.

If you can afford post-threshold Alpha (if it’s easy to achieve now, that’s a bug. Let me know and it’ll get more expensive) and opt to forgo the Body Stuff of the other categories, then you get good stats. Just don’t lose 'em–they don’t record your previous values. Will look into downsides when I take a shot at its capstone, but that’s not an immediate priority.

Elf-A, well, take a look at the code and the design specs. I think that’s going a bit overboard.

Chimera: the idea of a faster Unstable Genetics is interesting, but as-is it’s designed as a dangerous category pre-thresh, with reason. Chimera was designed to create expendable shock troops: to be dropped into high-concentration zed areas and kill a lot of critters before they die. I’m open to the rapid-changing post-thresh, though.

(I did name the THRESH_CHIMERA trait Chaos, after all. :wink: )

3

Some of this was discussed in IIRC; despite making myself look like a moron, I decided not to remove some pertinent points so that KA101 could counter them here for wider availability to the forum as a whole without the whole thing sounding nonsensical.

This should give everyone (and gave me) a significantly better grasp on how to go around formulating mutation suggestions.

Elf-A, well, take a look at the code and the design specs. I think that's going a bit overboard.
I wanted to downgrade the penalties originating from other sources, but adding ones that seem more elf-like. Such as being softer, making animals like them, and generally having a restricted diet.
4

I like the OP’s idea.

5

Not necessarily easy to do, but I thought I should give post-threshold fish some love.

Lateral Line organ
A line runs from your gills to the base of where your tail SHOULD be. Allows detection of vibrations, and works best when submerged in water.

Shark Jaw
Your jaw distends enormously, jutting forwards and developing many sharp teeth. Can cause bleeding.
You receive an oversized mouth with constantly regrowing teeth. Prevents mouth items, like the others, and gives a powerful bite attack.

Leviathan (requires Huge)
You are now a massive predator of the water, extremely dangerous, and cheerfully capable of devouring anything in your path. Unfortunately moving around on land has become more difficult.

6

[quote=“Nappist, post:5, topic:5932”]Not necessarily easy to do, but I thought I should give post-threshold fish some love.

Lateral Line organ
A line runs from your gills to the base of where your tail SHOULD be. Allows detection of vibrations, and works best when submerged in water.

Shark Jaw
Your jaw distends enormously, jutting forwards and developing many sharp teeth. Can cause bleeding.
You receive an oversized mouth with constantly regrowing teeth. Prevents mouth items, like the others, and gives a powerful bite attack.

Leviathan (requires Huge)
You are now a massive predator of the water, extremely dangerous, and cheerfully capable of devouring anything in your path. Unfortunately moving around on land has become more difficult.[/quote]

Fish and Cephalopod are pretty much On Hold until we’ve got working inter-Z-level relations and (from that) working underwater geography. As things currently are, there’s very little point to becoming water-adapted and I don’t write useless mutations.

That said, Shark Jaw is already planned, and I’m not sure what the lateral-line would accomplish (needs more detail!). Leviathan would require additional code-finagling.

7

I was basically coming up with ideas of what to do with fish, given that it’s empty right now. Lateral-line would simply be similar to improved hearing. Improved detection of vibrations underwater, since noise is a little screwy. Alternatively, make it change the color of ?s you can detect based on how much mass the critter in question has.