I put a character of mine that already existed in a universe with Pokemon, and she had a Beedrill. So I just cheated in a friendly giant wasp that followed her around. It was kind of nice. Except that the creature’s health is finite, and there is no means of healing it once health has been depleted. On top of that, there’s no way to tell it to stay out of harm’s way or otherwise keep it alive when its health is extremely low, and it would always kill itself. Canonically my character would be devastated if this happened. I started to wonder about what could be done to serve as sort of an optional add-on for people who like pets and want to preserve them, or as someone that wants to be a Pokemon trainer and capture Hulks to take into labs or to tackle tank bots or something.
The idea in my head uses the same mechanics from the deployable friendly turrets and manhacks, except with an additional “catching” mechanism.
You’d have some device used to catch creatures. Ideally you could throw it at anything and it’d have x chance to work. If it doesn’t work, well, it just falls on the ground after impact. If it does work, it despawns the creature you lobbed it at and replaces it with the encapsulated version of it in item form, which you can pick up and carry around as you wish. Using it would spawn it beside you, just like a manhack or turret. It’d be friendly and basically do things normally.
I’m not sure how you’d go about retrieving it. If you follow the idea of the manhack/turret, you’d just walk into it and recover the encapsulated (x creature) item it drops. Alternatively, you could have a function on the item to de-spawn the creature and replace itself with the encapsulated version of whatever creature it is. This would, effectively, emulate the Pokeball system and make managing a pet not only a lot more convenient, but also fun. Because having pet Hulks couldn’t possibly go wrong.
I am not savvy with the code of CDDA so I don’t know exactly what this would take to implement, just that it would be really freaking amazing.