I have very mixed feelings on the gene that damages the heart when adipose tissue gets too high in CFF-derived genomes.
On one hand, I don't think it's a terrible idea. It might in fact be a great way to punish creatures who eat themselves out of house and home, as vanilla creatures are known to do. On the other hand, it absolutely SHOULD NOT be the number one cause of death.
Unfortunately, the latter was the case for the testing feral run for my base ettin genome. Way too often they'd get caught up in hanging around sources of food, seeing no reason to abandon that spot, and not generating enough activase even with the disappointment stim constantly triggering from their failed attempts to push food (WHY they were constantly trying to push food in the first place is another extremely frustrating mystery I've yet to solve). As a result, ettin after ettin after ettin dropped dead of heart attacks.
Eventually, I decided enough was enough. This wasn't something that's unique to the ettins; the fundamental flaw leading to it's also in my norn genome. So it was back to the norn genome to figure out a better way of balancing it.
The first order of business before editing anything was hatching a norn of my base genome and watching it go about its business on a mostly-vanilla version of the Capillata. To my great dismay, I found my earlier observation about the disappointment stim being triggered constantly was flawed. The norn barely generated any activase and was constantly low on muscle tissue.
Based on this, my first thought was to throw out the 2017 Activase system entirely and replace it with the TWB's. And that's what I started doing...before I realized that the two systems didn't necessarily have to be mutually exclusive. With that thought in mind, I added the TWB version of the Anabolic Steroid emitter (which triggers when muscle tissue gets low) and tested it out.
Working in tandem with the existing 2017 activase system, the results were actually pretty good. So I was free to ditch the activase from the disappointment stim and move on to the next step: properly balancing the adipose tissue.
For this, I referenced Darcie's Gizmo Norns quite a bit. My old base genome took their digestive system edits wholesale, but I wasn't about to do that this time. This time around I tested what I felt was most relevant to what I wanted: for adipose tissue to build up slower and break down faster. As it turned out, I was getting good results only from tweaking the reaction that converted adipose tissue back into triglyceride (it was originally 1 adipose -> 8 triglyceride, I dropped it to 1 adipose -> 6 triglyceride).
Even more surprising was the good results I was getting from making the reactions that had activase consume glycogen and adipose tissue dormant. In my initial tests I'd assumed muting those would result in a lot of norns dead from heart attacks, but it didn't happen. In fact it seemed like the risk was significantly lower. My best guess is that since creatures are getting less hungry in general they're less inclined to overeat.
I ultimately left the adipose tissue reaction dormant, while changing the other reaction so that glucose was consumed instead of glycogen, mirroring how the TWB version of the Activase system had movement stims consume a little bit of glucose in addition to generating activase. Feeling satisfied with this outcome, I added a batch of the new norns to my norn testing feral run....
...And wound up failing a major fundamental goal in making creatures that are interesting to watch. As it turns out, it's possible to make creatures who are TOO good at taking care of themselves. These new norns had zero reason to leave their hatching area because they never got hungry and none of their other drives got high enough to warrant it. Out of the four I hatched, only one eventually did.
I also eventually decided that now they had too little adipose tissue, in that the only way they'd have a heart attack was if I forced them to do nothing but eat food via CAOs. Otherwise, they simply never ate enough to even get close to having one, regardless of how fat-heavy their diet was. I solved the heart attack problem, but I still had the problem of creatures who didn't do much.
Back to the drawing board it is, and if I'm honest I'm starting to get a little frustrated with this project. I'd very much like to be at the part where I've gotten all this stupid tweaking and testing and balancing done and am making cool new breeds like the ones I talked about in my last post instead. But nope; it just feels like for every problem I've solved another one or two raise their ugly heads, and that goal gets even further away.
It's for that reason I'm giving serious thought to just abandoning working with the 2017 genome altogether and restarting with a different one. In particular, I hatched a Gizmo Norn to observe its nutrient levels with the X Ray to get a feel for how they looked, and as I went about tweaking my base genome that Gizmo Norn took care of itself and died of old age in a manner that's pretty unusual for non-CFE creatures. So the Gizmo genome feels promising for such a task...if I don't mind having to add all the stuff CFE and beyond added that the Gizmos don't have, that is.
Sigh.
