Here is pacu (X5)

[calibayzone]

When a 100 kg piece of granite drops onto another 100kg piece, they make a 200 kg piece (the limit is 25000 kg). Why not this with critters? Your CPU will thank you.

When critters of the same species and morph collide, they have a small chance of merging (each critter checks for collisions only once in a while, doing so is expensive!). Also, merged critters have a small chance of separating into two smaller pieces at any given time (wrangling also unmerges critters one-by-one). In wild areas most of the critters would be separate, but in a dense pacu farm with 100 in a space of 3 tiles the critters would be highly merged. This balancing is a natural consequence of the rules I outlined, and need not be explicitly coded.

In a merge calories, mass, waste, and decor would add. Temperature would average. Eating and defecation would be chunked into larger meals due to a larger combined appetite. Reproduction and death wound't merge, the combined critter would need a list of it's own member death dates as well as reproduction amounts, but the cost of doing so is minuscule as these only happen at most once per 20 cycles or so per member. Pathfinding and heat exchange eat so much more CPU.

Merging shouldn't affect the gameplay significantly if done correctly. We could restrict it to only happen when i.e. the ages, etc are fairly close.

[Sasza22]

So you are basically suggesting this?

[Madbro]

9 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

So you are basically suggesting this?

Reasonable sprite!

[Yunru]