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[Robosaur]

A bite from the Spinedeath Spider is, without a doubt, one of the worst fates a person can recieve. It begins with a rash, then swelling. Then, without warning, immense pain racks the victim's body. Within hours of the initial bite, a person will turn into a spider hybrid, with twitching auxiliary limbs, additional eyes, and a hardened carapace. The venom rots the mind as well, turning them into destructive, rampaging creatures that further spread the horrific mutation to others, until months pass and their body erupts into a new brood of hatchling spiders.

[Dirst]

Although I really like this idea, the current state of syndromes is that each tag that can be applied or removed is a stand-alone affair with no parameters.  So this would be a new CE_APPLY_VARIATION capability for syndromes, which would create a new CREATURE type on the spot.  Toady did seem to add the ability to add new items to a world after Time Zero, so this might be do-able.  Modders would need to be careful to specify all of the relevant tag changes within the variation.

The only reason to do this, as opposed to a CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION, is if it would retain the original creature's attributes.  Then we would have two choices: "re-roll a brand new creature" or "apply potentially drastic changes to an existing creature".

[Knight Otu]

This suggestion has come up a few times, and the problem is that creature variations work in a way that isn't easily compatible with syndromes. Dirst mentions that Toady has added the ability to add new objects midgame, so the hurdle possibly isn't as big as it has been.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84398.msg2922258#msg2922258

CV_NEW_TAG alters the raw text before it is even processed, where CE_ADD_TAG has to deal with a creature def that is a processed raw through a unit that has already processed the creature def.  Various optimizations are already in place, so it can't alter the text directly.  I'm not sure if it's better to stop processing multiple tags and treat it exactly like creature raws, because that would really lengthen the syndrome raws (you'd have to deal with a zillion START/PEAK/END/etcs or globalize to groups of tags or something) and there might be cases where a syndrome would want a very different parameter list than the creature uses (so making them use an assumed identical format would add confusion, although having things live outside CE_ADD_TAG is also confusing).  This and the whole interaction system is certainly subject to suggestions.

[Robosaur]

In that case, there still needs to be a way to alter body tags and probably some other stuff like that with syndromes.