I will be !!sciencing!! the following:
- Phoenix is prevented from being dismembered
- It will be built from bone and undamagable flame tissue, for blood it will use flames also.
- It dies when bled out or when its skull is destroyed
- Upon dying one of its materials should evaporate, emiting a phoenix-reviving gas.
- Said gas should also contain a syndrome to temporarily impair the phoenix, or turn him into a seperate phoenix egg creature for a set period of time.
Fairly confident in all but step 4, with which I havnt expirimented much with.
Step 4 won't work, unfortunately. Materials can't do interactions, and only an interaction can revive a creature. Materials can give new interactions to living creatures that breathe it in, though.
I recall a thread where a chicken was set to lay bees instead of eggs. Can it be modded so that a phoenix, upon dying, would leave such an odd egg (like a bronze colossus leaves behind a statue)?
It doesn't work, despite constant attempts to make it happen. You can't create new creatures properly - spawned vermin will zip around randomly at hyperspeed before promptly vanishing, eggs won't have a creature type and certainly won't hatch, corpses won't belong to any particular creature, etc.
In short, if you want something revived, something alive has to do the reviving.
Actually, there's another way. You could make it a regional effect that takes place everywhere - kind of like the zombie animation in evil regions - just change ANIMATE to RESURRECT, make it operate everywhere, and make it only affect phoenixes (you can do this by giving the phoenix a unique CREATURE_CLASS). Also change it to an 'egg' class or something for a time (this will also keep it from dying immediately from whatever killed it in the first place).