The problem with this is that right now, transformations completely rebuild the body from scratch. It is possible for castes to be completely different in almost every conceivable way, so it wouldn't be possible to do this any other way. This means that, in addition to healing all lost body parts at the instant they transition from one form to another, the creature's colors and such would be shuffled around unpredictably. This isn't very realistic.
Instead, metamorphosis could be handled in a manner similar to tissue layer growth (used for hair/beard growth and color change) but applied to entire body parts.
As an example, a toad's BODY token would have both a tail AND limbs. At birth, its limb size would be set to 0, which would cause them to behave as though they did not exist. When reaching metamorphosis age, its limbs would grow and its tail would shrink to nothing over the course of a few weeks. This can sort of be done with syndromes already, since BODY_APPEARANCE changing tags actually do function if you change the size of a body part, although they won't make it disappear if it shrinks down to 0.
Actually, making this work through syndromes would probably be ideal, and then make a function that applies syndromes at particular ages. This would let you do other creative things like making personality changes at certain ages or unlocking abilities, and conversely would allow magic transformations that conserve body parts.
Author
Topic: Grows into CASTE (Read 594 times)