Lysocyst

A lysocyst is a membrane organelle that fires one enzyme carrier away from the cell and is destroyed launching it. The carrier flies until it touches a cell, reaches dense substrate, or runs out of range, then bursts into a ring of digestive enzymes. Everything a lysocyst does happens where the carrier lands, not at the cell that grew it. A cell carries one lysocyst by default and never more than four, and grows a replacement only once a spawn interval, so that interval, not the arming time, limits how often a cell shoots.

Spawn limits

The gene caps how many live lysocysts a cell may hold. The first appears as soon as the gene is expressed, and at most one more per spawn interval after that.

Growing one costs cytosol: 0.12, multiplied by burst count over six, potency over 0.8, launch speed over four and range over five. A cell that cannot pay skips the spawn and retries at the next interval, so a starving cell carries none. Firing costs nothing further.

Firing sequence

The organelle arms for the gene’s arming time, counted in simulation frames rather than in seconds, then launches a single carrier along its aim direction and dies.

The carrier travels at launch speed, dissolving nothing and sticking to nothing, and bursts on the first of three things:

• touching a cell,
• reaching substrate at or above the gene’s trigger density,
• running out of flight time.

Flight time is range divided by launch speed, jittered by up to ten percent.

A carrier cannot hit the cell that fired it during the first 0.2 seconds of flight. After that one that curves back into its own parent bursts on it like anything else.

A cell at or below five percent cytosol does not fire, unless it holds a vacuole power the payload can draw on: an acidic payload needs the acid power, a basic one the base power, a near-neutral one takes either. A fire is skipped again when the frame’s enzyme spawn budget is already full, and the organelle survives to try on a later frame.

Aim

The gene carries three aim weights, [substrate, others, self], each from -1 to 1, negative meaning avoid. The default is [0, 1, 0]: hunt other cells. “Other” is decided by surface signature, not by strain name: a cell counts as other when more than four of its thirty-two signature bits differ.

With a positive others weight and a target in range, the organelle locks on: the other two weights are ignored for that frame, and the shot leaves pointed straight at the target. Lock range is the carrier’s own flight distance, so aim never promises further than the shot reaches.

Without a lock the weights steer where on the rim the organelle sits rather than the shot itself. The shot leaves along the direction the organelle is turned toward, which tracks the densest substrate within reach and points straight out from the cell when there is none.

A lysocyst has no firing spread: the carrier leaves exactly on its aim line.

In hardcore mode, while the player is directly controlling a cell, that cell’s lysocysts take the cursor as their aim target instead of a hunted cell.

The burst

The burst spawns the gene’s burst count of children, at most twelve, evenly around a full circle with a little jitter, at forty percent of the carrier’s speed and never slower than 0.5.

The children are ordinary digestive enzyme particles. They inherit the carrier’s pH, dissolve radius, consume strength and cytosol drain unchanged, along with the enzyme modifier genes the cell carried when the organelle was uploaded. Two of those modifiers do not survive the trip intact; the note below documents them. Children cannot burst again.

Burst potency doubles into the child’s size scale, which multiplies both the radius of substrate it dissolves and the size it collides at. Potency widens a burst; burst count only makes it denser.

Children start with whatever flight time the carrier had left, so a burst next to the parent cell produces short-lived children. A carrier that bursts at the end of its range gives its children a flat three seconds instead.

A child that touches a cell sticks to it and drains cytosol on a pulse. Impact and drain are both scaled by kinship, and wherever that comes out above zero each of them sprays three nutrient particles that home back to the cell that fired the lysocyst. A child that meets substrate at density 0.34 stops and dissolves it until the density falls back to the gene’s trigger density, returning nutrients for what it removes. That one gene value is both the carrier’s burst threshold and the children’s floor.

One modifier changes the sequence rather than the payload. If the genome carries a Fragmenting enzyme modifier, the carrier splits at that modifier’s trigger point before any of the three burst conditions can fire. Each fragment is still a carrier with the same burst count, at seventy percent of the parent’s size and remaining flight time, so a Fragmenting lineage multiplies its bursts instead of getting one.

Kinship

Damage from a cell’s own enzymes is scaled by kinship. The multiplier counts the bits differing between the attacker’s surface signature and the victim’s: zero for identical signatures, rising to full at six. A burst landing on its own parent or an unmutated clone does no damage and yields no nutrients. A daughter that mutates its surface genes drifts off kinship and becomes edible to the line it came from.

Burst pH does not gate this. It is seeded to the owner cell’s optimal pH when the gene first appears, and older code used that match as the self-protection test, but the pH test is marked deprecated and no longer applies to cell damage. Burst pH still sets the payload’s colour, and its reactivity: a payload far from neutral both hits and drains up to twenty-five percent harder.

Genome values

Every value below lives in the genome and is clamped to its range on each mutation.

Burst pH is the exception to the defaults. A gene that arrives by spontaneous addition has its burst pH overwritten with the owner genome’s optimal pH, or with neutral 0.5 if the genome carries no pH tolerance gene; the 0.3 above is only what a genome loads when it stores no value at all. Burst pH also drifts toward the local substrate pH rather than drifting evenly.

The gene allows multiple copies, and duplication and deletion are equally likely at 2.5% per copy per division. The mitosis defaults scale both by 0.08, putting the real rate near 0.2% per division. A mutagen raises it and a stabilised lineage lowers it.