Trophin

Trophin is the feed a dish holds, and the stock every trophin spray and every paid nucleus dose is charged against. It belongs to the dish rather than to the lab, so a balance built up in one culture never reaches the next one. A dish that runs dry earns more inside itself: held ground pays trophin back, and scrapping a cell converts the cell into more.

The dish’s balance

A balance exists only while a culture dish is loaded. On the bench, on the Bionet board and in the menus the figure is zero and nothing can be spent.

A dish with no recorded balance opens with the equivalent of 32 sprays at the tool’s default radius and intensity. A saved culture plate records its own balance and restores it on load. A plate saved before the game recorded one reloads with the opening allowance rather than with nothing, because no record and a record of zero are not the same claim.

The DISH panel prints a TROPHIN row: the amount held, in micrograms, and beside it the rate held zones are adding per second. The rate is dropped when no zone is paying; the amount held is always shown.

In a creative lab every charge succeeds without touching the balance, and the row is not drawn.

Trophin income

Held ground also drips ordinary nutrient particles into the zone itself. Those particles have no owner and feed whichever side is standing there, so ground that is being lost still feeds the side taking it. Only the balance credit is player-only: rival-held ground pays the player nothing.

A plasmodium returns more feedstock than a motile cell, but not in proportion to how much more it absorbs. A cell scrapped with an empty tank returns almost nothing, and splitting one before scrapping it does not multiply the yield: division halves what a cell holds without halving what it can hold.

Scrapping needs neither held ground nor a win, and it is what an empty balance is recovered with.

The cost of a placement

A placement costs what it deposits, at a flat price per unit deposited. The intensity dial sets the concentration and the radius dial sets the area of the disc it covers, so widening the brush costs by the square of the radius.

A tool that is open with nothing armed sprays trophin, and that spray is charged like any other.

With more than one compound armed, each row pays its own share out of its own stock. A row holding nothing is dropped: it pays nothing and places nothing, and the rest of the mix places its shares normally, so the spray gets thinner rather than being refused. A row holding less than its share hands over what it has and emits that fraction. The gesture is refused whole only when nothing in it can pay at all.

The paid nucleus dose

The Trigger Mitosis key, bound to F by default, acts on every selected cell in turn. A cell whose nucleus is already ready divides, and that costs nothing. A cell whose nucleus is not ready is charged a flat price in trophin, the same for every cell whatever its size, and the nucleus is fed directly. Clicking a nucleus is the unpaid path and charges nothing.

• There is no fallback to the cell under the cursor: an unselected press does nothing.
• With a strain selected it walks the whole strain, and stops at the first refused charge.
• The dose is sized as a fraction of that nucleus’s own division threshold rather than as an absolute amount, so it carries a nucleus across the line wherever that line sits.
• Only body plans that can spend nucleus energy are charged: an ordinary cell, an amoeba, and a plasmodium, whose buds gate on nucleus energy. A heterokaryon is blocked by nucleus count instead and is skipped without a charge.
• A free feed from the cell’s own vacuoles runs alongside the paid dose, which is the half that adds energy the cell never held.

Each armed compound is charged the dose price again on top, so a spray carrying two compounds costs twice per cell. Trophin itself is charged when it is armed, or when nothing is; composing a spray that leaves trophin out is a refusal of the nucleus dose.

A dose also buys direction. A cell dosed while standing on ground that is extreme, or on ground mottled wider than its own tolerance band, gets one guaranteed mutation step at its next division: its pH or temperature optimum is pushed toward the local field, or its band is widened where the ground is too mixed for any single optimum to sit inside. The ground is sampled when the dose is paid for, so a cell that crawls away afterwards keeps the step it was bought.

The trophin spray

Trophin has one effect: it is food. Mutation is carried by other compounds.

In the Particle form a spray lays down nutrient particles, which are ordinary food, and alongside them accelerant particles, in a count that tracks the nutrient ring’s own so that density holds as the brush widens. An accelerant particle carries no food energy. It stamps a growth-clock boost on any cell it touches, with no transporter organelle required, and everything that boost speeds up is on the division path.

A plasmodium therefore gains nothing from the stamp. It is served instead by a separate arm of the same gesture: a spray landing on its network, or a little past it, boosts the network’s growth and budding directly.

In the Brush form the same stroke writes food into the ground instead of into particles, additively rather than to a level, and carries neither the accelerant nor the plasmodium boost.