Symbiont

📖Description

Symbiont lets you cultivate powerful, living cells capable of producing a wide range of materials. Each cell requires nutrient food, created from organic items. The mod also introduces a custom genetic system, making it possible to improve your cells... At a cost!

If you enjoy resource production mods, but would prefer more of a puzzle, Symbiont is just for you!

🛠️Beta Notice

As of version 0.1, Symbiont does NOT include any built-in item, fluid, or power transport systems, nor power generation. However, all machines are compatible with existing transport and power generation mods.

Additionally, the list of items that can be produced is limited to corals, moss, iron, gold, copper and cultured meat. However, all recipes, Cells, and Biotraits are datapackable, so you can easily add or modify content.

🦠Getting Started

To begin, you’ll need three core machines:

• Metabolizer, which processes items and liquids into food for cells. It can also be used to obtain new cell cultures!
• Bioreactor, which uses cells to convert nutrient pastes from the Metabolizer into refined bio-liquids.
• Lastly, Bioformer can be used to solidify processed bio-liquids into useful items.

🧫Obtaining Cells

Cells can be obtained in a few ways:

• Metabolizer Culturing - The main method. Create the right conditions inside a Metabolizer to grow new cell types. Use a mod like JEI to explore all available recipes.
• Bone Sampler - Allows you to collect animal cells. It’s mostly painless and enables production of cultured meat. Perfect if you don't want to hurt your animal friends!

Once you make your machines and prepare some cells, it's time to start producing items!

🔬Genetics

As you obtain better cells, you might notice their stats aren't always at 100%. This means their Biocode includes unique Biotraits. Hold Ctrl while hovering over a Cell Culture to view its exact traits.

Core Stats

• Stability - Determines whether a cell successfully multiplies or dies off after a cycle. Values above 100% might duplicate the culture, while below 100% might cause it to die off.
• Growth - Increases the speed of production cycles.
• Production - Boosts the quantity of items and fluids generated.
• Consumption - Affects how much liquid is consumed per cycle.

Biotrait Types

Each cell can only have one Biotrait of each type:

• Stability - Improves Stability, often at a trade-off.
• Metabolism - Modifies Production and Consumption stats.
• Replication - Affects Growth rate.
• Adaptability (currently unused) - Increases culture's stability by adding temperature, light or pressure growth conditions.
• Special (currently unused) - Allows your cells to produce secondary drops!

Biocode Manipulation

While each culture has its default Biocode, biotraits can be extracted and applied to a different cell culture! To get started with genetic manipulation, produce bioplastic sheets using polycells and craft a Centrifuge and a Recombinator:

• Centrifuge uses a bucket of Biopolymer Solution and a reactant item to extract one of the Culture's Biotraits. Cells that are processed die, but if they had a Biotrait of the specified type, a Biotrait Extract is produced. Reactants include:
  • Redstone for Stability
  • Glow Berries for Metabolic
  • Amethyst Shard for Replication
  • Glowstone Dust for Adaptability
  • Dragon's Breath for Special
• Once you get your hands on a few Extracts, you can apply them onto a Cell Culture using a Recombinator. It has 5 traits slots, one for each type. When you are satisfied with the new stats, activate Recombinator using redstone signal.

🫟The Future

The current plans for future updates include:

• Implementation of Adaptability & Special Traits.
• Modules, that can be placed next to Symbiont's machines to improve their output, change their production environment or to allow for secondary drops. These modules would be anywhere between 1x1x1 and 2x2x2 and the amount of accepted modules would be limited.
• New plants and fungi, along with hydroponic beds and fungi planters to make a smoother experience.
• This is more of a long-term goal, but bugs could be added as a way to create even more complex processing chains and obtain newer items. Ideally, this would be developed as a separate mod that would automatically integrate into Symbiont's progression.

If you would like to leave your feedback on Symbiont, make sure to leave a comment or to join the discord!