Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24723127-20140323212322/@comment-24145588-20140326144931

(Disclaimer: There has been some mention of the problem of Big Blue Bubble using unsolicited suggestions. On the other hand, there shouldn't be any reason we can't have discussions of things we'd like to see. So: By posting this, I give Big Blue Bubble full permission to use my ideas posted in this forum, in part or in whole, without any compensation to me. I freely place my ideas for My Singing Monsters in the public domain, for any and all to use.)

I've thought some more about the Mutation Chamber idea, and come up with an alternative. Feeding monsters expensive Decorations might be interesting, and the (initially) unknown aspect of which Decoration goes to which monster could make an interesting puzzle. But, if we wanted to integrate the Ethereal Island into the game more, how about letting the Ethereal monsters bake "cosmic food" which could be delivered back to the Natural islands for use in the Mutation Chamber? This would do two things:


 * Give us something to do with all those Shards that accumulate on the Ethereal Island.
 * Give players an incentive to populate their Ethereal Island and put those monsters to work.

It goes like this: Create a new food preparation structure on the Ethereal Island only, the Cosmic Oven. It would work similarly to the regular Bakery, but it would use Shards as input, cost a LOT of them to use, and produce only "small" food items, with values of 5, 10, 15, and 20. Say, "Cosmic Dust" would cost 12,500 Shards, take 6 hours to prepare, and be worth 5 Cosmic Food points; "Comet Tails" would cost 25,000 Shards, take 9 hours to prepare, and be worth 10 Cosmic Food points, etc.

When collected, Cosmic Food items wouldn't go into a "points pool" like regular food does; Cosmic Food items would actually remain as items in an inventory slot somewhere, and would still be available when you got back to the Natural islands.

On a Natural Island, you would have your Mutation Chamber. Put a "mutable" monster into it, and feed them an item of Cosmic Food from your inventory. This is why those would remain as discrete items, and not just go into a points pool, because you would actually need to feed an individual Cosmic Food item to a monster, and not just give it points. It would take a long time to consume it -- probably the same time as it took to bake it. During this time, the monster is not on your island and singing, so it doesn't contribute to the song, and doesn't gain coins. (But it would probably still provide happiness to other monsters, like the ones in the Hotel.)

At the end of that time, the Cosmic Food item is gone from the chamber, and the monster comes out, with his Mutation Points increased by the amount gained from the food item. The Mutation Points would be a new stat for monsters, like level, happiness, and amount fed. From 0% to 95%, the monster would be unchanged; but at 100%, it would mutate into its new form.

There would be no chance of failure from feeding monsters Cosmic Food; it costs a lot, it takes a long time, but there isn't any risk of it simply being consumed and lost with no effect. Excess food would be wasted, e.g., if your monster was already at 95% mutated, and you fed him a 15-point item, the monster would go to 100% and would mutate, but you would not get a "refund" on the excess Mutation Points.

Not all monsters would be mutable; only the ones that can be mutated at any given time would be shown in the selection, similarly to the way that only breedable monsters show up in the Breeding Structure selection.

It would be expensive: At the rates I suggest, 100 points of Cosmic Food would cost 250,000 Shards to produce. It would be slow, taking at least a couple days to produce the food and feed it to a single monster. But, with your Ethereal Island well populated, it wouldn't take too long to get that many Shards, and it's still a shorter time than the 84 hours currently needed to produce a two-element Ethereal monster.

It would give players a new way to tweak their Natural islands. It would provide them a use for all those Shards that currently just accumulate without any purpose. And it would give them a reason to breed and feed up the Ethereal monsters and produce more Shards.