Smart Virus

[bwisialo]

That's not what I did, but that's cool! I figure there are lots of doing it, especially if the other cell types were permitted. How does your virus spread exactly? Infected swimmers produce Virocytes attached to Lipocytes?

Mine is Myocyte swimmer with Virocyte head -- a smart Viro-swimmer. It finds victims by color, changes their Phagocyte and Stereocyte into the virus cells, and then... the infected hunt the uninfected. It takes off like an explosion and everything is dead after several hundred hours.

[Alast]

Yours is like a zombie swimmer

I was thinking about that sort of approach but couldn't figure it out. So instead I'm infecting the Stereocyte. It still has the swimmer go for food but it uses the energy to create a Lipocyte attached to the Stereocyte and the Phagocyte to split off into a single Virocyte and a cell fart. That way the single Virocyte has quite some energy to last for a while on the substrate.

[bwisialo]

I named it Zombie Virus. Yeah, energy utilization is a big challenge here. I like the idea of a virus that doesn't have any nutrient-gaining cells in its genome. If an organism that is 100% parasite uses only Glueocytes and no Photocytes, Phagocytes, etc., then a fully-fledged virus would use Virocytes and no nutrient-gaining cells of it own. Real life virus do not take in nutrients, right?

Hm, I just thought of several other strategies that might work.

[Alast]

Right, viruses don't have any active metabolism. And in this challenge you made sure that the genome wouldn't have any nutrient gaining cells. So there we go

[CandyYAHFT]

Some viruses have... We could call them "wall breakers" to pass through protein membranes of though cells, like devoroucytes, but that don't gain energy, btw I'm not even trying, seems like a fun challenge, but I know virus are my worst cell
(to use I mean)