I decided to start up a zerobot sim on my computer for the many hours a day I'm not using it. After a few false starts I think I have everything all set and going well.
I decided to do everything as default as I could and try to stick to what I could gather EricL had done. I created a zerobot dna file, which I think I did right, and started it up. First time I did something dumb I can;t recall now, but I restarted it. The second time I disabled eyes to speed the sim up, I then attempted to turn eyes back on and either due to me missing something, or the option not being available I was unable to and started fresh.
Other info I have is that I do hourly saves, this will hopefully not be as necessary later on, but I'm not really short on drive space so I'm keeping them. All my bots are autotrophs with all characteristics active (dna execution, reproduction, virus vulnerable ect).
After 40 hours the bots have been building up some nice mutations each one having on average 148 mutations.
So after 40 hours I have noticed a little hurdle. No big deal really but something I have to keep an eye out for. Bots are learning to shoot far before reproducing. With them being autotrophs they basically can shoot nearly unlimitedly, and as a result the second a single "spiral shooty death" bot evolves it manages to kill all the bots and then itself dies as it shoots more than it takes in as a plant.
So right now every so often I check to see if my bots have been decimated, reload my saves and then if I see the bot before it has done anything bad I save it, then kill it off and resume. Or if I find a save before the bot mutates into Spinny Death, I just let it go on from there.
One thing I could do is to make shooting prohibitively expensive but I feel I'll lose out on a lot if I do this. Any other suggestions as to how I can help keep a single bot from destroying everything, or should I just keep playing momma?