Can I just code this stuff in in peace plz?
With great power comes great responsibility. It's important to have a vision of what you want the program to become, but at the same time it serves no one, least of all yourself, if you're unwilling to accept or consider constructive criticism.
I'd say that my primary concerns are:
1. Integrate smoothly and cleanly with the existing infrastructure, so to an end user's perspective there's no seams between new features and old features. The program is pretty hard to grok as it is. We need to follow the principle of least surprise.
2. As best as possible, let old DNA files produce viable bots. We've had some changes in the past that broke all previous bots, and BOY was that a snafu.
3. Don't break or eliminate existing features without carefully considering the implication. Especially around veggy feeding there are dozens of different options in the UI to tweak the settings. At the very least we should have a good idea of how they interact with new features.
4. Keep the changes as small and atomic as possible, to keep the source code in a clean state. Massive systemic changes are dangerous in such a fragile code base. Trying to do even 3 or 4 things simultaneously is a recipe for heartache.
...
Oh, another part of the code that will need changing: -6 and -1 shots steal a certain amount of nrg from the body of the bots they're feeding on. You'll probably want to consider chloroplasts in this as well.
Also, in cases where you need to assign arbitrary constants (such as the nrg cost of building a chloroplast, etc.), you should expose it through the UI. There's a separate UI form for costs and constants, so I don't think it'll cause problems with the widget limit.
