...a flurry of naive questions...
A furry of naive questions? That sounds like a comic strip to me (jots down for use in own webcomic)
Feel free to ask any questions you feel like. We all have thick skin around here, you can't get us mad or annoyed (unless you happen to be Botsareus, in which case it's your entire purpose in life :P (JK Bots))
The lines you are seeing are ties, and you are correct in assuming that the bots tying to veggies are feeding. Ties are sort of like hollow rubber bands that connect two bots, and can be used to form permanent structures or temporary feeding holes. I guess if you use them to feed, you can think of the tiebot as a kind of leech or mosquito.
Organisms don't become connected (and thus MultiBot (or MB)) until the ties are ~20 cycles old (or maybe it's 40, I can never remember). If a feeding tie lasts that long, most bots will 99 .sharenrg store which transfers 99% of the combined veggie/bot energy to the bot, so it's rare to see many Bot/Veggie hybrids.
But it's not impossible. Maybe PY built one at one point.
Give the PY tutorial on the FTP a look see. It teaches you how to build somoe simple bots, and works up in complexity. We also have a wiki help system, but it's rather limited at the moment. Look at
darwinbots.xwiki.com (most complete) or
www.darwinbots.com/WikiManual where we're (slowly) moving all the wiki contents to.
ABE Links fixed by PY :DThnx I forgot to double check them :P Num