No, it is a fixed value. It literally affects the mutation cap.
Let's say we are dealing with Point Mutations:
A value in Point Mutations of 1 is really naughty as the robot mutates all the time. We all know that. I am just using as example.
Due to how mutable my new mutation algorithms where, I had the opposite problem mostly.
The mutations value was getting very, very large. Therefore, the robots would just sit there for days w/o mutating.
I invented this type of cap to fix the problem.
A counter on how many mutations to allow is a different story.
Initially, I just had a time cap on how many mutations to allowed. About 4 seconds. That did not cross platform very well if we are talking about safemode, due to the fact that each cpu runs at different rates. I ended up replacing it with a counter. I was configuring the counter before realizing that I may have a corrupt copy of vb, and maybe the whole OS. For reference, see the source code.