Player mitigation tool: Bitter/Stinky

A series of biomods (or suit coatings) that make the player taste or smell bad to certain creatures, and (for balance, and fun) good to others.

Inspired by the infamous bitter coating on physical copies of Nintendo Switch games, and by animals licking a lemon (etcetera) for the first time, I was thinking that this could add a layer of flexible difficulty to the game. If a player gets bitten a lot, or eaten a lot, by a specific creature (or creature type), it (or they) will learn that the player tastes bad, and the player will have peace for a while, until the creature(s) either forget, or get hungry enough to ignore the bad taste.
A universal bad flavor would be a little overpowered, so I think there should be multiple flavors to find and test. Of course what one creature dislikes, another creature will love :)

I’ve seen cats bat at snacks they find disgusting, and I’ve seen pet rats back off and hiss at snacks they personally dislike, so different creatures might simply behave differently when the player tastes bad to them, instead of completely avoiding them. They might avoid the player but become aggressive if the player gets too close.

Because player deaths are canonical, creatures who try to eat the player would have the opportunity to learn over time, meaning that if the player is stuck at a specific leviathan, a bad flavor might eventually buy the player a little extra time, or change the leviathan’s behavior.

Flavors (or pheromones) could potentially also be applied to the chum biomod to trigger/reinforce these different reactions.

Additionally, one especially delicious flavor/smell could be a way to attract everything, making gathering food easier, but riskier.

It might be necessary to animate a reaction for each creature that tastes or smells the bad, to help the player learn which flavor works for which creature, but I think the fun interaction would be worth it.

Slowly teaching wild animals that you are a friend, or not food, or even an enemy, is the biggest way we interact with wild nature on Earth, and having that in game would be so cool. It would require getting bitten (or eaten) many times before a creature gradually learns to avoid the player more and more, but that might be more interesting than an instant deterrent. If it is linked only to death, it would be akin to a rubber banding difficulty scaling. A biomod that is only for difficulty scaling based on how often the player is killed could be explained as a randomly positioned green rubbery organ that simply tastes horrible, or something like that.

To preserve the initial fear of meeting a new creature, maybe each type of creature has some flavor they dislike, which requires scanning the creature and a source of the flavor.

If this would crowd the biomod interface too much, flavors/smells could be tied to a suit coating that could be applied by some kind of shower-like or spray-tan-esque station at the player base. That might be necessary if each creature needs its own flavor to dislike for balance.

(Implementation might require a couple of weighted variables, but a few booleans and an optional cautious sniff function would probably be good enough. Hopefully it’s not too complicated.)

I love that the game has no killing, so I would love some interactive systems like this instead.