From my own observations in-game (yes, heavy use of debug mode is involved), I’m curious what one would need to do to successfully “farm” ovikari larvae without one’s own defenses crushing the eggs or slaughtering the growing buggies.
Maintaining a certain level of consumed, but not absorbed, calories doesn’t seem to have an impact, and I’ve also noticed that once the body has removed an ovikari, it’s impossible to become infected with another.
The parasite system was quite thrown together. I am currently working on setting it up for the entity system (which will eventually replace all the player’s regular systems as well) and all the weirdness that one experiences should be expunged after the transition.
Ovikari in general weren’t originally written to work with more than one larvae at a time (lore excuse was that they were aggressively territorial and would kill other larvae) but I later changed my mind and had to tweak what I wrote to try and support multiple parasites at different stages of growth all within a single parasite cell.
In general the main improvement I’m planning on is a more cohesive process for multiple parasites.
For now, I don’t really know what all to suggest, as many of the core processes broke as I changed things (such as setting a processing calorie store instead of the original disjointed calorie system). I believe in doing so a lot of the parasite health was lost along with it’s general instability.