Remove extreme kcal cost for Pounce

[rselias]

Summary

Balance "Removed kcal cost of Pounce"

Purpose of change

Pounce/Feline Leap costs a whopping 400 kcal to use, in addition to its stamina cost. This extremely high, as a single long jump shouldn't burn as much energy as ~40 minutes of high-intensity cardio. Furthermore, the other mutation leap abilities have no kcal cost at all, making this seem like a mistake.

Two other mutations have similarly high kcal costs: Slime Spray (700 kcal) and Bioluminescent Flare (400 kcal). It makes sense for both of these abilities to have kcal costs, as they involve the player creating substances from their body, but the costs of these abilities are many times higher than other, similar abilities, like creating webs or firing quills.

Describe the solution

Removed the kcal cost of Feline Leap. Costing stamina like the other leap abilities is enough.

Divided the kcal cost of Slime Spray and Bioluminescent Flare by 10. This brings Slime Spray roughly in line with Web Weaver (69 kcal). There's no realism-based math behind this change, so if anyone thinks they should be higher, feel free to argue.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Leaving Slime Spray and Bioluminescent Flare alone.

Reducing Feline Leap's cost to a small amount rather than removing it entirely, and adding a comparable cost to the other leap abilities.

Testing

Created a character with the relevant mutations, saw that the costs were changed correctly, and made sure the mutations still worked.

[kevingranade]

There's no realism-based math behind this change

If you don't have a rationale for changing them, don't change them. It's equally likely that the mutations you're comparing them to are too cheap, and that needs to be resolved by looking at how much biomass they involve and how many calories that would cost to produce.

[rselias]

Alright, then I'll stick to removing the kcal cost of Pounce for now.

[fairyarmadillo]

The calorie costs on snail slime and bioluminescence in nature are very low. Snail slime is mostly water and is otherwise just made up of polysaccharides like human mucus, and wikipedia suggests that luciferin-powered bioluminescence is 80-90% efficient at turning energy into light. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luciferase#Mechanism_of_reaction

They should both probably cost an appreciable amount of water, but not a ton of calories.

[rselias]

Agreed on bioluminescence. Snail slime doesn't immobilize prey, though, so I don't know if it's the best point of comparison for the Slime Spray ability. Might be better to consider velvet worm glue. It's costly enough to make that velvet worms will eat the hardened glue that they've shot, in order to recycle the proteins it consists of.

[fairyarmadillo]

Snails do exude huge amounts mucus to immobilize predators. They don't do it to prey so much because they aren't in the habit of eating things that move faster than a snail.

#70088 added a cooldown/charge system for ink glands that could be used for other substance-emitting mutations. Food for thought for anyone looking to work on these, but that can probably be discussed in its own issue or PR.

[Maleclypse]

I went ahead and did math with available research on exercise burn for animals. Kcal cost for movement abilities is probably not as realistic as stamina costs.