Creatures Caves

Sorry to hear that... I think it's worth messing with, you can really do a lot of interesting things with custom chemicals and it sounds like you are on the right track... I'd work on one chemical reaction at a time to make sure you are not missing some interaction you didn't take into account... And of course double-check half-lives for the chemicals.

Also important, look at the reaction rates on your reaction genes... they work essentially just like the half-lives... In C2, they determine how quickly the reactions will react away a full dose of the ingredients. If they are set to the default setting in C2, they will react all of the ingredients they can instantly... As soon as an ingredient is missing, they will stop, as will any other reactions depending on any of those ingredients. If you have some reactions that are trying to work in a chain but share some common ingredient, it's quite possible with this default 'instant' setting that one will just override the other by reacting away all of something they are both looking for.

As an example of using the reaction rate in C2, if your reaction is like 1 chemical X + 1 SugarNSpice = 1 Powerpuff, and the reaction rate you set in the reaction gene says it gives you a decay time or halflife of 3 seconds, then in 3 seconds it will turn 255 chemical x and 255 sugarnspice into 255 powerpuff and there will be no more chemical x or sugarnspice left in the body... Now let's say there is 255 chemical x and only 128 sugarnspice... then the reaction would stop after 1.5 seconds when all the sugarnspice is used up, and you'd be left with 127 chemical x and 128 powerpuff, because the reaction couldn't finish using all the chemical X.

(To make it even more confusing, this is just how it works in C1/C2... halflives work a little different in C3/DS... in C3/DS, halflives are no longer decay rates and work like true half-lives... that is, the half-life or reaction time you see in a gene now represents how quickly the reaction or decay will use up half of whatever is in the body, instead of how fast it will use up an entire full dose... and there is no longer any 'instant' decay of all of any chemical, though you can still make things decay VERY quickly, like milliseconds, which is close enough but helps get rid of some of the confusing results you might be having where reactions get completely overridden... Also, are you having a problem getting the X-Ray agent to work in C3/DS? You can monitor chemical levels VERY finely in that, and specify any chemicals to watch that you want...)