Creatures Caves

Brainfarter basically just makes sure a buggy navigation script doesn't make creatures get stuck trying to do an action that get no response at all. Looking at the creature with a script monitor shows that no scripts are running, which is only ever the case when a creature's making a new decision-which is supposed to only take a very small number of ticks. Sometimes it'll run an involuntary action script, but its brain is frozen and it's essentially paralyzed. Very rarely you can snap them out of it by putting food near them, probably because their brain is trying to eat seed/fruit/food but there's none there so they're stuck trying to do an invalid action.

As I understand it, a creature afflicted with EES has no scripts running in it, because it's waiting for a stimulus that the engine won't let it even try. Everything is stuck. Its neurons are ready to think "eat food", if it had its scripts running and wasn't essentially frozen and deactivated except for its biochemistry it'd be thinking 'eat food' properly, but because its scripts aren't doing anything it's just frozen in that moment before its neurons fire and its current thought is replaced by whatever it's 'trying' to think. If you put food very close to the creature it can sometimes snap out of it, especially if you hit it.

The culprit is a mixture of bad handling of invalid actions and a creature navigation script that is intended to get them to navigate without forgetting what they're doing-it's either replacing only the verb of the thought (changing "push elevator" to "eat elevator" where it means to put "eat food" ) or only the noun (changing "eat food" to "eat elevator" when it's supposed to put "push elevator" ).

By clearing the noun lobe, Brainfarter forces the creatures to run scripts again and unfreezes their brains.

It's actually possible to get the symptoms of Eat Elevator Syndrome with objects that aren't elevators at all-if you take a creature that's affected by Chemical 130 and put it in a bare room and give it a full shot of 130, they can get stuck, trying to perform an action on something they hallucinated. Since there's nothing of that object class in reach, the engine doesn't give them any response at all. So their scripts get stuck in endless waiting.

IIRC, the chemical 130 decays and eventually they stop seeing the object, clearing their noun lobes and unparalyzing their brains.