Moleculoid items
The Moleculoid items are the fifteen pickups of Moleculoids, the dungeon crawler by Molecular Reality Corporation in which the monsters are rendered from structures in the Protein Data Bank. Each item is named for a molecule or a molecular system and has one of four rarities and a game effect. The table gives what the code does with each one, in the order the code defines them, beside a note on the real molecule.
| Item | Rarity | Effect in the code | The molecule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glucose | Common | Restores 25 hit points. Labeled "cellular fuel". | The main sugar carried in blood, C6H12O6. |
| ATP | Uncommon | For 6 seconds, speed ×1.5 and damage ×1.3. The label promises 50 percent more of both. | Adenosine triphosphate. Splitting off its last phosphate releases about 30.5 kJ/mol under standard biochemical conditions. |
| NADH | Uncommon | For 8 seconds, damage ×1.5. | The reduced form of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, which carries electrons from the breakdown of food to the respiratory chain. |
| Coenzyme A | Uncommon | Sets a "pierce" effect for 8 seconds and shows a badge. Nothing reads the effect. | Carries acyl groups on a sulfur atom. Fritz Lipmann, who found it, named it for acetylation, the A of the name. |
| Heme | Uncommon | Restores 50 hit points. Cannot drop. | An iron atom held in a porphyrin ring. A hemoglobin molecule holds four. |
| Antibody | Rare | Sets a "homing" effect for 10 seconds. Nothing reads the effect. Cannot drop. | Immunoglobulin G, a Y-shaped protein of about 150 kDa with two identical binding sites. |
| Caffeine | Common | For 5 seconds, speed ×1.8. | A purine alkaloid. At the concentrations of a cup of coffee it blocks adenosine receptors. The game's label, a phosphodiesterase inhibitor, describes a weaker action. |
| Morphine | Rare | Invincibility for 4 seconds. Cannot drop. | The main alkaloid of opium, isolated by Friedrich Sertürner and named for Morpheus. It dulls the perception of pain and does not prevent injury. |
| CRISPR | Rare | Meant to kill the three nearest monsters. No code handles it. Cannot drop. | A bacterial defense system built from several molecules: stored fragments of viral DNA guide the Cas9 nuclease to cut matching DNA.[2] |
| Plasmid | Rare | Meant to summon an ally for 15 seconds. No code handles it. In no drop table. | A small circular DNA molecule that copies itself apart from the chromosome and passes between bacteria. Joshua Lederberg coined the word in 1952. |
| Cholesterol | Uncommon | Adds 2 armor, which takes 2 from each hit, down to a minimum of 1. Cannot drop. | A sterol that stiffens cell membranes at body temperature and keeps them from packing into a solid at lower ones. |
| Glutathione | Uncommon | Clears every active effect and restores 15 hit points. | A tripeptide of glutamate, cysteine and glycine, held at millimolar concentrations in cells, where it keeps proteins reduced. |
| Insulin | Uncommon | Restores 30 hit points and gives speed ×1.4 for 6 seconds. | A hormone of 51 amino acids in two chains. Frederick Sanger worked out its sequence, the first of any protein, and won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[3] |
| Dopamine | Common | Adds 100 points. Labeled "reward!". | A neurotransmitter. In 1997 Wolfram Schultz and colleagues proposed that dopamine neurons signal the difference between the reward expected and the reward received.[4] |
| Legendary Enzyme | Highest | Adds 8 to melee damage and 4 to ranged damage, and the game adds them a second time. | No molecule. The game's note reads "Catalytically perfect", an idea from enzymology in which an enzyme is limited only by how fast its substrate can reach it.[5] |
Where items come from
At the start of each wave the game scatters eight pickups through the dungeon. They are drawn from a pool of eight entries: Glucose (three), Dopamine (two), Caffeine (one), NADH (one) and ATP (one).[1]
Monsters drop more. A quarter of ordinary monsters and half of the elites leave an item, and every boss does; a boss always leaves the Legendary Enzyme. For other drops the game picks, with a probability of 0.6, one of the two items tied to the monster's family in the table below, and otherwise draws at random from Glucose, Dopamine, Caffeine and NADH. One enzyme takes the starting melee damage of 15 to 31.[1]
| Family | Tied items | Appears in the game |
|---|---|---|
| Enzyme | ATP, Coenzyme A | Yes |
| Transporter | Glucose, NADH | Yes |
| Receptor | Dopamine, Caffeine | Yes |
| Chaperone | Glutathione, Insulin | Yes |
| Structural | Cholesterol, Heme | Only as a boss, which leaves the enzyme instead |
| Toxin | Morphine, Antibody | No |
| Nuclease | CRISPR | No |
| Antibody | Antibody | No |
Items that cannot drop
The function that builds the waves reads the monster table for level 1 at every level, so only five of the eight families ever spawn. No family is tied to Plasmid. Six of the fifteen items therefore cannot be found. Morphine and CRISPR are two of them, and a comment in the item code says that CRISPR and the summoning effect are "handled in main.js", which they are not.[1]
Display
No screen shows an item's gloss or its note on the molecule. In the dungeon a pickup is a colored shape that bobs and turns, drawn as a hexagon, star, diamond, triangle or circle, with a Y for Antibody and an X for CRISPR. The rarest items flicker. The five timed effects, speed, damage, invincibility, homing and piercing, appear as a small badge with the seconds remaining.[1]
See also
Notes
- ^ The game's own labels use dashes between an effect and its gloss, as in "Invincibility, pain relief" with a dash for the comma. They are given here with commas.
References
- ^ a b c d e "Company records". Molecular Reality Corporation. October 2026.
- ^ Jinek, Martin; Chylinski, Krzysztof; Fonfara, Ines; Hauer, Michael; Doudna, Jennifer A.; Charpentier, Emmanuelle (2012). "A programmable dual-RNA-guided DNA endonuclease in adaptive bacterial immunity". Science 337 (6096): 816-821. doi:10.1126/science.1225829.
- ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1958". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved October 25, 2026.
- ^ Schultz, Wolfram; Dayan, Peter; Montague, P. Read (1997). "A neural substrate of prediction and reward". Science 275 (5306): 1593-1599. doi:10.1126/science.275.5306.1593.
- ^ Albery, W. John; Knowles, Jeremy R. (1976). "Evolution of enzyme function and the development of catalytic efficiency". Biochemistry 15 (25): 5631-5640. doi:10.1021/bi00670a032.