Lawk. What.

But I've only heard of/seen the thermoplast...

Because in future it will serve to enable and disable other things which may be exciting from a gameplay perspective but not entirely scientifically accurate. Fire-breathing, for instance. Modders could add fictional organelles and label them non-LAWK so the LAWK toggle will enable or disable them. It's a system in place mostly for the future, so right now the fact it only refers to one thing is irrelevant.

Also the space stage has much more room for stuff like this. IMO we should head mostly for hard science fiction (as soft science fiction is too broad) but that excludes a lot of stuff, like teleporters or backwards time travel or basic FTL drives or plasma weapons.

Of course some people might really like this stuff so it could be included later as non-LAWK.

It's a really interesting question, I'm finding it really hard to think of things which are scientifically impossible and there aren't many. Almost anything has the possibility of being achieved, which is really interesting.

As a general concept forwards time travel is straight forward (pun not intended). You can either accelerate to near the speed of light or go hang out near a black hole for a bit and come back far into the future.

The issue of time in the space stage is an interesting one. In each stage less time passes (billions in the microbe, hundreds of millions as an animal, thousand in industrial) because of the accelerating pace of change. So does that mean the space stage is over in a few years? Do you rip through a deep tech tree in a decade and hit some sort of singularity? Is there any time for colonising other worlds?

If you want to establish a colony it will take many generations but in that time the research that could be done on your core planet would be incalculable, assuming things keep speeding up.

One game which treats this really well is Rimworld. Where worlds which become very advanced almost instantly transcend the physical plane (a usual end point for sci-fi civs) and all that is left is the people who left that planet before they transcended. So you end up with many different planets at many different levels even though, once they can, they almost instantly vaporise.

Anyway yeah a bridge to cross when we come to it and not before.

So essentially LAWK is something that you can toggle depending on whether you want to be scientifically accurate or creative?

Welp.... the first thig ill do is trigger LAWK off... cause I wanna see it at its maximum!!

Photosynthetic animals do exist, dinoflagellates (of red tide infame) are motile, have red photosynthetic organelles, and also engulf other microbes. None are macroscopic, though, probably due to fish and bugs not being mixotrophs.

Wheels and rotors: The exact mechanics are sketchy, but bootleg cyclids would be still restricted to non-LAWK.

Dragons, not of the Komodo variety, that expel classical elements from a hole, are also really mechanically sketchy. Not LAWK.

Then even with LAWK on, it would be just like Spore all over again (except not cutesy). There's still a huge amount of diversity one can find. It could go from Half-Life's Xen creatures, like the Antlions and Vortigaunts, to Avatar's (the bending one) "take two animals and combine them."