Fickle gill

is a fungal infection that can affect a variety of body parts. The infection takes up the infected body slot, preventing items from being equipped to that slot.

Each time that the infected host would take damage, if there is at least one nearby creature, there is a 25% chance that the host will spew forth a cloud of fungal spores. These spores can in turn infect additional creatures with fickle gill. Stepping in these spores causes one damage per turn, and will aggro neutral creatures towards the spore emitter. All types of damage can cause the fickle gill to puff, including damage from stepping on or from bleeding. This also increases the chance of angering nearby creatures.

While the host cannot infect themselves with their own spores, the host can be re-infected by the spores of their own Temporal Fugue clones, which can in some cases lead to a rapid proliferation of body parts infected by fickle gill.

Each infection has the following effects on the player:
 * 200 reputation with Fungi
 * -200 reputation with the Consortium of Phyta

The infection has the following additional properties depending on which type of body part is infected:

Tips

 * This is the most common fungal infection to get due to how easily it spreads. In fungal biomes, it helps to look at all friends to fungi to see if they are covered in fickle gill, and if so, and avoid them in melee. If they do spew spores, it can indicate which spore color that game causes fickle gill.