Splitting Darknut

I believe it's always been that way, Freedom. But if you kill the blue darknuts after killing the splitting darknut, then the splitting darknut, as well as the rest of the enemies on the screen will return. Besides, if you kill the splitting darknut, then leave the screen without killing the blue darknuts, the splitting darknut doesn't return either.

That's what I'm saying, if you have 1 splitting Darknut on the screen, and you hit and split him, then walk out and back in, no enemies will be in the room.
Seems an easy way to cheat the "system" to me. 😉

I can't say if it's always been that way, I don't have a clue, you might be right. 😉

It would make sense, if it was:

~ The splitting Darknut dies, and is marked as dead for however long the "temporary" dead setting is.
~ The two blue Darknuts are spawned, and aren't in the normal table of enemies for the screen. So, they will never come back of their own accord.

I imagine that it would be a huge kludge to tie the splitting Darknuts revival to the fates of its split descendants...

Yea, I guess if you're going to use them, it needs to be in a room that locks you in.

pkmnfrk is right.

DN revamped splitting enemies like Darknuts and Tribbles a while back; old behavior was as you described - split/generated enemies counted as normal room enemies for the purpose of enemy return. That however had its own set of problems: if you had a room with a splitting Darknut and, say, a Bubble, killed the darknut and its children, left the room, and came back, no enemies would appear, because the two Darknut children counted as two enemies.

Perfect behavior would require detailed bookkeeping of what enemies split off of what, taking into account multiple levels of splitting, tribble transformations, etc. Since current behavior isn't all that unreasonable, I feel such changes should wait to be discussed post-2.50.