and ends up figuring out that two seemingly-unrelated variables were affecting each other during the miscast, due to extremely specific timing components of the cast
I'm not sure I like an error being capable of destroying the universe actually. maybe the threat of the superweapon is just that it will do exactly what it's supposed to
From the point of view of the Darwinians, all of your units are insanely powerful entities with no regard for their own well being that fearlessly follow your commands exactly and act in protection of the systems that run Darwinia
Big picture wise, I think it's a little important to decide whether the non-area is something that can cause damage to something that gets put into it or is harmless after it happens but that area no longer exists
Delete a long straight road, step into it, step out on the other side because only the start and end of the road exists, there's nothing besides that so it does not take any time to travel
where the height of a lakitu cloud uses the same memory address as bowser's AI tracker, so if you can bring one into the fight you can use it to manipulate his behavior
And the game boy color Pokémons were so tightly packed that you could do a lot of hacking by naming your character or creatures with certain characters in the right spot
prepare one spell, then quickly cancel it without properly terminating it and start a different spell to make the memory from one spell collide with another (stop & swop)
Magic textbooks: "Avoid casting spells in proximity to other people casting spells simultaneously, the results are unpredictable and unproductive" Zia: "Fuck that we're gonna figure out exactly how they interact and use it to hack the elemental interaction table"
i also agree that being able to destroy the universe with it is not the way to go, but that also raises questions like: how does the universe react to these things? does it have an auto-recovery process that runs if enough glitches build up?
so you don't have this universe-destroying threat hanging overhead but you do have a threat of previously unaffected areas sharing a particular sector getting rolled back like, potentially thousands of years of geographical/architectural development
(i would also say that living creatures are not directly affected by such rollbacks because their data is stored in a completely different unrelated section of the universal programming, so the rollbacks don't blip people out of existence but does blip their homes out of existence which causes enough problems on its own)
or if that still feels like too large stakes you could just have it so that the erased portions of reality eventually reset to a restore point that makes that area livable again but to a more ancient version of that landscape
yeah lots of fun things you can do with rollback points like that! especially if they're not like, set to consistent points between sectors, so they're unpredictable too
Zia: "Fuck that we're gonna figure out exactly how they interact and use it to hack the elemental interaction table"
but the restore points are like, not exactly recent