Possibly the main Unique Selling Point of our game is that you can scan corpses of alien DNA, and that, given you've captured enough DNA to sequence their genome, you then clone the alien race, and 'become' an alien. This is something that you can do on your ship, which acts as the meta-game area in between missions, where you can re-equip, perform cloning, upgrade skills, make weapons, etc.
Because of this, we have taken out saving & loading the game. If your corpse dies on a level, the level is saved with your corpse, and you are re-cloned as the last chosen type by your ship, and you start back on the ship. Some things stay on your corpse, like any weapons, crystals, scanned DNA, and scanned crystal elements, for you to retrieve by scanning your corpse later.
Cloning can help you complete a level in a couple of ways - one is that you can use the alien clone body as a disguise that will protect you from attack for a certain time when confronted by aliens friendly to your clone body type. Another is that each alien clone type has a power that they can use pretty much once per level that is fairly powerful, and may really help in a particular situation.
DNA is not used up by cloning, so you can use cloning to get 'unstuck' if you have a tough challenge in a certain level.
But, crystal elements on your corpse remain there after death until scanned, so if you want to rely on crystals, you can't if you die part way through a level.
So, we changed it so the weakest type of crystal is makeable once you have enough skill and have scanned its constituent elements at least once. This way you can use crystals even if you have no crystal elements in inventory, although the more powerful versions of a crystal still require elements to create.
