Digimon Weight

by Octavo

Digimon weight is one of the very few characteristics that have been around since the very beginning of Digimon, and yet it's one of the least-studied. This is, perhaps, rather unfortunate, since I think it goes some great way towards explaining how Digimon grow and develop.

Now, as I understand it, here are the facts of Digimon weight:

• It increases as a Digimon evolves to larger forms.
• It increases with food.
• It decreases as a Digimon trains.
• It increases greatly with the X Antibody.
• A Digimon with lower weight is more "efficient."
• Small Digimon like Mamemon have low weight.
• Any given Digimon type has minimum weight, but not maximum weight.
• And... Weight is correlated with file size, by the use of metric prefixes to the word "bytes."

That last is the key point here: A Digimon's weight isn't some mere statistic, like Family or A-Attack. It's the amount of space on-server that the Digimon occupies, and therefore the amount of information present in the Digimon.

Now that we've established exactly what weight means, let's take a slight diversion. How do Digimon become more powerful?

• Through training.
• Through evolution.
• Through the X-Antibody.
• Through experience.

All of these have an observed effect on weight; in three of the cases, it's up.

How does a Digimon's weight increase? Obviously, through taking in data; that's what filesize means. So how does a Digimon take in data?

• Through eating.
• Through experience.
• Through deleting other Digimon, as seen mostly in Tamers and a bit in Frontier.
• Taking the X-Antibody.

Now we're getting somewhere. But wait; three of these are associated with an increase in power, but eating is associated with a net decrease. Why is this so?

Here's my proposal for a Digimon's very life process. A Digimon lives to absorb data and absorbs data to live, in the same way a human lives to eat food and eats food to live. In its simplest form, that data is digital food.

What does a Digimon do with this data? Through training or battling, a Digimon can compare this data with the base data it is already using. If it's better, it swaps it in, and increases its power. If not, it deletes the extra data, and reduces its filesize. A Digimon can't reduce its weight below the Minimum Weight of its species, because that's the size of the necessary program to run that variety of Digimon.

Deleting a Digimon increases power by quite a bit more, as seen in Tamers. Another Digimon already has highly-refined data, likely to be very battle-ready already. This data will have a far greater effect on a Digimon's power than the essentially random Food.

How do Digimon evolve, then? By collecting and refining data, a Digimon can reach the point where it can reconfigure larger sections of its data all at once, into a (usually) more complex arrangement - with much greater efficiency, and thus greater damage potential.

Lastly, the X Antibody reconfigures a Digimon's data, making it resistant to the X Program. However, all that extra code makes a Digimon's file size much, much larger.

So when server space is short, watch out for the X Antibody, and remember to keep training!