Nice! I knew about the legacy emitter but I wanted to see if it still worked on the new type! Thank you for your example project, that really helps!

I had some weird color management issues with redshift initially, but set these settings on my default project and it's been ok since. I have a default project that opens up whenever I create a new project in C4D.
You can change the default startup project by going to Edit > Preferences > Files and amending the settings here:

in C4D 2025, I can drop a sphere onto a cloner onto a metaball:

(sorry if the images are blurry, this site only seems to allow low res images? I tried an 800px image, 20kb in size and it was "too big")

Anyway with metaball activated, I can generate nice blobs.

However, what if I want to animate the blobs? I have tried adding both soft both and hard body tags to the metaball generator, the sphere and the cloner, nothing seems to work - I want them to move freely and independently, forming blobs as they meet each other.

Any ideas?

In version 2023, I can drop an emitter onto a metaball generator, and it "metaballifies" the emitted objects.

If I something similar in the new particle system in 2025, it doesn't work:. Here, I add the emitter and particle group as a child of metaball.

and here I also add the cloner as a child of a metaball:

I know I can create a legacy emitter, but surprised that metaball no longer works with emitters - I used to be able to create some interesting effects. Would be interested to know if there's a go-forward plan to allow metaball and emitters to work together?