BTW sorry for the edits, I was on my phone and linked the wrong image and stuff and wanted to clarify my points.
Thanks for the reply. And Iām not meaning to imply you did not do your homework, sorry if it comes accross that way.
Oh yes, I know oxidising does not require oxygen, a large part of my education has also been in microbiology. I was just aluding to the origin of the word. Regardless, without oxygen you need another compound to ācatchā the electrons for you. In order for a cell to derive energy from a reaction, there must be a potential difference in the right direction between the electron source (f.e. Fe2+) and the electron sink (f.e. O2). This is commonly visualized in the electron tower:
Basically in order to get energy from moving one compound to the left (oxidising it) you need to move another reaction lower on the tower to the right (reducing it). From what I remembered only really oxygen can really be used to oxidize Fe2+ but your own source offered that other possibility, Iāll have to look into it. But CO2 can definitely NOT be used to oxidize the iron. The autotroph part of chemoautotroph just means they produce their own organic compounds for growth from CO2, like plants do. (So CO2 is part of the growth process, not part of the producing energy process)
From the article you linked, you should keep in mind that chemolithotrophs are a broad group, and just because some of them do not use O2, does not mean the iron-oxidising ones donāt need it. As you can see in the tower, getting energy from iron is a lot harder than the others.
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I appreciate the insight but I think what we have is a fairly accurate and digestable representation of some iron chemolithoautotrophs.
Also c02 can in fact be used as an electron acceptor. Even though it isnt in this case. (and as you stated, it cant in this case)
Also i donāt want to complicate the process too much.
as i said earlier ā
Though there are cases where it is using oxygen as an electron acceptor. But thatās not all cases and we wanted it distinct from our current hydrogen sulfide based chemosynthesis.
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Also, in the iron oxidation process, acid-stable cytochrome c is the primary acceptor of electron, As you can see from the email, from the microbiologist i contacted. Though oxygen is in fact used in the process, i didnt want to complicate things too much. So kinda rolled chemolithotrophy together to make what we have in the game. SO think of it as using h20 instead of the 02 on its own.
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I want to get more kinds of chemolithotrophy in the game eventually, we will see what happens, but i like what we have right now despite its abstraction. ( I tested with oxygen also impacting the process and it feels fine so i may make that change just so i can talk about terminal electron acceptors in the description)
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Alright, you seem to have a good idea of why you want to continue this way so I wonāt press you too much. The only reason I mentioned it is because while the abstractions of the other processes make perfect sense as abstractions to someone like me with a little background in microbiology and chemistry, this one did not (since it leaves out an important half of the reaction and makes CO2 disappear into nothing), while it is in essence so similar to the sulfide metabolism you already had (just another chemolithotroph).
So I do hope you can expand chemolithotrophy at some point.
Good luck anyway! And sorry for you costing you so much of your time!
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I appreciate the feedback. We want to communicate science effectively in our game 
Sorry if I came off as slightly annoyed. That wasnāt my intention.
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Yes indeed compoud clouds work now.
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@Alpaca that is an amazing username (sorry for disrupting the flow of the topic just had to get that out there).
Alright, I finally got some more time to play it today. Firstly, game stability is great! Still havenāt had a single crash!
The game seems a bit harder than the previous version, that seems fine to me, a positive point even. However, trying to rely on iron ions is significantly harder than other playstyles Iāve tried (relying on glucose in some form) Specifically, big iron chunks are not really a grand oasis where you can fill up on iron ions, and then go out to collect other things. Rather, there are often only very thin clouds of iron ions hanging around the chunk. While swimming around it often seems like youāre not getting any iron at all while swimming around one (Unless itās a new one I just arrived at, but it doesnāt last.) . Once your cell gets to a certain size, it seems you just have to rely on glucose instead. This is especially true if you add a nucleus. Iām not sure whether this is intended?
Also, I had some issues with not being able to see compound clouds clearly. Especially glucose is only clearly visible if the background happens to be black.
PS:
After writing this, I did manage to thrive (with a nucleus) with a rustocyanin build, but only by engulfing every other cell that could contain iron, so it was just a predatory playstyle anyway. Also, it was probably only possible because there was this one simple prokaryote that apparently always spawned containing a ridiculous amount of iron. Which reminds me: With this organism if I died I only respawned with 3 iron, so I would die almost immediately unless I spawned directly on top of an iron chunk or one of those prokaryotes I mentioned.
PPS:
I discovered there are some really weird things going on with ATP production/consumption. I noticed whenever my cell is at/near the final growth stage (ready for reproduction) I can no longer move continuously without running out of ATP, even though a young cell can do this just fine. No amount of mitochondria I add on will fix the problem either. Since an old cell just has an additional copy of each organelle, there is clearly something going wrong here. Either the organelle copies donāt produce (enough) ATP, or there is too much ATP being drained. I noticed these problems start when I add a flagella, perhaps you should start looking there?
Another minor issue is that flagella donāt just seem to consume ATP when pressing a movement key, but when youāre being pushed by another cell. This means you can get stuck with slow movement if you canāt move without running out of ATP, for example because of the above bug.
Thatās more of a nucleus problem. I donāt touch the nucleus until gen. 10.
I definitely had this happen before adding a nucleus.
In that case, you probably added a flagella before you could sustain one.
Sorry, but Iām not sure you actually understood what I wrote down.
I can sustain the flagella just fine when I just spawn as a young cell, itās only after all organelles are doubled and Iām almost ready to enter the editor again that this problem occurs. No amount of added mitochondria fixes it. Thereās clearly something wrong with the math there.
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Iāve been experiencing this too.
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And adding an additional mitochondria doesnt fix this? (in the current build, eg the actual release)? (Where we did balance changes)?
Have you played with the official 0.4.1 release?
My experience does not match yours after i get mitochondria or even before it, maybe you really arent adding enough. Of course, this is when i do not run out of glucose, which does happen sometimes.
Also heres me winning (As you can see i dont have that issue)
But balance is nice. So if there is an issue with the current balance changes, then we can iterate on it more.
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Actually funnily enough I see the issue I was talking about around the 3:00 mark in your video, in the split second before you enter the editor. You might not notice it if you enter the editor quickly. My point is that that cell you made could easily keep moving and stay at max ATP, but drained ATP when ready to reproduce. Of course, ATP consumption should be doubled because you have twice the amount of flagella and hexes, but ATP production should be doubled as well, right? I can also kind of see it at 13:04 (that cell was not draining ATP when it just spawned).
Thereās a few other times your ATP is draining (with enough glucose left of course), but I donāt count them since youāre either not fully grown, or engulfing. Itās really hard to spot in your video because you usually enter the editor as soon as possible. Swim around for a bit, and youāll probably see.
Itās not exactly game-breaking most of the time, but it could be a sign of some under-lying problem in organelle duplication and ATP production. Also, if people see they are draining ATP right before they enter the editor, they might be inclined to add mitochondria they donāt actually need (I was).
Yes, I did confirm it in the release version for you again just now.
So some repro steps that make it extremely obvious: Start new game ā survive until first editor ā add one metabolosome and a flagella ā swim around happily without ever running out of ATP ā eat until youāre ready to reproduce ā Donāt immediately hit the editor button, but notice you can now barely move without running out of ATP
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In 0.4.1 I still have this issue, and adding mitochondria doesnāt help.
Actually the processes are static in the sense that they are based on the species template a cell has, and not the actual organelles in it. Thatās related to this issue that was for combining this data (it is right now duplicated):
So I guess intead we should generate the process list again whenever the organelles of a cell change. @Untrustedlife?
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Huh, so right now the processes should not be changing as the cell grows? Because ATP consumption is definitely speeding up as the cell grows right now.
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