0.5.4 Feedback thread

Let’s bring back the thread where you can give random feedback (if it isn’t long enough to warrant a thread of its own) about the latest release.

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Okie dokie, so I tried the new version and enjoyed the many minor improvements to the colors, lighting, UI, etc. The binding agents are quite wonky, I must say. Sometimes my cell became detached without my pressing U, and then the other cell just sat there. If I then pressed U, the AI of the other cell would reactivate. Sometimes my cell clipped into the cell I bound to and caused me to zoom around without spending any energy. Sometimes the binding caused the other cell to get enough resources to split, which made my movement very slow and unresponsive until I pressed U and the cell exploded into several more cells. But most of all, I saw no reason to use the binding agents beyond testing them. Living alone was always better. Being attached to another cell made the game a bit screwy and meant I couldn’t move as much and was a large target for spikes and toxins.

I think the amount of resources gotten from dead cells is also too high. Engulfing just one cell usually gave me enough to reproduce, even if I had a nucleus and the other one didn’t.

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So do you mean that a cell in your colony split new organelles while it was attached?
That shouldn’t be possible. If that did happen then it is a bug.

No no, I don’t mean it split while it was attached. It only split once I pressed U. What I mean is that my movement was much slower while attached to this cell. It only happened once, though, so I don’t know if the splitting necessarily was the cause.

Sounds like what I’m calling “ghost drift” which is a physics issue where physics glitching causes cells to drag your colony in some direction:

I have a big problem here, why are binding agents only available to Eukaryotes? There are plenty of Prokaryotes which form colonies and some (myxobacteria for example) are even multicellular.

It was easier to enforce limiting progress to multicellular to only eukaryotes by just starting out with the binding agent only being usable by eukaryotes.

Just got a chance to play this.

  • Binding agents are indeed a bit wonky, but for me not in any way that hasn’t been reported yet.

  • I like the added pressure of actually decreasing glucose levels. At first I thought that still wasn’t working, but then I noticed the decrease only happens in patches that have some life in them, which makes sense I suppose. I assume that is intentional?

  • I noticed you need to detach from a colony to unlock the editor button, but if you bind again after that you can still press the button. For me that did crash the game though.

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That is intended, yes. Reasoning is probably that why would the glucose decay if there aren’t any cells to eat it.

And that’s a new bug…

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It made me dependent on iron for my energy and almost destroyed my metabolismomes

I guess so. I just repeated it to make sure I can reproduce it. Strangely, this doesn’t work in the free build mode, only in a normal game. Also, the crash doesn’t happen on clicking the button, but on leaving the editor afterwards.

I guess that could happen. My first game, I rushed to the surface using the early glucose, then went photosynthetic. My second, I stayed in the vents and used chemosynthesis.

The reason it did’nt happen gracefully is because most of my species evolved before glucouse started declining, and when it got to 0.1%, my species went from a super power with 120M population down to just a lowly 20.
The changes happened in only 300 million years.

This could happen when a invasive species becomes more hungry and BAM, you’ve got this situation in the REAL WORLD

I got around to playing the new version today. Some observations:

  • Glucose decay is working now and has succesfully nerfed most (non-plant) glucose builds into oblivion. I consider this a win because it makes you diversify more.
  • The ability to preview membranes in the editor is cool, but it has brought my attention to how insanely similar they all look. Under a microscope stuff like cell walls and silica look much more different than in the game. Which is weird, because you’d expect a game to exagurate the differences for the sake of easy identifaction.
  • Now that glucose is gone, marine snow has become the most OP thing. It has all the things you need to survive and reproduce, and spawns often, even when there’s no life in the patches above you. Ironically, the abyss is now one of the easiest patches.
  • The one-hex strategy is still alive and well. Even as every other pure-glucose build got nerfed to heck this one is basically unaffected. It’s still an easy win even at ~0.5% glucose because it just needs stupidly little food to survive. The one glucose cloud that spawned while glucose was still plentiful literally carried me through the entire game.
  • Finally, binding agents are very powerful, but not for any intentional reasons. Rather, the ability to Tokyo drift into nineteen different compound clouds in the span of a second gives plant colonies a comfy no.2 place on the the tierlist.

Hope this helps with balancing :ok_hand:

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OR YOU JUST BECOME ROCK EATER AND SURVIVE FOREVER

Yes that’s what diversify means… people become more things than just glucose eaters

I’d like to see in the next version that when my cell comes back from the editor it spawns in other area of the patch, just like when it dies. Sometimes I kill my cell because it didn’t have enough glucose or iron to survive when I come back from reproduction.

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It’s intentional that you don’t go to a new area, just so that you need to save up resources before going to the editor.