0.5.8 is out now. You can post any feedback you have about the new release in this thread if your feedback doesn’t warrant being its own thread.
0.5.8.1 is out now as a small patch.
2 Likes
The multicellular stage is very fun, but also extremely hard.
I’ve run into several noticeable issues when trying to make a predatory animal in the new update; Firstly, the drawback to speed is quite massive and cannot be offset with flagellum without starving the creature at higher cell counts, before it is fast enough to catch up to prey items.
I recall adding enough flagellum to barely enable active predation, but there was not enough glucose in the creatures of the ecosystem to keep the creature fed; I recall slaughtering 20 and the organism still starved instantly afterwards. There was a large variety of different sized organisms in large populations, so the ecosystem itself wasn’t the issue. The main issue seems to be that the slowness scales up faster with added cells than the flagella add speed, so in order to keep up with the speed decreases, you need vastly more flagella than is affordable to maintain.
After abusing saving and loading, no matter what i tried i found myself unable to keep the organism consistently fed beyond 3 or so extra cells. i’m not sure what was creating the energy drain as the organism had a massively positive ATP score as a single cell, which should have gotten even more efficient after multicellularity. Instead the efficiency now seems to dip, with legal energy amounts causing almost instant death when growing extra cells.
On a different note, one major issue i have with the editor is that i’m not sure how to delete cells, or set the order in which cells are grown. I consider these both important capabilities because more than once i found the ecosystem changing around me and necessitating removal of placed cells, replacement by better cell types that I developed, or changing when certain cells are grown.
There was a moment in the gameplay where my organism was too slow in it’s infant stage to catch any prey, because the order in which the cells were grown started with stem cells instead of movement cells. This meant that as the original prey items got faster over time, my organism couldn’t adapt to catch them when young, and therefore went extinct (it wasn’t viable to edit the stem cells because the cost of movement to get fast enough was only affordable if a small percentage of cells had extra flagella)
One thing I hope to see more of is other multicellular species developing in the environment so that multicellular predators can fill their glucose storage semi-regularly; Right now, even with the most glucose efficient setup i could devise, with very few hexes per cell, the organism is at glucose deficit inside of a thriving ecosystem of bacteria.
As for bugs i encountered, a notable one was the inability to engulf when starving, which meant that quite a few times my large engulfment-based organism died despite food being available, which is annoying when it takes so long to grow them into a behemoth.
Another noticeable bug is the fact that the cell spawning can be a bit wonky at times, leading to strange shapes quite often which reduce your creature’s effectiveness. i would liken it to a genetic mutation/deformity, but it happens pretty much every time at larger cell counts.
overall, i’m very excited to play more multicellular gameplay and look forward to designing many complex forms that utilize interesting cell synergy. However for now, predatory builds seem a bit bugged or unbalanced, as the resource extraction from the environment is somehow less efficient than as a single cell. The slowdown seems a bit too harsh for now, meaning that i have to repeatedly quit and load in order to find the right balance usually losing the game 12 or so times in a row.
7 Likes
I really like the current implementation of the Multicellular stage. The multiple cell types add a new layer to the gameplay, where you have to think about what parts are where. With a sophisticated enough structure, you can make an organism that has outside armor and an internal digestion system, and that’s pretty good for a prototype.
I know it’s not the focus of development right now, but maybe a delete cell button could get patched in. I can’t remove anything I place in the multicellular editor (or maybe I missed something important).
The improved chemoreceptors are also a pretty helpful feature. I like their high level of customization, it makes them feel more realistic and helps with surviving the first few generations before much else has evolved yet.
2 Likes
100%, i agree with this post completely. The mental puzzle of planning out what pieces will go where seems so much more involved than in the cell stage, despite them being pretty similar in nature overall. For instance you could layer durable cells as armor that blocks attacks, or create death chambers to trap organisms.
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Did you play the latest release?
Its got the speed penalty lowered and some osmoregulation bonus for colonies.
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It’s really fun so far.
Some glitches I’ve encountered so far are:
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Right after I entered multicellular, my cells became temporarily cannibalistic.
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After respawning (being surrounded by 20 cannibals is not good for you), I became a super god that doesn’t lose ATP.
nevermind to the cell deletion thing (which I also brought up in the Thrivestream), i found out it’s bound to the delete (not backspace) key.
Not being able to use the engulf mode while out of ATP is actually a feature. I guess it’s existance can be debated in terms of game balance. Usually though when you want to engulf something it emits enough glucose for you to briefly enter engulf mode to eat it anyway. So this hasn’t been much of a problem in the past.
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i experienced the same thing. definitely needs some balancing. to be honest, i feel like the whole predator setup, multicellular or not, could use some working on here and there.
I think this is a good place to add Bilateral and raidial l symmetry.
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I am fail to start the game…anyone?
I think you posted on discord as well? Your issue seems to be with the language the game tries to run in having invalid bbcode in the translations, and that causes a crash. That’s obviously not very good and not our intention. So I went ahead and really quickly whipped together a PR making sure the bbcode can’t crash the game (and added some safeguards against incorrect placeholders in translations):
We were pretty much planning a 0.5.8.1 fixing build anyway in a couple of weeks, but for now I think you should be able to edit thrive_settings.json file (somewhere in your AppData folders on Windows), and replace the language selection part with "SelectedLanguage":{"Value":"en"} to make the game start in English. That should hopefully get around the crashing issue. Also you can just delete that entire file if the default language for the game on your computer doesn’t cause a crash.
But… there is already?
If you press the dot in the bottom of the editor, you can change symmetry by 1x, 2x, 4x, and 6x.
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I think people may be suggesting like symmetry giving you a discount, which it currently doesn’t do. It just makes placing things a bit faster in a symmetrical fashion.
3 Likes
With talk about the editor and such, I’ve always wondered if the mutation point amount is going to be increased or can be increased by outside factors.
I understand the slow, gradual evolution of organisms, but always being capped at 100 points seems a little small, well to me that is.
I imagine that a hostile environment, plentiful resources or internal stresses would hasten one’s evolution, even if temporarily.
MP is a percentage. Doesn’t make any sense at all to be able to make more than 100% of possible changes. Instead discounts can be applied.
In fact I’ve already opened the following issue:
But why is it a percentage? Does it have to be a percentage?
Would you prefer it to be a floating point number between 0 and 1 instead?
I think it’s pretty natural to start off with 100 and all organelles costing then a whole number of points.
1 Like
Why not? Then you will be able to make it a floating value between 0 and 1,5