With a new release it is again time to have a new thread for all of your small feedback on the latest release that doesn’t deserve a full thread on its own.
its amazing i love the day and night sistem
5 Likes
Personally i made an organism that is an autotroph which sits still in the day, then goes to feed on other cells by using its short ranged bursts of speed from mucilages at night time.
However, I do wish there were more options to fine tune the ai controlled player species, such as making them hunt at night and stay still during day.
8 Likes
is it just me or do the chloroplasts, and chemoplasts not work properly?
im not having that problem
if you have day/night cycle turned on, then night=hey wait no glucose cuz no light
I’ve finally gotten around to playing Thrive again! 
I have no idea what was implemented when so some of this feedback might be for features older than 0.6.0. Oh well.
Most of my feedback will be based on the prokaryotic part of the game, since for reasons that I will become clear, that is where I have spent most of my time so far.
Good Things
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Fossilisation is awesome. I don’t have much more to say about it. I love the idea of saving microbes I encounter and possibly sharing them on the forum.
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Thriveopedia, especially the evo-tree, is even more awesome. It is a feature I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. Even if it had no gameplay purpose (which it does, see below), just scrolling through the tree and seeing what evolution has come up with makes the Thrive world so much more real.
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Day-Night cycle works well. The game was trying to convince me that it would be a poorly balanced nightmare but it honestly works just fine. The meta has a lot more depth now that being a plant doesn’t automatically make you immune to starving. Nonetheless, photosynthesis is still perfectly viable. Small microbes can continue to use the builds they always did, just with more difficulty, while larger ones actually need to think about storage.
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Automatic compound generation is fine. To be honest I was kinda on the fence hearing about this. However, once in-game I realised it was probably an improvement. It removes the boring grindy aspect of the game almost completely. It does make the nitrogenase thingy seem less useful by comparison.
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Procedural patch map and better information give the game much more depth. By far the biggest improvement since I was gone was the procedural patch map and the ability to actually see what’s going on using the thriveopedia. It adds a much more strategic aspect to playing that was distinctly missing before.
Finally I can see what my competitors are doing and actually react to it in interesting ways.
Bad Things
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Fossilisation and thriveopedia are very hard to find. Fossilisation can only be accessed by pausing the game using the space bar (I think), which is something I’d never done before I was actively looking for this feature. The entire thriveopedia is hidden away in a tiny button in the corner of the screen, that says ‘statistics’ when you hover over it.
I was actively looking for these features and it still took me a while to find them. I can quite confidently say that if I hadn’t already been told by the progress updates, it would have taken me the entire playthrough to find either of them. -
Information overload. This has always been an aspect of Thrive, but I feel like I’m only now noticing because I don’t know every feature by heart anymore.
Most menus in Thrive contain a massive amount of useless information, and information that is useful is often dumped into large homegeneous walls of text.
I genuinely feel like a large amount of the confusion that Thrive seems to generate among newcomers comes down to this. Thrive is a fairly simple game at heart, but it’s hard to not feel like you’re missing something when the game is constantly infodumping new screens at you and there’s no obvious way to tell which text is critical info to your current strategy and which text is random background lore. -
Menus need to be more interconnected. More of an annoyance then a serious criticism but it’s weird how a lot of the strategic information is scattered between the patch map, the thriveopedia and the auto-evo report.
A lot of the time I want to see who my competitors in my patch are, so I look at the patch map. I see a ton of names and populations, but no pictures or better info, so I go to the evo-tree (and it is lucky that I even know about the evo-tree). Search the entire tree for those species.
I see what the species are, but which one was the one with the high population again? Navigate back to the patch map. Oh that one. Does that one have a globally high population or just here?
Navigate back to the evo-tree to see the total population. Oh look at that guy, he’s a potential threat to me. But where does he live?
Search the entire patch map. Etc. etc. -
New reproduction system. I like the the slow automatic compound collection. I’m not so sure about the slow transfer of compounds from storage to reproduction. I guess it’s more realistic, but it removes a lot of the instant gratification of the game. Sentiant want see bar go up fast, Ooga Ooga.
Ugly Things
By far my biggest hindrance to playing this version of the game was performance. To be fair, my computer isn’t that great, but it’s not a complete potato either. And I feel like when I last played performance was going in the right direction, so I’m just kinda confused what happened?
Currently the only way for the game to be playable for me is basically to just stick to patches that are barely inhabited. Anything that has a lot of microbes of different species in it already goes into single-digit FPS. The sound-glitch also keeps happening while the game is lagging, making it even more infuriating.
Fiddling with the settings for cloud resolution and graphics and such did not seem to have much of an effect.
I frankly found it uninteresting to continue playing after gen 10 or so. By that point most patches are filled and moments where the game isn’t lagging are few and far between.
Anyway, I don’t want to end this on a negative note. The game has gotten much more interesting since I last played, and I’m super excited to finally be able to properly strategise and think about the ecosystem. Even as a 1-hex I’m constantly keeping track of what others are doing and if they’re gonna challenge my niche.
My main suggestions going forward would be:
- Figure out what is causing the performance loss.
- Quality of life improvements to menus. (Big fat thriveopedia button, change text dumps into organised menus, highlight information that’s relevant to current creature, etc.)
- Expand upon strategic gameplay even more: better auto-evo, food chains, more nuanced cell creation mechanics then just placing more and more parts, etc.
Hope this helps! 
6 Likes
There’s a setting for number of spawned entities in the options, did you find it?
1 Like
While possible to add a tutorial to make the player go to the Thriveopedia, that may not be the best. That is because knowing about the Thriveopedia is not absolutely required to play the game.
Instead more natural navigation to the Thriveopedia can be added. I’ve had this idea for a while but didn’t find an existing issue so I opened one now:
Have you tried the lowest entity count setting? What setting is it set to at? Also could you get a screenshot where the debug metrics panel is open (Shift+F3) and performance is bad?
As is the case almost always, we know of many major issues / deficiencies in the game but don’t have enough programming (volunteer) resources to take care of them:
We are actually know closing in on 600 open issues on Github. It’s much faster to notice problems or missing stuff and open issues than actually solving them.
3 Likes
I have set the entity count to ‘tiny’ and it has mostly fixed the performance issues. Now that I can play for longer I’ll try to see how the later parts of the game are doing.
EDIT: One thing I’ve already noticed is that the population algorithm seems a little… indecisive? What I mean is that it doesn’t seem to assign super high populations to anyone, but it also doesn’t really make anyone extinct except when it needs to force extinctions.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing overall, just an observation
4 Likes
I haven’t been having problems even got to the macroscopic stage in about 3 hours. It was really fun.
One bug occured. Or I think it was a bug, but could be just my pc. Is that at one point in the multicell stage my creature sped up drastically and after growing another cell it just stopped.
This update is awesome. The Fossilisation, Thriveopedia, and Day-Night cycle make the game a lot more fun.
But the Fossilisation was a pain to find, I thought Thrive was bugged because it wouldn’t show up when I pressed Escape (which is what I thought the pause menu was).
I have a complete potato pc (Intel Core i3, Nvidia GT 710, 6 GB RAM) and it still runs well.
Also yeah I met the easter egg cell. Just to say that.
if your computer is a potato mine is a rock
5.9GB Ram, AMD Radeon Vega 6 GPU, AMD ryzen 3 3300U CPU with Radeon Vega Mobile GFX, and a
64 GB flash drive.
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