0.8.2 Release General Feedback

Current Game
21

I see, or well I don’t. I don’t get as bad an issue when I run with OpenGL mode but it does certainly make the backgrounds nearly pitch black for me.

I did notice one thing is that if you turn off the microbe background blur then that makes the backgrounds much brighter:

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I opened an issue:

This might have a small chance to be fixed. The chance is small as previously the OpenGL 2 issues when we were still using Godot 3, most of them never got fixed, just got made irrelevant due to us upgrading to Godot 4. There’s a slightly larger chance that the background blur option will be forced off in OpenGL mode as that would at least make the backgrounds visible again.

2 Likes
22

To be fair, the other cells have a much smaller vision range than the player to my knowledge.

2 Likes
23

Cells don’t have any vision range unless they have a chemoreceptor, which grants them a short range to detect compounds from.

3 Likes
24

I meant range from which they “detect” the player’s presence. Player can see them from further away.

2 Likes
25

0.8.2.1 patch will be coming next week. It will fix all the guidance lines being black in the release, which for some reason no one has reported in this thread yet.

2 Likes
26

I suppose people thought the unintended change in their color was really intended? :person_shrugging:

27

I think that’s probably a case of the smaller cells feeding off of the remains of the larger cell after stabbing it, but I’m not sure.

I was a bit confused by this at first, but I guess if you’ve skinned the potatoes very roughly, they can be hexagonal. Why do I keep making things that look like food? :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Those were added at least 3 releases ago. Though before now, they were a lot easier to miss if you avoided the ice shelf.

1 Like
28

Is that really still predation if the small cells don’t actively seek for the large ones?

29

Well, it’s predation if they do. If they don’t, it might still be counted in the current auto-evo setup. I’m not sure. :person_shrugging:

1 Like
30

Also, do the toxins released by toxic cells on death correspond to their toxin types or are they always the damaging toxins?

1 Like
31

Of course I think the game is getting better with every release. I have not activelly kept up with updates but I’ve been playing for a very long time before joining the online conversation. My biggest area of concern as of right now is the fact that the player moving to a patch tends to cause the mass extinction of the majority of species consistently. Usually leaving behind only the sister species that radiate off of the players own species. Maybe the game is better with a higher ai mutation rate? I don’t know. But this is sort of not fun because I can never be in a stable diverse ecosystem for more than a single turn. I am usuall7 only competeting against very similiar organisms to my own. It would be better if the player didn’t have such a radical impact on ecosystems to this extreme in my opinion. But I of course don’t really know how to fix it.

2 Likes
32

On the other hand if the player has too little impact, they could see themselves becoming a lone branch in their tree of life…

33

How? That’s like the exact opposite of what would happen.

If the player impact on the ecosystem was reduced, then the other species would act as if the player didn’t exist. So they wouldn’t evolve to negate any specific strategies the player used or compete with the player. Instead we’d have an ecosystem simulator that the player is “allowed” to play in but “not touch anything,” that is totally opposite as to the goal of Thrive to be an interactive evolution simulator game.

1 Like
34

By the way, considering the siderophore feature doesn’t seem to have received updates for a while now, will it just stay in the experimental mode or after reaching some deadline get removed?

1 Like
35

Is the Banana Biome supposed to have all of the Banana-shape chunks become regular shaped upon turning into an Ice Shelf biome due to the Global Glaciation Event?

Edit: Reloading seems to have fixed the chunks back into Banana-shapes.

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36

So it probably is a bug then. Not important enough to get fixed anytime soon though.

1 Like
37

The glaciation event just copies a template of chunks so it just puts normal ice chunks into the banana biome and then later removes them.

2 Likes
38

So pretty much an ice shelf is “overlayed” over the various patches?
Also, now that I come to think of it, where exactly do the microbes live on the ice shelves where there is consistently both water and sunlight?

1 Like
39

Bit late on the Thermosynthesis things (I apparently didn’t notice the last patch),
but I decided to do a sessile playthrough with them and was surprised by the update.

This is on normal difficulty with no changes besides non-LAWK, on the latest version (0.8.2.1).

My first play started in the vents; I tried to figure out the new heat bar,
which I struggled to understand what was actually doing, even with the descriptive text.

At first I though the highest yellow bar was overheat and that I’d start taking damage, and that the green bar was ideal temperature.
Nope, that didn’t work, I knew in real-life a heat engine works off a gradient,
so I assumed that I had to move between hot and cold, and I got killed trying to do that.

I could still get to the editor, but it seemed like I was just loosing all my stamina the instant I was out of heat,
so I tried adding more storage to bandaid the issue.
Needless to say, I died horribly on that playthrough, before I went extinct just decided to start over.

My second attempt, I wanted to use thermosynthesis in the tide pool because that was my favorite place to use it in old versions.

In my third attempt, I started in the vents and migrated to the tide pool so I could use thermosynthase.
When I got there, I then assumed it was just the old system but with a noise map, and more heat over the background was just better;
this worked very well for the prokaryotic stage, with only a few random instances of just loosing all stamina for ‘no reason’.

I eventaully grinded up to a nucleus with that strategy, though most of my sister cells just died,
and I am glad that game kept my population reasonable (300) despite not being in a any niche the game recognized for that patch.
I think it helped that I decided to use cellulose so nothing had a niche to eat me up to the point.

Now, up to that point, I had thought ‘A glaciation event is going to kill me, isn’t?’ and then a glaciation event happened.
That editor cycle I (the player) moved back to the vent, and since I didn’t have any niches in the tidepool every cell there died.

Back in the vents with a functional build, I do fine until I sit still too long, then I disintegrate into chalk;
I finally figured out what was happening, I was overheating in dumbest possible way since if the that weird gradient bar
goes over the tiny white bar you no longer produce stamina, I think.
I’m still not sure how this system is supposed to actually work.
The problem is you will take damage to cool yourself since you can’t store anything,
you seem to gain a little stamina when cooling but it won’t be enough to get you back to working heat,
and if you go to the blue on the heat vision it will be way too cold and deal a ton of damage;
the best strategy I found was just to inch towards the center using the environment widget on the right,
and hope you didn’t get to the center before your health regenerated.

On thermal vision, it is useless;
at first I assumed that red/orange is hot and blue is cold, so I saw blue everywhere and assumed it was uniformly cold.
I then noticed there was blue and transparent (though this was barely visible with iron all over the screen),
so I assumed blue must be heat, and then realized it was No Color is heat.
Whenever there were clouds I had to toggle on and off to see what was different,
I think this feature just needs to turn them invisible when enabled, and maybe grey the background too.
I had to rely on the little thermometer in the environment widget to find good spots.

Despite the above, I did succeed this playthrough;

It was such a relief that when you bind to another cell with agents, it actually counts as a gradient between both, so as long it’s
not too cold you won’t take damage when moving around,
which allowed me to finally roam around after being constantly surrounded by invisible damage fields.
It was at the exact same time that auto-evo finally did something and let a bunch of prokaryotes use mucus,
which was entertaining fireworks.

And post-game (Multicellular) I decided to recreate the Heat-eater from this ancient Thrive promotional video:

which worked okay, and I used it to cross the sea floor and ice cap to reclaim the tide pool using Photosynthesis and some temporary midochondria,
but I made the mistake of removing too many midochondria from the tail (for “accuracy”) with thermoplasts in the river biome just before the pool,
which is 6 degrees colder than tidepool, and ended up a, not-death loop but actually more annoying unable to reproduce loop,
where I could survive with just the head, but then the tail would start dying and getting pecked by poison prokaryotes and die.
I tried to reload to the autosave in ice cap nearby, but autosaves aren’t in multicellular yet so that ended my playthrough.

I didn’t notice any outstanding visual problems with older features this patch (I use OpenGL),
though the sea floor is extraordinarily dark, this was a non-issue due to clouds still being visible and the player always being centered,
and I’m not sure if thermoplasts glowing is a feature or bug.

Edit: Also currents are a good addition, on a different playthrough they were a neat way to gain some speed or at least break up going in straight line; in the above playthrough they made some spots more challenging for thermo, particularly in the river.

1 Like
40

I assume you went there by an extinction chain to an old populace, since I don’t recall tidepools connecting to vents directly, right?