0.8.3 General Feedback Thread

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0.8.3 is finally out! Here’s the patch notes (a devblog will come later today):

You can share the feedback you have about this new release in this thread.

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0.8.3.0 Feedback

What I like:

  1. I like the new Planet Customization options. I tried a medium world that is warm in order to limit the number of ice patches, because that would mimic the Early Earth. Large oceans, Active Geological activity, and Instability, again to make it similar to what the Early Earth would be like. cannot wait to play around with these option in more playthroughs.
  2. I like that Hydrogen Sulfide is diffusing across patches. Patches that originally did not have H2S now do across the world, i.e. Costal and Epipelagic. I like how it gives more incentive to use Chemosynthesizing Proteins across the world, rather than just a few patches where the compound would be originally be located.
  3. I like the buff given to the Thermosynethesis and Melanosomes. It makes them a more viable strategy for playing, especially for Themosynthesis.
  4. The Iron Meteor finally works properly! Now more Iron chunks do spawn during an Iron Meteor event.
  5. I like the new icon for the Hydrogenase. It better reflects the appearance of Hydrogenase in game.
  6. I very much enjoy using the new Hydrogenosome organelle. This will most likely become my main Eukaryotic organelle. I also like how it kind of looks like a peanut, even if that was not the intention.
  7. It also enjoy the buffed damage to Cytotoxin, and the increased base firing speed for all toxins. This will make it easier to get to the Microbe Massacre achievement.
  8. I like the achievements added. They help create goals for new and veteran players alike.
  9. The more applied force for currents based on surface area is a great addition. It provides a unique challenge to players. I ended up making a very elongated shape to try and minimize my surface area in one direction. I can already imagine other players creating other minimum surface area shapes to try and counter-act this. I wonder if this could be used to indirectly make selection for microbes based on surface area?

What could be improved:

  1. This isn’t directly related to the new release, but I just found out that the maximum number of quick saves and autosaves is limited to 50. I tried to input 55 for quicksaves, but it kept going to 50. Is there a reason 50 is the maximum number for quicksaves and autosaves?
  2. The Ripple effect seems to be very subtle. I could not tell it was there even when I zoomed in all the way. Is there a way to make the ripple effect more prominent?
  3. I noticed my Glucose levels as an Autotroph tended to flicker very quickly between 1.7 and 1.8 (at full storage) as Glucose was filling up. It stopped once my organism started to have its organelles duplicate, but then started again a few seconds later. Is this supposed to happen?
  4. The Mucocyst seems to be less impactful with having to use half of the mucilage as an upfront cost. While this makes it easier to eat AI cells, it also makes it easier for AI cells to eat players. Perhaps reducing this initial mucilage upfront cost to 30% would be a happy medium between making the Mucocyst more useful to players without extending the AI invulnerability time too much.
  5. Despite engulfing chunks, I did not get the Yum! Achievement notification. I first engulfed cell chunks, and then a Medium Sulfur Chunk.
  6. We need different icons for each achievement. Right now, they all more or less share the same image.
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I think it becomes less noticeable the larger a cell is. By the time you’re an eukaryote it’s almost gone.

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When playing another playthrough in that went to Multicellular, I think I found two potential bugs:

  1. When in Multicellular, I made long cell colonies. Very strange long connections appeared (see picture below).
  2. At around the same time, I noticed that the Sunlight did not go up to 100%. Instead, it stopped at 75% before going back done. The picture was taken shortly after the Sunlight started to go down from 75%.

image
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Here is the log report on PasteBin:

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I have also noticed these long matrixes, they seem to be associated with weirdly-shaped colonies, especially non-compact ones.

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Did the reduced sunlight last longer than 1 generation? If not, then it was caused by meteor event, which reduces light level for 1 generation

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It could have also lasted longer than 1 round if multiple meteors struck their patch in a row.

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I just checked. The reduced sunlight did only last one generation, but I made sure to go through the next round, in case the sunlight amount is different from what patch map says it should be.

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By the way, do meteors also reduce sunlight down to 25% in ice patches or only to 37.5%?

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Thanks for the feedback.

There needs to be some max, because the saving system is planned around a max of 1000 saves. Going above that is going to use a lot of disk space for players and probably cause all kinds of issues. So there has to be some limit. I can with a few seconds of effort increase the max amounts to 100 in the selection.

No, there’s just an option to turn it off.

The real amount was probably right at the boundary between where the value rounds down or up, causing it to flicker quickly. It’s not really optimal but it is very hard to get anyone to do any fixing for this.

At least fixing ATP flickering is planned but still no one has wanted to fix that for the 1+ year this issue has been open:

I forwarded this feedback to Deus.

The achievement triggers on when the digestion completes. That’s done to avoid giving the achievement if you engulf something you cannot actually digest.

Yes, but art has been funnily enough a bottleneck for many things in the past months (which is a very unique situation in Thrive development history).

So it is the plan to eventually have unique achievement icons for everything. I’ve opened a tracking issue for progress on this:

Well the strange thing isn’t really the visual connection, but the colony structure. The visual links just show what the colony structure ends up being.

I opened an issue even though we are not yet going into multicellular development so it is likely going to take a really long time for this issue to be addressed:

So this was confirmed to not be a bug but just another event that happened to trigger just then.

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Though not a necessity, I think for rather obvious reasons the achievement should also not be triggered if the engulfed cell was toxic.

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That would be an extremely, extremely hard condition to detect, because in the game there is no such thing as toxic cells. The digestion system applies damage if it finds toxin compound in an engulfed object as it removes that compound. By the end of the digestion there is likely no trace of toxin left so it would be impossible to detect it at that time. Instead there would need to be new pieces of code and data storage to remember this fact. All purely to make an achievement not trigger in certain situations. I think this is definitely not worth the effort to implement.

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Also I just looked at the achievement list, and whilst it’s now probably too late to make major changes to it, there seem to be no achievements relating to chemolithoautotrophy (“iron-eaters”), which is rather strange as that’s a major playstyle type, undoubtably more important than radiosynthesis at least, which has got an achievement.

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Iron is so common and widely known strategy that I thought it would not do any good to have an achievement that basically everyone gets for free. So I explicitly decided against including it.

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Isn’t there an entire sub-category of achievements you must acquire to progress in the game (such as the editor, nucleous, colony and beyond the cell achievements)? And even if these ones don’t count, I’m rather sure you could use the same arguments against there being a photosynthesis achievement.

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Progress achievements are, I think, good. Most games have them. We can use them in the future to know for example how many players actually got through the first editor cycle or not. So they are definitely useful.

Iron is not required so it is not truly a progress achievement. But considering we should have a max of 15-20 achievements per stage, it seems silly to me to give an achievement for something 90% of players (totally a made up number) do as their instinctive playthrough. The achievements should be more interesting that and encourage trying less used gameplay styles.

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Speaking of less used gameplay styles, is the endosymbiosis achievement about the hardest achievements are supposed to ever get or could perhaps there be 1-2 such “extremely hard” achievements for each following stage?

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I completely digested the cell chunk first, and the Yum! achievement did not trigger. After I completely digested the Medium Sulfur Chunk, the Yum! achievement still did not trigger. Even after reloading, the achievement still did not trigger. It was not until I had fully digested another cell today that it did trigger. Why was did the Yum! achievement only trigger when fully digesting a cell, and not when fully digesting the previous chunks?

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Checking the code again, I just realized that the code was accidentally only checking if the digested thing was a cell before triggering the achievement check.

I’ll fix that now so that also non-cell digested things trigger the achievement.

Edit: made the PR:

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