Will that be in a hotfix to 0.8.3 or only present in the next version (0.8.4)?
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By itself this is nowhere near serious enough to warrant making a bugfix patch. So there won’t be a bugfix patch 0.8.3.1 unless some very bad bug(s) are uncovered soon.
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I recall there are some situations where a hotfix is released as a re-release of the base update instead of being it’s own version, though I can’t remember if that has ever happened with Thrive…
Also, is chemosynthesis supposed to be a prokaryote-oriented strategy? I have noticed that for a good while now you’d need to adapt for a different niche if you just became a chemo-centric eukaryote because chemosynthesis is not nearly enough to get you going alone by that point. Could just be a problem with me since I never saw anyone complain about that.
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Do chemosynthesizing eukaryotes exist? I personally connect chemosynthesizing with bacteria and maybe for a reason. Though maybe sulfur eating civilization would be interesting lol
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Well chemoplast does exist so I suppose the game at least intends for chemo-eukaryotes to be an actual thing
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Do you want the save where the multicellular body plan structure bug occurs, so you can get a look at what is causing the problem?
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The bug seems to occur with most multicellulars that have “limbs” so a save file might not even be needed.
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I think such a save is not useful for now as we will have a save breakage point before reaching multicellular development. So such a save could no longer be loaded once the issue is more topical to be addressed.
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I mean, someone could try fixing the glitch before we move on to multicellular development proper.
Also, not sure if this wasn’t already reported before, but you can probably crash/lag out the game by cloning the spaceship fleet too many times in the ascended mode.
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Someone could also fix any of the other 600+ open issues we have:
So I don’t think this argument is very strong at all…
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To be fair unless you always play as an interconnected blob in multicellular, you WILL encounter that issue. So it definitely wouldn’t be at the bottom of the issue list in terms of revelancy.
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Had a play around with the current version as of late. I have a few thoughts on the matter!
Specialisation
I think in the current version of Thrive, the biggest issue is that there’s no real metric for how specialised a creature is. In real life, unnecessary parts tend to be stripped down or otherwise decay to entropy very quickly, but in Thrive, the only real disadvantage to generalisation is that it takes room you could use for something else.
As a general rule, any individual species wants ammonia, any species wants phosphorus, and there’s no real disadvantage to expanding your environmental range or used compounds (outside of mutation investment, which generally isn’t the limiting factor unless there’s been a phase shift like a predator’s prey becoming shelled or toxic). The ‘recommended organelles’ in the editor backs this up- it’s very common for it to suggest ‘hey, what if you were slightly able to exploit iron?’.
I think a solution to this could be modelling the opportunity costs of being more of a generalist. From a quick look, ammonia is generally for proteins, while phosphorus is generally for DNA and ATP- I could see the separation of ammonia costs and phosphorus costs into roughly these categories to be a good way to do this. Having your membrane be more important would also be useful, help avoid the urge to add a bit of rusticyanin just for the sake of not having the ‘and then I spat out some iron’ message and whatnot, and encourage the use of the ‘heavy’ membranes by reducing their complexity.
For example;
- Ammonia costs are primarily generated by each unit of protein. Cells that need to produce a lot of organelles and agents have a high ammonia cost, while cells with a lot of cytoplasm and with simple membranes have a low ammonia cost.
- The surface area of the cell affects your membrane. Membranes are basically a set of checkboxes- membranes by default will keep things out (outside of things that are always positive), and you need to check the box to allow it to penetrate the membrane. If your membrane doesn’t accept it, your cell won’t use it, and will expel it if detected. Having a shape with lower surface area, and having a less complex membrane (such as refusing glucose absorption if you’re an iron-eater), will result in lower ammonia costs. A large and complex membrane allows you to absorb a lot of useful things from the environment quickly, while a small and simple membrane will keep you safe and secure inside of it.
- Phosphorus, meanwhile, is primarily needed by the number of different organelles and proteins you’re using. Having a broad variety of organelles will make your DNA significantly longer, as will having a lot of ATP-generating parts. Similarly, having broad tolerance ranges means you need a lot of substances in your cytoplasm to protect yourself, which will also raise costs. Simple and specialised organisms have low phosphorus costs, while complex and generalist organisms have high phosphorus costs.
Developing Strategies
Being able to interact with the world more would also be very useful. In the current game, one patch is much the same as the other- the only real difference is who lives with you, which resources you wish to approach, and how common they are. Additionally, it’s only when you reach the multicellular stage that you begin to develop a ‘life cycle’. Having ways to give your species a specific course of action throughout its life would be a great way to further boost the variety of gameplay available.
On top of that, the game world is often rather limited in how it can be responded to. Receptors are very specific and require micromanagement in a constantly-changing world, and behaviour is one of the areas that lacks a lot of emergent complexity. Having ways to do that would be great for encouraging a more diverse game world.
For example;
- Having more middle grounds between ‘dying’ and ‘not dying’ would be most excellent. One obvious one would be, say, growth having an ATP cost- with a bit of streamlining of the biochemistry, you could choose to be a horribly toxic little goober that only reproduces in perfect conditions and once it’s completely full of toxins, or you could be a little mucus-filled predatory blob that will do literally anything but stop moving.
- Being able to use receptors, membranes and other such things- photoreceptors, hormones and mechanoreceptors, perhaps?- to automate things would further add complexity. For example, being able to pick a receptor and choose a behaviour slider or taxis (approach/leave)- say, picking a mechanoreceptor with a taxis towards ‘fast flowing water’- could let you create a particular niche- say, a predator or filter-feeder that waits in ambush in a boundary. (Or even, say, allowing new organelles like a ‘mechanovore’ that uses the piezoelectric properties of specialised sugars to generate energy on the boundary between fast and slow water.) You could use this pretty well to manifest real life strategies. More responsive organisms could allow for a more chaotic environment, too, such as having areas of light and shade.
- Creating more of a passive/active dichotomy in the parts could be a good way to further expand on it. Having an ‘aura’ option for mucus and poisons to hide from or ward off enemies, or being able to use a mucus or specialised option to sporulate for better conditions.
- Being able to gain and lose parts as the organism grows would be another possible option- and a reason to decide between eukaryotic and prokaryotic parts even once you’ve got a nucleus, since organelles can’t be grown from scratch. For example, you could have an iron-eating cell that sheds its flagellae and loses its storage cells once it finds a large iron chunk to leech off of, or a multicellular stem cell that gets rid of excess flagellae and digestive compounds once it’s got some flank, propulsion and feeder cells.
A Changing World
Finally, the world itself in Thrive is very static, over time, on the world map, and within a particular habitat. The biggest example is the Great Oxygenation Event- in real life it took millions of years, but in Thrive it pops up as soon as there are phototrophs and doesn’t really do anything other than being a mutation tax. I feel the world itself being more dynamic and more subject to permanent change would be a great way to make it more meaningful.
I think the most important part, therefore, is habitats having different tolerance ranges. An organism living in the tide pool is going to have a very different life to one in the open ocean, and not just because the latter doesn’t have any iron. As the time of day changes, the temperature, oxygen levels and so on are all going to change, and things are going to vary area-to-area too. Someone living in a mud is going to live a very different life to someone in the upper water levels, and I think representing that is important!
For example;
- Habitats having ranges and modifiers would be great. For example, if you live in a tidepool, you should expect oxygen levels and temperatures to rise and fall, and have ways to compensate for it. On the other hand, if you live in the open ocean, you might have a very large and stable habitat, but need to change very quickly if something bad happens (such as an anoxic event).
- Having more layers of cause and effect between biology and the world would be wonderful. I think the biggest one would be the relationship between organic matter, oxygen and iron. In real life, the Great Oxygenation was significantly delayed by the need to oxidise the iron in the water column first, and environments with iron tend to have a lot of organic matter (think bog iron). So you could see- say- iron-eating life living in the open ocean at game start, causing detritus-eating life to become more common lower in the water column, but having that iron fall to the seabed and detritus levels drop off as photosynthesisers start to oxidise it until you have oxygenated low-iron upper waters and anoxic seabeds where the old guard still thrive.
I think the gamefeel of the game itself is going pretty good, with perhaps a few little bits that could be tweaked, like the binary speed for a game that’s played at multiple different paces (ranging from smol zoomy blob to ponderous eukaryote to literal vegetables). So adding these sorts of sources of replayability, and having them in mind to carry onto future versions, is the main area that I feel would be good to target going forwards.
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It causes the global glaciation event, which does change the world significantly, though only temporarily.
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Having unnecessary parts does increase your reproduction cost (thus longer gameplay cycle), and your total population will be lower as population is total energy divided by the cost of an individual of your species. Some organelles also give negative tolerances, thus needing to counteract those.
So I would argue that there are at least some reasons why you do not want to add extra organelles that aren’t really useful.
Most players who have trouble with the game and show their cell, turns out to having just slapped whatever on their cell they wanted and thus have a really hard time. So I think slapping on everything you want to your cell does have a real negative impact (or at least if you aren’t that familiar with Thrive yet).
You cannot be perfectly adapted if you expand the range. If you are perfectly adapted you get 10% health buff and 10% extra bioprocess speed, which is an effect that you cannot get any other way.
If someone came up with different ammonia and phosphate costs for different organelles, that would be simple to put into the game as the reproduction system is built from the ground up to allow different ammonia and organelle costs per added organelle of a species.
So the problem would be coming up with a sensible list of what changes to do and then balancing (if required).
This seems like a bunch of extra initial complexity for basically no gain. Cells are already programmed to only absorb useful compounds. So this process is in the game, but completely automated.
I’m against adding any extra initial complexity as I think we are at the max that the average player can tolerate at the start of the game.
This used to be the case like 8 years ago or so, but it was removed as ATP is kind of also like the health of the cell. So players had trouble staying alive or properly growing. So that aspect was removed from the game. I do not think we should add that back.
It reduces available iron. I think that’s already significant as iron eating is one of the most popular strategies.
Also I’ve just made a change for the next release that hydrogen sulfide amounts will also greatly diminish once oxygen arrives.
Yeah, and the player is going to have a bit of a bad time if they were a photosynthesiser already.
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Also about the “patches being too similar” thing, I recall there were plans to add “terrain” to patches that lie on the surface of the oceanic/river floor but it was scrapped because it might’ve been too difficult to code the microbe ai to work around those obstacles.
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That, and the graphics people disappeared. Hopefully they return, and it actually sounds like it would be an interesting feature to have, but we shouldn’t delay 1.0 for that particular feature when there in no telling when someone will be able to help with it.
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Yeah the current roadblock is that all the graphics people have disappeared.
If that wasn’t the case we could add a bunch of small obstacles that could be clustered to provide patch type specific obstacles to differentiate the patches without needing any AI coding work.
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What if the graphics people just don’t return?
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Is it supposed to be the case that we cannot get the Hydrogenosome option when doing Endosymbiosis, even though the organism in question has many Hydrogenases?
I was using 2x speed mode, and I am not sure if that was the cause. I have gotten the Hydrogenosome Endosymbiosis option before in other playthroughs of 0.8.3.0.
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Actually that’s not intentional… I was sure we had that configured correctly, but I just checked and sure enough the hydrogenase JSON config is missing what it provides in endosymbiosis.
I’ll make a PR fixing that oversight tomorrow.
Edit: made a fix:
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