I never got a screenshot, but I ran into a purple cell before the first editor. I don’t entirely remember if I tweaked the mutation rate, so maybe that has something to do with it.
It should not be possible at all, no other species are added to the world before you get to the editor, unless you are playing in freebuild where the world is prepopulated.
that’s weird, I’ll keep an eye out in case I run into it again. Where should I send it if I find it?
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If you see it happen, make a save and upload that save somewhere I can download it from.
When I reach coastal and evolve the first Thylakoid there, my species in istant volcanic vent also do it. It is really strange.
Evolutionary diffusion should be subject to some suppression, which can depend on the degree of variation difference(gaining the new kinds of cellular structure should diffuse harder than adding or modifying existing cellular structure), different patches’s environmental similarity and distance between different patches. Perhaps plasmid should be able to improve the ability of evolutionary diffusion.
When my species gain the new kinds of cellular structure, the species that I used to be in the same patch shouldn’t vanishes completely, expecially when I gain first aggressiveness structure.
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The player species is exempt from having it split into two due to differing selection pressures in different patches. Players already complain about auto-evo wanting to kill them off, I can’t imagine how many complaints I would need to read if players could lose 80% of their population (with it splitting off) by placing one new organelle.
It is a real question. Many players pursue the thriving of species numbers. The quantity of significant losses is unacceptable for them. It may be related to the current victory conditions.
For the entire evolutionary history, many species flourished for a while, but some of they also overdraw evolutionary potential and eliminated by the changing environment.
I imagine a specie gain first aggressiveness structure, it begins to prey on the former compatriots and differentiate into new specie. But in fact my specie all turn into new specie, it don’t have any attackable objects, because there’s only itself here.
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Please do not double post, it is against the rules. Edit your previous post instead.
what about if there was an organelle that allowed you to keep that population in your species by transferring genes between populations
What would that solve? That’s exactly how the game functions currently; no matter what the player does their entire species mutates like the player edited.
they could gain back population from a patch by just moving to it as long as it has a recent relative to their current species in it
another possibility could be that you only speciate when renaming your species
I definitely think that tying success to current species population amount is a bad move. That kind of mindset only incentivizes the creation of things such as worms and nematodes. Instead success should be based on survival through time as the environment changes, emphasizing adaptability and resourcefulness.
The reason i point this out is that, as Lan describes, all of your species changing at once is such an unrealistic and strange event that it feels like a slap in the face.
It also perpetuates the myth that all organisms in a species are inherently united to some goal of success, which is instead the opposite of what actually occurs, as many species have evolved from speciation from direct competition and hunting.
i think that rather than listening to some minority or even majority of players that feel upset if improving their species resets their population numbers, you should instead tie success to whether the player is still alive as the environment changes. Let those unhappy players make the choice between upgrading their species and maximizing species numbers.
Realistically, the only thing that would happen is they hold off on changing too much, and stay the same, and then their species is outcompeted by rivals that have decided to change and then rapidly reproduce. Those who decide to make the plunge will instead find that their maximum creature amount after that change is larger than their previous one.
This also helps manage a different issue you have where players have zero incentive to stay the same if their species fits their current environment very well.
By having the species start again in population numbers every time it adapts, players would have a sort of ‘internal minigame’ of focusing on survival and population increase for multiple generations after each change, to get their population back up to the previous numbers. This would in turn give players breathing room to actually play around with their current iteration if it’s the most well adapted, rather than changing it for no reason but its own sake of ‘more upgrades’.
The reason this works well is that in the current setup, useless negative changes have no immediate repercussion for the player, so they are led to an unsatisfying outcome where multiple bad changes compound until they die “randomly” at some point, with no ability to evade that outcome since there’s no way to predict it happening (at least for those who have not spent an unsatisfying amount of time getting used to when to hold back).
Having changes reset species number count would solve this by actually giving the player the objective to carefully manage their species numbers between necessary changes, making them actually want to manage their species and make sure it’s as well adapted as possible at any one time.
In this case they would clearly understand that changing their species for absolutely no reason would be a massive drawback for no benefit, and at the same time the minigame of ‘growing species numbers’ ensures that staying the same is not boring.
I also think that even if the negative outcry is too overwhelming, having this style of adaptation be a difficulty option would mollify those who seek challenge and scientific accuracy whilst appeasing the more gamey consumers who are obsessed with species numbers alone.
Though is is also worth considering that the only reason species numbers have any real value to the player is due to how the game is currently designed, and instead, it might be possible to emphasize adaptability and survival. Long term loss of species numbers is no big deal beyond a slightly more nail biting experience after the adaptation occurs. In fact this could enhance gameplay by making those events more impactful.
To help make this less brutal during species transitions, the autosave system can allow players to return to the moment they adapted if they get unlucky and their smaller population is decimated. And alternatively, if you want to give even more help to the player, the immediate gameplay period after changing the species could have an automatic ‘respawn as previous species in patch’ mechanic where a death returns you to your old organism with your old editor and species setup.
This way it’s more like you have one life as the newly adapted organism which is a relative of your previous orgnaism. You have one chance to reproduce as that organism, in competition with and opposed to your previous organism, and if you die, you merely continue playing as one of your previous organisms. When that occurs the species number count would jump from “1” to 300 or something depending on how many there were. And it’d just be a camera transition to the old organism like in the previous system.
To make the game more realistic, the victory condition would be based only on complexity rather than species number count.
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There’s no actual ‘win condition’ related to species numbers. Currently, the ‘You have thrived’ message pops up when you reach 2 billion years after the start, but that’s unrelated to anything else. And you can get that even if you’ve got to the point that auto-evo thinks you’ve become extinct every round (despite your species continuing).
The overall goal of the game is essentially to evolve to get from one stage to the next, and that is achieved via making changes - biological and then social changes. The player is encouraged to adapt their species over time. And it can seem weird that the species all change at the same time, but bear in mind that each time you leave the editor, 100 million years have passed.
Improvements could definitely be made to the indicators for success available to the player, though. I’m still not sure what the fitness numbers in the detailed auto-evo panel are showing. This could be made much easier for the player to see (possibly with bars for different categories, which could be read at a glance). And if a mechanic was implemented for determining roles within an ecosystem, then we could perhaps have adjustments to mutation costs inverse to the fitness within our current role (as fitting a role perfectly means less evolutionary pressure to change).
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I need to correct you here by saying that there is also a requirement of having 300 population. That’s so that if auto-evo calculations say you should be extinct (i.e. 50 population each time) you can’t actually win. Your species need to be doing well enough to not be going extinct all the time.
That’s how a game over works… having high population in multiple patches is an insurance against having a game over. Which feels more secure as a player (in any game) having one life or having 10 extra lives?
Your ancestors should still not dissapear because ancestors just dissapearing not only can cause problems but is also unrealistic.
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what about the player being able to design what their species looks like in specific patches or even just parts of patches if they want to while keeping all of their population as the same species making it possible to be viable in multiple types of biome while having each specialization or caste or whatever it would be called affected differently by auto-evo from having different parts of their genome expressed differently because of environmental conditions.
it solves the problem of the player randomly loosing population after editing their species, it solves the problem of the player’s actions taking whole patches of population away, it might make things like sexual dimorphism and ant colonies easier to do, and it allows hyper generalist species to specialize while staying hyper generalists.
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I think every time the player exits the editor, the player’s species should speciate. This shouldn’t be necessary for the other species but it should be for the player’s species. Because if you had chloroplast, migrated to the deep and removed your chloroplast, why should the cells above also remove their chloroplasts? The ancestors should stick but they should evolve too, evolution never stops anyway, the living fossils are the ones that evolve the slowest.[1]
Why should the option to start playing as another species exist? We can revert by loading a previous save file.
We aren’t the same species as the tiktaalik. I think the ancestors that remain should adopt a new name, and evolve. The player can decide to keep the same name after evolving, but if that happens, I think the previous iteration should be posthumously renamed, such as “primium thrivium cambrianum”, the descendents being “primium thrivium” and “primium undulatium”. This should happen every 100 million years.
This is people complaining for the totally opposite reason.
Why would the slight variations of the players species outcompete the player? ahem protoplasm ahem. There is no reason for that to happen. Evolution can make a better design than humans, but it takes a lot of trial and error. Meanwhile the player can predict the outcomes of adding a particular hex. Maybe the player can’t always become the predator, and I am not sure about that, but the player should be able to become the first predator, or a predator after mass extinctions.
What? Aren’t there any plants? Do all cells try to be the top predator? That aside, does the player outcompete the creations of auto evo so much that it becomes a luca again in every generation? How slow is evolution in Thrive?
I don’t think the player should be able to decide if its species speciates or not, name change doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t work that way. The total amount of energy available depends on the sunlight, having more middle sized predators doesnt make it possible to feed a very large predator if that large predator couldn’t already be supported with the prey of the middle sized predators.
There is no reason for that to happen. Large creatures eat the smallest creatures all the time, just look at the blue whale. The scenerio you mentioned sounds like it would be very uncommon, you lose the ability to hunt the small cells, the species that evolved from you can still hunt them, and you can hunt the species that evolved from you, but the species that evolved from you can’t hunt you. If auto evo was good, I’d expect that species to hunt both you and the small species, if the auto evo was bad, I wouldn’t expect either of you to be able to hunt the small species, and because of that, starve.
That is how the niche of the larger fish appears in the first place. This doesn’t require ancestors that stick around because there isn’t just one species. And even if it that was the case, it can’t happen in the order you said, you can’t stop preying on your prey at any point, you have to start hunting your ancestor while you still consume your previous prey.
You are aware that if you can only hunt your own species, you would still go extinct because perpetual motion machines are impossible, right?
I agree with the rest of your points
This is a terrible solution. Why does the players species exist in more than 1 patch in the first place? Can’t I just see the number of my species in the same patch? And who remembers their population in the previous iteration anyway. And why does evolving them change all of them at the same time? [2]
Do you mean cannibalism? Attacking should be possible even without cannibalism when some of the player’s species are turned into another species.
That opens a can of worms. For starters, the word species doesn’t have the same meaning for microbes as it does for us, every species can share plasmids and “reproduce” with each other, so technically there is only one species of bacteria, but when someone refers to a group of bacteria, they refer the bacteria that live in close proximity to each other and have the same niche. I think I heard this in a scishow episode, but if you want a source, I can give wikipedia: *
It would be much simpler if we treated species as very distinct things, and horisontal gene transfer as only small parts being traded, such as proteins for environmental tolerances, because I am not sure how it could work with hexes.
Well, in regions like the deep sea, its not that you can rapidly reproduce. The foods come far and few between, and you have to keep a low metabolism and have a slow growth to not starve. The speed of change that is possible depends on the environment.
If the player is aiming for a different niche, there would be cases where the previous numbers are unattainable.
Should the population start from 1?
Small creatures exist in larger numbers. But what does being succesful mean anyway? Worms can never be selected as the apex predators by the auto evo, they wouldn’t be competing with the existing apex predators for that niche.
I agree
I don’t know how bad that is, but it is better and more realistic that it doesn’t happen at all, by making the player compete with its close relatives
Since all species originated from luca, this means that the player would be able to play as any other species. What is the point of trying to survive if you can lose all the time and switch to another species?
How many species do you want to play at the same time? This is like multiplayer, right?
That would require designing more than one species for one species. I personally wouldn’t want to do that
But those populations all exist in the same place, every variation has to survive in the current patch, instead of having a different variation in different patches, potentially in every patch, “affected differently by auto-evo”, different species in all but name
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For this, i was just considering an experimental mechanic where if you die, you respawn as the version of your creature that you previously designed, but without loading the previous save (if the species still exists in the environment), sort of tying the two species together in the player’s perception due to relatedness even though they do compete against and maybe even consume each other.
Still, was just an idea.
I think overall i agree with the points you make, it makes no sense for ancestors that are across the globe to be influenced by player choices if those choices would make them less adapted for those locations. If we look at it as representing the actual evolution taking place, it’d be as though an organism there somehow evolved these adaptations and then outcompeted its relatives to become the dominant organism.
That would be very strange if the adaptation for example is a rust-consuming organelle and the organisms that evolve the organelle exist in a place with no iron. There would be no reason for any of the organisms there to gain that organelle and then survive to pass on their genes, and then when that species goes extinct in the patch (due to all of them gaining the rust adaptation for no reason), why are there no longer any examples of the previously well-adapted organisms there to be left around.
That’s like a plant species that’s abundant in the sunny patches suddenly becoming a vent-based chemotroph for no reason, and then dying out due to that. I hate that this can happen in the game.
I also hate that I can evolve a successful producer organism into a predator, and then, if my previous organism was the only producer organism in that environment, I cannot now predate on that producer because suddenly all of the producers transform into predators? Despite there being no food source for them to do so. Whereas I evolve because there is a food source available (the producer that i’m evolving from).
It should be possible for a plant to become carnivorous by eating other plants. If in a patch there are only other plants of the same species, and no other food source, plants that spontaneously evolve predatory adaptations would be able to survive by eating other plants. That’s just basic biology. The fact that in this game which emphasizes scientific accuracy does not contain this feature (because of player complaints) blows my mind.
The lack of this feature is the direct cause of many of my losing games, as often my creatures become so successful that they lose competition and become the only organism in that niche, and then if I ever switch niche away from being a producer, I cannot rely on the producers of the planet as a food source because they also randomly change as well, so i starve to death.
This kind of scenario actively punishes good and successful gameplay, as well as experimentation. Because If i play well as a producer organism I now am now not allowed to experiment by becoming a consumer.
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Why does this:
Become this:
I have tried to correct it three times.
I wonder if this works: Accurаcy
Edit: Yep. I used the Cyrillic letter “a” (or “а”) for the second “a” in Accurаcy and put it between four asterisks. Still, we gotta let hhyyrylainen know about this.