What it says on the Tin.
The Thread is speciffically for Ideas for ascension perks which currently only consist of an Osmoregulation cost reduction.
It might be fun coming up with ideas for both plausible and out there ideas for ascension perks.
link to the poll in this post.
Here’s a few I thought of,
Moon Gravity: You can adjust how much you’re affected by gravity, allowing smaller creatures to make massive jumps, or to make extraordinarily large creatures.
Rapid Growth: The amount of time you need to grow to full size is drastically reduced, potentially down to instant as long as you have food.
Extreme heat/cold tolerance: allows you to survive in otherwise unsurvivable temperatures, such as near volcanoes or in the deep arctic.
Breathless: you don’t need to breath at all, without the downsides of anaerobism; you can survive in inert gas, anoxic water, completely buried, or the vacuum of space.
Action Injury: You gain a threshold where if you don’t take it at least that much damage, it’s negated entirely,
like an action movie where the protagonist only gets hurt when it’s dramatic despite being shot at the whole film.
timeless: you can control the flow of time as you like, but this perk disables multiplayer unless you have a way of making timelines work, as without that you would either crash or drag everyone with you through time
pheonix: if you go extinct, even if it is from the entire galaxy, you can respawn, causing a catastrophic event that scales in severity with organism size, you can respawn on any planet you have ever inhabited and the one you choose is the one that experiences this. you also have the ability to burst into flames and restart your life cycle from the earliest point you can survive on your own instead of dying 3 times per reproductive cycle as long as your ashes don’t get washed away by water, if combined with extreme heat/cold tolerance removes fuel cost of producing fire directly from the body but still allows usage of fuel to produce jets of fire
vesicles of holding: vacuoles hold 2 times more per level of this, max level of 5 as i doubt anyone will ever need every vacuole adding over 128 storage per hex no matter what perks they have or how long they intend to survive without a food source
darwin’s odd finches: allows you to have perks work for species that split off of yours, you choose which ones are passed on, modifiable at any point in the game, specifically to allow players who have specialized to maximize the efficiency of their perks to not become a single line on the tree of life
All from LUCA: Even if the current species is not extinct, you can switch to other species.
Coming from the stars: You have entered a planet with a partially established biosphere as a species from a different planet.
Moving special MP: When entering the editor, you have an additional MP that can only be used and prioritized for the consumption of moving organelles.
MP Loan: Allow MP to use slightly more than 100. This will reduce the conversion of player species from the original species and reduce the amount of MP available for the next few times entering the editor.
Free enzyme packaging: You can cover the same eukaryotic organelles over the prokaryotic organelles without consuming MP.
Porter: You can proactively choose to move a species from one area where your species exists to another area where your species exists. You can also be transported.
I don’t really like giving player species mobility and metabolic privileges, which can make it difficult for Auto evo to separate new species from player species.
Jell ski: You can keep firing the muculage for 20 seconds but it still takes the same amount of time to fully recharge
Lightsaber pilus: This unlocked organelle kills any cell it touches
Universal whisperer: You can click any creature and it will instantly be tamed by you (aware/awakening)
Drainer: You can click a body of water and an olympic pool amount of liquid gets disapeared
Natural convection: It gives you a pet tornado
Stretchy: The range of the limb you use for grabbing or attack is increased by 4 fold
Ying yang: You cause light and darkness to switch places, this makes all the sea creatures with camouflage (white belly and black top) easily visible
Temporal teleport: You can enter a coccoon and exit in any part of your lifecycle 5 seconds later. you can grow up or grow down or change into a different biological cast
Infinite money: You can use as much mp as you want and also you can get everything the other side can provide during a trade deal
Niche judge: You can make the auto evo think a species as being more succesful or less succesful
Blitz-kree-magnon: Spawns a tank battalion in aware/awakening stage to help you
Sand shark: Allows you to swim on land, no matter how little it makes sense, because magic.
Miniature: You can choose an aware stage creature on thrivepedia and play with it in cell stage. It becomes 2.5d.
that is why i made the “darwin’s odd finches” one, it is also its own drawback as there is no way to make sure you won’t make a species that is hostile to you and possibly better at your niche than you
fast regeneration: when damaged you gain HP and mature significantly faster until you are at full health, as it is a multiplier and not an addition you need to be able to regen for this to work
cancer killer: you are unable to have your cells turn on you as a multicellular creature
energy loan if you run out of energy you start taking enough from your future self to survive and once you start producing more than you need to use a debuff that takes energy and sends it back through time is applied
Alternate coding: your creatue is made out of a diferent set of proteins than most life on your planet, rendering you and your organelles inedible, but as a drawback you need specialized lysosomes to have any digestion efficiency
Screw Specialization: have more specialization/upgrade slots for your organelles and later organs
Multi learner: be able to unlock multiple brain upgrades at a time instead of one
Light up the world: bioilluminesance consumes half the energy and lighting technology is more likely to be invented by an individual and is researched faster by your government
Small with an attitude: The size disparity in order to dissuade a creature from attacking you is improved, you can be smaller and dissuade a creature then without this perk
Up close and Personal: decreases the range other creatures will run away from you if scared, decreases border friction later on
Recursive respiration: makes it easier to recycle oxygen and other gasses for your creature thus making it to where they don’t have to bring in more gas as well as increasing breath length, gives some resistance to air pollution as well as chemical warfare, wrecked ships in shallow waters are easier to recover
i feel like this should be a precursor to this
dna compression: you are able to fit more genes in each nucleus as a eukaryote or plasmid hex as a prokaryote
like nobody else: bioluminescence light production is doubled at no extra cost, if paired with light up the world and darwin’s odd finches you will get bioluminescence based energy transfer, especially with
PHOTOSYNTHESIS AAAAAAAAA: halves cost of carbon fixation when performed in an organelle or cell that has a pigment that allows harvesting energy from the sun, doubles output of photosynthetic compounds, for maximum result pair with
one way void: adds a membrane type that allows light in but not out, perfect for something trying to achieve maximum photosynthetic efficiency
energy hoarder: all methods of storage, transfer, and acquisition of energy have efficiency greatly increased
I really love the idea of certain perks being needed for others as well as combinations of perks being combined to get a new perk or add a unique benifit.
It makes me think that if so many perks are possible then maybe instead of choosing 1, points should be given so multiple perks can be added or 1 more powerful one can be chosen.
The Chosen One: in your home system, there is an inactivated Ascension Gate. But you still need resources to activate it.
the chosen one(lv2): you have the power to summon an ascension gate once per ascension after reaching space, but you still need resources to activate it
What do ya’ll think are the merits of both options as well.
Which would be better for the ideas for perks also mention.
Make sure to still give perk ideas when possible.
I mean the single choice just makes you pick one ascention perk, while the point-buy system allows you to make combinations and strategies. If i understood what you meant correctly.
We have come up with 67 perks. Even if half of that is added to the game, that means the player would need to descend and replay the game 30 times in order to see all the post game content.
And also not all of these are equal. “Rapid Growth” can make the player overpowered, the same isn’t true for "Light up the world ". Point system can allow the player to gain the same amount of advantage after each descension, and try all of them with less replays.
Also the perks can be arranged in a tree, more advanced ones being unlocked after the precursor ones.
Unnatural disaster: You can trigger any natural disaster at the spot you are standing, as long is the biome fits it (so no landslide in a flat terrain, but you can create a volcano anywhere on the planet)
Summon flock: Spawns a random species from thrivepedia as pack members to help you
Out of proportion: Removes the square cube law for a few generations, allowing you to play according to the rules of physics that applied to your previous size
Double jump: You can jump while you are falling as if you are in the ground , but you can do this only once
Rapid evolution: You can pause the game and use the cell/organism editor, the changes are effective immediately, can only be used for your own species
Lifesteal: You gain a percentage of the damage you caused to another creature. Your hp can get above maximum.
Breathtaking: You can steal oxygen and stamina from other creatures within touching distance
Gluttonous bomb: (aware) You can place a blackhole on the ground. It isn’t effected by gravity, so it doesn’t immediately fall to the center of the planet. It only pulls objects close to it, such as animals, plants, soil, and air. The air is pulled from a greater distance compared to others. The low pressure can create a hurricane. After feeding for some time, it starts shooting a beam of light from its poles like a quasar, the intensity of the light increases with time. The range it pulls objects from also increases, it is proportional to the light intensity. When it reaches a certain size, the black hole explodes, leaving a crater behind, because this needs to end some way. The black hole causes time dialation(in single player), length contraction and red/blue shifting but its pulling strength is very low compared to a real black hole of that size, you can get away from it if you aren’t too close. All the creatures that were nearby get effected with a radiation poisoning.
Sweet dreams are made of cheese: You can make it rain cheese
You and I to get a breeze: You can give a knockback to other creatures with a wind, you can also use this for flying if you are light enough
Travel the world and the seven seas: You can open the patch map and teleport to another patch
Everybody is looking for something: You can click a spot in the minimap and every creature in the world that are loaded at that moment would start going there. If you move towards to a far away place and come across new animals, they would also be going there when you notice them. The animalls that arrived there start moving in random directions in a 20 meter radius area. When the countdown reaches zero, they start acting normally again. You can use this if you are low in hp and want to get rid of the predators that are following you
Some of them want to use you: You can give the control of your creature to the standard AI of your species or to another player. You can switch to 3rd person view but you can’t focus the camera to a far away place
Let there be flight: You can click any creature and it would start having wings and the needed biology to fly
The final countdown: If you activate this in multiplayer, the other players would have to kill your creature, otherwise the planet explodes. Useful perk for trollers. Can be disabled on servers. Can be given to another creature in the map editor to create boss battles.
Planet conditioning: You can change your suns size. To do that, activate this perk, look at the sun, and scroll the wheel in your mouse. Disactivate this perk to go back to the default. The sizes can range from white dwarf to red giant. The orbit of your planet or the other planets in the solar system aren’t effected. Only your planets climate is. Don’t like some glaciers? Melt them under the deadly rays of the sun. Want some liquid nitrogen rain? Sure, just turn off the heater until you are satisfied.
Sweater party: You can click any creature and a sweater will apear on its body. It acts as an additional layer of fur.
Upstanding: You can click any tree. Legs will appear attched to its trunk and it will start running around. After some time, the legs dissapear and the tree becomes sessile again, roots connecting it to the ground
Love is in the air: You can click two creatures and they will mate. The offspring will be a hybrid that carries both of their characteristics if they aren’t the same species.
Indeterminency: You will teleport to random places every secord, most likely 30cm to the right or something like that. You can’t teleport to inside an object or under the ground, unless there is a cave in there. When you press w and try to move forward, you will be more likely to teleport forwards, the expected distance travelled after some time will be the same as your normal speed. And you can increase or decrease this indeterminancy with the scroller in the mouse. If you max it out, you would travel to a random location in the planet every second. You can use this to get away from a predator. If you are injured and can’t move fast, and if it is about to reach you, you can increase the indeterminency to a few meters so that even if it reaches you and its average distance to you is zero (when measured with a vectoral sum), you will just keep teleporting around each other, unable to interact at all or doing that momentarily. There is also entanglement, you can make your distance and direction with another creature fixed, so you will teleport together and it will appear in the same place with respect to you. You can use this on your pack members or the prey you want to hunt.
World on a tilt: You can make the ground appear as if it is tilted. You can use this perk for climbing a mountain, for making the surface appear flat. If you make the tilt 180 degrees, everything would start falling up, except the ground. The effect is local.
Negative punch: You will cause a negative knockback when you hit something. If you charge at something and hit it with all your body, you will not stop after hitting it, you will receive a large speed boost instead. It will go through you, come out the other side and move at that direction at a great speed. This damages both of you
with “like nobody else”, “PHOTOSYNTHESIS AAAAAAAAA”, “one way void”, and “energy hoarder” you can get infinite energy through the light bulb and solar panel method, so it would have a lot of ways to get more powerful unlike rapid growth, it just starts weak, but if you’re ascending to escape the heat death of your world you wouldn’t have to with “light up the world” at full upgrade assuming you found out how to turn matter and energy directly into eachother
photosynthesis? nah, photovoltaics: makes all photosynthesis organelles except carbon fixing ones produce electricity instead of ATP and makes carbon fixing organelles require electricity to function, affects all organisms that evolve from you after you first gain the ability to eat light regardless of other perks, due to the lack of inefficient chemical transport mechanisms in your photoautotrophy this provides a 50% increase in light eating efficiency and makes it less viable for predators that evolve from you before you evolve photoautotrophy to eat you as they would not get as much chemical energy from you.
cold fusion: you get an organelle can fuse any element into another element(warning: this still produces things that can damage DNA so it’s best to use it in an area with no DNA that needs to be used). if combined with “one way void” the eukaryotic version is pitch black in dark areas but has a bright white outer layer in bright areas and either way this combination removes the need to keep it away from necessary DNA once you are a eukaryote, if combined with a conductive organelle outputs electricity while active
vacuum membrane: allows you to add an extra membrane to any organelle and what that membrane does is prevent all heat and chemical transfer between it and yourself (for organelles that produce a lot of heat but don’t let much out)
organic fission: (requires cold fusion and one way void)(WARNING: this organelle produces a LOT of heat when on so keep it in low density and where it will get cooled fast unless you have “extreme heat/cold tolerance” in which case you could use it to start fires wherever you walk or as a defense mechanism, for example: claws so hot they make the air glow) allows the player to perform fission in their own cells at the cost of producing a lot of heat extremely fast and quite a bit of ATP/s, the AI will generally only use this if they are autotrophic and to make the chemicals they turn into ATP unless you make them do otherwise, for example having a lot of these organelles in a specialized organ that is launched at an enemy and all of the fission organelles in it are activated on impact to rapidly increase the temperature and burn the enemy, if combined with “extreme heat/cold tolerance” allows using it for long periods of time and having thermal defense mechanisms that also can convert toxic metals into carbon and oxygen
absurd heat/cold tolerance: allows going into places that should not be physically survivable by any means like liquid nitrogen and the sun without dying or taking damage, upgrade to extreme heat/cold tolerance
gravity god: allows full control over how much you are affected by gravity at all times, powerful enough to make a black hole escapable from past the event horizon or make you get yote at 299,792,458 m/s² towards the nearest atom, maybe if you’re light enough you can use it to have negative gravity. usable by AI members of your species. allows control over the direction of gravity(should probably require saving up for a few ascensions to get)(upgrade to moon gravity)
This idea I think you got it from Stellaris XD.
speedrunner[1]: doubles ascension points gained per ascension, doubles speed and halves growth time, halves MP usage
secret perk, unlocked by completing the game in as little time as humanly possible ↩︎
I don’t see how that could POSSIBLY be exploited.
nah it’s easy to exploit, it’s just really hard to get, and its requirements change based on your ascension perks
firewall: you can block attacks with fire 8* your core body temperature, does not work in water unless your core body temp is high enough you’d need extreme heat/cold tolerance to survive it