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Recently got a Windows computer and finally remembered to try a newer version of Thrive on it.

Wow.

Yeah, turns out jumping from 0.6.3 to 0.7.1 is big. The newer version looks… a lot cooler. The Flagellum gate is sensible but a bit annoying, and everything else makes sense - and it looks like atmosphere changes have actually been implemented!

I really like the increased density of cells in the newer version. It feels a lot more alive, and predator play is more interesting. I also like the new extinction screen. Really, there’s a lot to say about it, but I haven’t gotten too far yet. Currently running a mixed predator/plant.

Oh, yeah, that’s one more awesome thing: more species evolving from the player. That was a big gripe of mine. And migration! Can’t forget that.

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By “flagellum gate” you mean flagellum length modifier?

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I mean the gate that prevents you from getting flagella. In order to get flagella, your speed needs to drop before a certain threshold, which is rather annoying, because I’d like to never be slow, actually, and use flagella before being slow enough that Thrive wants me to build them.

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Pretty sure you need to have like 10 excess ATP to gain the option of evolving flagella.

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The flagellum unlocks with 10 excess ATP or <15 speed. Both of these are awkward gates, in my opinion, since flagella can still be quite fast when they are using less than 10 ATP (so that gate is too aggressive in its (presumable) goal of preventing you from adapting something that will trash your ATP balance), and 15 speed is very slow when you’re a small cell (so that gate is too aggressive in its (presumable) goal of preventing you from evolving a flagellum until you actually need it).

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I guess it’s supposed to mimic how a real species wouldn’t go for an “unnecesarry” adaptations, but it might not do that in the best way…

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The part locks are definitely better for gameplay, in my opinion, although out of all of the stages of Thrive they are least relevant in cell stage. They’re awkward to deal with, but that’s the point - it’s a necessary bit of balance to prevent you blitzing to all the adaptations you want. And you can switch them off anyway.

That being said, I still think they’re a bit too goal-oriented. If you’re a eukaryote, and you want toxins, you evolve a bunch of low-level toxin parts so that you can evolve the eukaryotic version. It’s a bit strange, because evolution can’t plan - although players obviously can, and that can’t be removed. The only way I can think of to solve this would be to completely hide any parts that you haven’t got partial progress towards unlocking, which I’ll write up as a feature proposal.

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I guess that could work.

That’s an unavoidable issue in the type of game Thrive is - The Player is an entity which guided a species in a manner different from regular evolution.

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Thrive, by its very concept, cannot be a fully accurate evolution simulator. You can’t simulate Darwinian NPC evolution without a very small board, a fantastically powerful supercomputer (thinking along the lines of a quantum computer/Matryoshka brain/insert sci-fi supercomputer here), or an auto-evo style simplification (which isn’t really fully Darwinian). And you can’t simulate Darwinian player evolution without removing most or all of the player’s agency, which isn’t very fun.

So it’s not a problem. Thrive is fine as-is.

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Yeah. And it’s still miles ahead of Spore in terms of actual evolution in-game…

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That bar is not difficult to clear. It is literally on the floor. Spore did not contain evolution. Any project which does would automatically have more evolution than Spore.

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Which is pretty ironic since Spore was advertised as the “evolution game” at the time leading up to it’s release…

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It did contain an extremely rough approximation of evolution, for the player exclusively, but if you call that ‘evolution’ then most RPGs feature your player ‘evolving’, in the sense that you acquire new items (in Spore, they’re parts) that give you new abilities and increase your power so that you can defeat new challenges and advance.

Yeah Spore’s just an RPG with a complicated character creator. It’s not an evolution game.

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I also recall there was a feature where species a could enter “metamorphosis” and became species b, which might be completely different from species a.

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Was there a metamorphosis system? I never played Spore, but I watched other people play and I never saw any sort of metamorphosis, just the editor, which let you do insane things as long as they were cosmetic.

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Did you never see those strange green-ish pupa things which sometimes appeared near creature nests?

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I didn’t play Spore and don’t recall pupas.

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Oh right, those objects

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That was a species wide upgrade that was suppose to represent evolution. Species A used the “cocoon” to “evolve” into species B, which then had species B children.

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Yeah, as if evolution was like a caterpilar turning into a butterfly within one lifecycle…

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