The big features that this update claims to add are:
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Better auto-evo.
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Stronger specialisation.
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New reproduction in the Multicellular stage.
There’s many bug fixes, as well as minor tweaks like “oxygen tolerance is now mainly sourced from parts”.
I don’t know how to address this in particular, so I’ll just do my normal habit of running the photosynthetic predator build up to the end of Multicellular (which I don’t expect to be a particularly interesting stage yet, since the player infrastructure exists but I don’t think the auto-evo does) and commenting on everything I see.
Start conditions
I’m running Normal difficulty with no modifications, this time. Usually I’ll tweak Normal to have reduced MP cost, because I get feral when I just barely don’t have the MP for another significant part. (I don’t think there’s enough small MP things to tweak… maybe I focus them too hard and then can’t do them later?) But I’m testing, so it’s best to stick to standard conditions. Starting in hydrothermal vents with LAWK off, but I won’t use thermosynthase. Never touched it, never bothered to; it’s a dead end, unless you’re planning to do most of your microbial development in the vents.
I’ll be timing my playthrough this time, although obviously one number isn’t going to be good enough for a picture of length - it won’t account for new players, players who take longer to think, players who don’t play at 2x speed the entire time, players who aren’t writing thoughts the entire time, etc.
Abiogenesis
Opening move is normal. The first round is just ‘hunt cloud’ and that’s it. Four species appear once I hit editor; three are me but with a random part below, and the fourth is me but more aggressive. I’m of the opinion that the random-part-below species in the first auto-evo generation are something that needs patching. Auto-evo should select random hexes so everything doesn’t look conspicuously identical here over several runs.
As is my tendency, I immediately sprinted out of the hydrothermal vents with little preparation aside from a little fluidity. This is part of the photosynthetic strategy, although changing depth and especially changing out of the vents is a fraught proposition these days due to the massive MP cost of changing your tolerances so drastically.. Atmosphere in the seafloor patch next door was 25% empty.
The sprint to the surface is more difficult nowadays. Because a species is dragged with you, you’re always under threat of predation unless you forgo MP that could’ve been spent on tolerances to develop a defense. And you do need the tolerances. But, as long as you constantly spam pause to check for any cells nearby, it’s not actually that dangerous - speed is mostly based on size before flagella appear, so if you’re the smallest cell possible, nobody can outspeed you - they can only catch you off-guard in the low light.
Second editor. Tweaked tolerances, became fully fluid and double-membraned. I habitually use the double membrane because it gives more health and osmo with its downside being compensated with flagella. However, it’s been changed. Now, it also has 100% toxin protection. I don’t know if that means I’m immune or not, but it’s nice to have. I also became green and moved to the mesopelagic; an ice shelf is on top of me, so I’ll be delayed one step moving to another mesopelagic.
I nearly got grabbed at the last second in the mesopelagic, but escaped and evolved. The place was swarming with other cells, but the strategy of using pause to detect and avoid them is working well.
My third editor. I moved my pressure tolerances around, maxed their broadness, added more UV tolerance. I’m not sure why there was such a massive pressure difference between two mesopelagic patches.
Finally got to the surface, after another packed patch. After finishing my UV tolerance, I had 55 MP, which is to say exactly enough for one thylakoid. Unfortunately, I had not unlocked thylakoids yet because it was my first turn in the patch. I instead added a hydrogenase that I didn’t need yet; I’ll be needing it soon, because oxygen takes a while to build up enough to make aerobic respiration work. With my last 10 MP I boosted the broadness of my temperature tolerance; I’m leaving it wide so that, when the glaciation hits, I don’t have to adjust.
The Great Oxygenation
Now that I’m on the surface, with thylakoids unlocked (completely unremarkable play step, the currents were typically strong and the patch was totally empty), I can start properly. So, first, I’ll evaluate where the world is at.
It’s 500 MYR. I’ve never been clear on the exactness of MYR - does it start at 0 or 100? This is my fourth editor step, so I guess it starts at 0 for the 0th editor step. The world is already fairly populous, with many colors of cell. Most are long sticks, occasionally with one hex out into the side, recalling the old ‘only axe cells’ problem of auto-evo. They all have fairly similar body plans. Most lineages of the world descend either from generation 3 Privium thrivium or the sadly-just-extinct Nako orilia, a basal ferrotroph from the second generation. Most species period are protean mixes of different metabolic parts - Nako orilia’s descendants usually have chemosynthesis, although most of them seem to be moving towards being mainly ferrotrophs. There’s recognisable distinction between sub-lineages here - Ubarhin gronsis, a generation 4 species, sees its lineages be mostly the generalists (such that they are in such an early stage), while Plimanela apien sees its lineages be large and iron-focused.
This isn’t really very important.
With my 100 MP, I added two thylakoids. The patch is fairly empty right now - the other species dragged with me has a sensor, a chemosynthesising protein, and a hydrogenase. While checking chemosynthesis to see if hydrogenase helped it, I discovered that tooltips scroll. I like that. This surface patch still has sulfur, so my foe species won’t be helpless - although, as we’re both the same size now, it won’t be able to harm me either.
I ran into a slight problem at the end of my first lifetime photosynthesising - I ran out of glucose and started dying. But then I evolved. I’m spreading my population around every patch that fits me, so I’ll hop patches to the local estuary to restock on glucose rather than suffer from hhry’s crusade for static surroundings. Here, I added another thylakoid, boosted my temperature range, and spent the rest of the MP getting my free 10% oxygen resist to compensate for the hydrogenase. Local oxy is 0.021% right now, but my species is populous, and it’s getting everywhere - it’ll pick up soon.
The new patch is not remarkable. The other two species are small silicates that just diverged from me; one stripped me down to just a cytoplasm while the other did the same but for thylakoids. Only one unrelated species that I can see has developed thylakoids, and it’s one of the big ones, so it’s not a focused photosynth.
The estuary has a big problem - it’s full of sulfur. Sulfur hasn’t gone into significant decline yet, and neither has iron - at least in this patch, they climbed rapidly until 300MYR, then stabilised and fluctuated a bit. The patch was only settled 500MYR, because its glucose is static before that.
Looking at the species here, only one generation after I arrived, they’ve exploded. New arrival Lesia ubum, a cytoplasm-rusticyanin, has over 100000T in population, which makes me think that should probably be written 100Qa instead. My large species has minisculely diverged, adding two new forms of photosynth to the patch. Elsewhere, thylakoids are being added up, and in just one generation, oxygen has jumped from 0.02% to a full 11%. I couldn’t switch my hydrogenase for a metabolosome because I hadn’t unlocked those yet, so I instead added two more thylakoids - for more glucose generation, in preparation for massively expanding my ATP capacity and turning into a predator, and also to compensate for the hydrogenase and gain much-needed oxygen tolerance. (My UV tolerance is now 113%.)
I’ll sit idle for now and let my species test itself against the night. Auto-evo doesn’t like my direction; it thinks adding thylakoids is bad. In the short-term, I suppose that’s true. In the long-term, it must be useful, otherwise there’d be no reason to get bigger at all. It’s advocating rusticyanin, because it still has a problem with only recommending generalists.
The music stopped, so I idly went to check it, and discovered myself at 4 health, and then the ‘editor unlocked’ noise, and my health at 2. I can’t spawn into my next generation in such a condition, so I’ll hop patch to the tide pool and add rusticyanin and chemosynthesis to make auto-evo happy and get some resistance to the sulfur. With my last 10 MP, I’m throwing the hydrogenase on the curb; the new patch already has 10% oxygen, with the patch I just left at 18%.
So, that great oxygenation might have gotten very fast again.
I don’t know how to check global stats anymore, but just paging around the surface patches, it seems like oxygen’s heavily concentrated here. Other surface patches have some - usually ranging from 3-7%. This is 800MYR. No subsurface patch has more than 1% - but I need to give it time.
900 MYR, and oxygen has suddenly skyrocketed - far past what I can fix my tolerance to in one step. I added two metabolosomes, but it’s not enough - my patch now has 33% oxygen. I don’t know how this happened, but if there were arthropods here they’d be loving it. Nitrogen in my patch is declining; carbon dioxide ebbed in for a while before I showed up, but it’s now cratering with the oxygen increase, so I’ll likely lose photosynthetic effectiveness - although with how many thylakoids I have, and how little energy I use, I’ll probably be fine.
Oddly, despite my ATP screen saying I have 40 ATP and only 20 ATP cost, even moving, I still run out without sprinting if I move anywhere. I’ve had this problem for a while. It’s annoying for eating stuff.
1000 MYR! Global glucose concentrations have decreased by 20%, which I think means there’s no longer unsettled patches. Oxygen in my home patch is now 50%. This would be an enormous boon if not for its toxicity - although it only modifies my health and osmo, and, I have metabolosomes, the osmo is not a problem. Osmo loss from overoxygenation will never be a problem if you have metabolosomes.
The massive oxygen happens to mean that with only five thylakoids, one rusticyanin, one chemosynthesising protein, and two metabolosomes, I can stick on a nucleus and not even worry about it. This is great. Unfortunately, setting up as a eukaryote is a time-consuming process, and I don’t have that time, given the oxygen. I’ll do it anyway since I can eat a 25% loss to osmo and health. What’s it going to matter to a eukaryote that eats the sun?
Global glucose has decreased by only 16% at 1100 MYR. What does that even mean. Has a patch gone dead? Oxygen is leveling off, and carbon dioxide leveling down. I’ve added two metabolosomes, to try to work towards mitochondria - no endosymbiosis possibilities exist here. I’ll need lysosomes, chloroplasts, vacuoles, flagella, and a cilia, which is a lot on the docket, although I can sit through whatever while I get there. I’ve just passed the hour mark on this session. I’m also moving to the local cost; only around 35% oxygen, so I should be able to survive without toxicity. (I still have a little toxicity.)
Amazingly, a species unrelated to me has developed a nucleus in a stable arrangement. Very purple! They have rusticyanin and mitochondria. I’ve tracked its lineage; seems that it popped up at 1000MYR, the same step that I became eukaryotic. I am noticing that a smorgasbord of eukaryotes has diverged from me, all of whom are virtually the same body plan because I’m large and have a lot of parts and therefore auto-evo can’t differentiate quickly. The tree has a very healthy number of red dots overall, and, humorously, right at the bottom there is a straight line of the same species, a single thermosynthase, existing unchanged since 100 MYR.
I can’t get lysosomes yet, but pulling cilia mean I can hit the 20 engulf requirement in short order. Some of what I’m eating is toxic, but my membrane means each tick is only one point of damage to my 88 health hide.
1300 MYR. This patch is stable, but there’s rolling extinctions elsewhere. The food chain has given up - not that I was checking it before - and only shows me. Even patches without me don’t have food chains that work - I checked a random mesopelagic and of its four species only one appears.
My coastal patch is now full of lazy eukaryotes. Glaciation looms, and I suspect a mass extinction, too - auto-evo’s never handled the advent of eukaryotes well.
Yep, one gen to glaciation at 1400MYR and half of the species have gone extinct. Because of the hhry-advocated patch staticness, they won’t disappear, so I’ll start moving patches actively to make sure everything updates. Only one surviving species in this one (that I’m leaving) is not a me-adjacent eukaryote. Pleasingly, sulfur and iron are now mostly gone. Returning to the estuary which was once chock-full of the stuff, its compound graph shows that they both cratered to zero at some point - although history isn’t saved back from 1400MYR any further than 500MYR. Luckily, I checked it at that point too; I can see that sulfur didn’t change much (despite how abundant it was in play back in 500 MYR, it’s only in the 0.5-2.5 range), but iron is cratering. This patch, alas, is entirely me-adjacent photosynthetic eukaryotes.
Glaciation has hit at 1500MYR. I’m still deep in the MP trenches if I want to get my body plan updated to full eukaryotic strength; luckily, I just unlocked the binding agent, which will make this all much cheaper. Everything is dying in droves, so many eukaryotes in an empty patch, but onward I go.
Glaciation & Multicellularity
A pacing issue that I’ve identified with Microbe is the Eukaryotic phase. The simple problem is that you don’t have enough time to unlock (manually or via endosymbiosis, if endosymbiosis feels like working today - I kept forgetting to check it) all the upgraded parts you need, and then replace your old parts with new ones. I’ve previously proposed a system, which would apparently be hard to program, wherein you can place new parts on top of old ones, with or without a cost reduction (not having to delete them is already a reduction). You can already put parts on top of cytoplasm; I imagine being able to, say, take three thylakoids conveniently arranged and drop a chloroplast directly on all three without having to spend MP deleting them.
Auto-evo is doing valiant work with the other eukaryotes. They’ve actually started to look differently from me - not least because they could immediately start using eukaryotic parts, whereas I didn’t get most of them unlocked quickly (you need to have a lot of each type of prokaryotic part to start the unlock clock for their upgraded form, and I didn’t have that for metabolosomes only thylakoids - and inexplicably rusticyanin despite only having one of those at auto-evo’s behest?).
Died, for the first time. Glaciation’s tough! Everyone around me was dying but I couldn’t live off their corpses. It’s day and I’m in a cloud with a little boost from iron and sulfur, so I should be able to make it back to the editor. Growth rate is good. There’s a long period at max size. I’ll test spores soon.
One problem with my build is that I’m lethally reliant on the inflated oxygen of my home continent. Elsewhere, it’s in a more reasonable range, and I can’t cope. To make the process of fixing this a little easier, I’ve deleted my two starting bonus cells - I’m now a single-celled organism that evolves faster.
Spikes have shown up, and I’m getting hunted with them. Unfortunately for the hunters, their spikes are few and ill-positioned and their brains aren’t wrinkled enough to cope with my strategy of ‘go spinny and nudge them around’.
Post-Glaciation
The glaciation ends abruptly, as is its wont - there’s no transition period. It was making things hard for me, but I survived. Four meteors hit the planet - those are too abundant even in the Microbe stage, most patches have an event symbol on them. I can’t find the global graphs, but locally oxygen shows an observable downwind, likely coinciding with the glaciation - I wish the graphs showed everything, back to the start. It’d give a better sense of how things have changed over time, rather than just now.
At the 1:40 hour mark. It’s 1900MYR; I’m a single-celled cell colony for tax benefits. I’ve almost finished wrangling out my stem cell, although I’ve just realised that I probably should have been removing parts rather than adding them, so it’ll be another generation to cut it back before I can start with the actual meat of the Multicellular stage - differentiating cell types. I am four gens in. Two mitochondria and a chloroplast can sustain me, while everything else that I was so worried about building has been wiped. I think that psychological error is because you need to have lots of parts to unlock the upgraded eukaryotic versions, but once you have them it’s better to cut down everything. I apparently don’t have the MP to make a new cell type, and I don’t think I can change the cell types of existing cells, so I’ll leave editor with 40 MP unspent.
In my opinion, making a new cell type should involve designating an existing cell as that new type. It makes more sense.
One problem with being small is that you’re vulnerable to engulfment. Oddly, none of the large eukaryotes around me are bothering. It’s all spikes, all the time, from one guy.
Most species in the world are now eukaryotic. The patch I’m in is still depopulated, though. Eukaryotes are usually masses of random parts, often regular prokaryotic ones. Many look similar - with their larger sizes, distinct families are forming, which is arguably a reason to take a look at the currently-essentially-cosmetic nomenclature system and try to design it to be seriously meaningful. I’ve previously advocated for it to use real scientific roots for genus names rather than gibberish; this would likely cause repetition, especially between runs, but if genuses are made larger, with less divergence, things would look better.
…Hmm. At 42 MP, I couldn’t make a new cell type, but at 100 MP, I can, without expending any. Something’s wrong there.
Despite building for a predator-plant hybrid, I’ve ended up mostly plant. Eating things just wasn’t effective enough. I’m not sure why that is. It’s possible that it’s a successful nerfing of plants; if their parts are more impactful to have, then me focusing on getting them over getting predatory parts meant that I just Became A Plant. It’s also possible that it’s due to auto-evo’s failure to create a viable ecosystem for me to feed on; I suspect part of the reason why it’s struggled to do that for many versions is because a player predator will cause a lot of in-round effects to populations by killing their members, meaning that even if the trophic web is balanced the player will artificially unbalance it anyway.
I’m going to go for a body plan of one mouth, some leaves, some storage cells, and some movement cells. I’m still going to try being a predator, even if it’s unlikely that my colonialism will actually help. I’ll need a big mouth, I guess. My three leaves are currently arranged as a line behind my stem, but they need to be as blobby as possible, so I’ve added two leaves thickening the line. The central leaf is now adjacent to four leaves and has a 16% bonus to something, and the others have 8% bonuses. I’ll dump the rest of my MP into setting up my storage cell, which I want in order to handle nightfall. (I’ll arrange growth order so that it’s generated after one leaf has been made. One leaf is important to keep me alive, but the storage cell is important to keep me alive through the night.)
I’ve been eaten! Thrice! Once my first extra cell exists, colonialism will protect me, somewhat, but my stem cell is still vulnerable - I’ll need to give it spikes for defense, and I should probably see how the spore works, to see if I can start with more cells. My stem cell also needs to be big again, as that’s the most effective defense - it will probably benefit from restoring all the parts I knocked out at the start. I shall hit the ‘revert to editor’ button!
…Reverting has reverted me several steps. Seemingly. My three-leaf lineup that I successfully brought to the editor is gone, along with its five-leaf successor.
When you think about it, there’s just so many cells you need to start with. You need to be able to move once your non-movement cells have grown in. You need to be able to eat once your non-eating cells have moved in. You need to start with more cells… and the spore doesn’t offer this. It does offer me the chance to create a spore cell that can move quickly and find a strong site to live in, though.
It’s a hard puzzle to solve, even without the pressure of other multicellular species. The only real answer is to get big. It’s now 2300MYR, thirteen generations after I became multicellular, and I only have two cells (having soft-cancelled sporulation by setting my spore to be my stem cell). This would be very hard if auto-evo handled multicellularity!
The ATP system is definitely bugged. I’m not able to move at full speed as only my stem cell, despite having enough glucose and more than enough ATP gen to cover what I supposedly need. I’ve manually saved here but don’t know how to send that.
My “base cell” strategy is still sound. It is basically: make a new cell type, strip it to nothing, never use it. It reduces the cost of making new cell types by ensuring you don’t have to delete stuff every time.
I’ve finally broken through something-or-other. Switched patch, added cells, started signaling other colonies to come to me, and now predators aren’t a threat. I can freely ignore my mouth and shell and just keep adding leaves and movement, forever. (I made the leaves silica instead of cellulose.)
Very big colonies still grow uncomfortably slowly, at least if they can’t actively get their phosphate.
And… done.
End & Summary
With a time of about three hours, and after about 30-35 generations, I’ve finished the two active stages of Thrive. Here’s the main things I observed.
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The predatory-plant build seems to have been finally weakened. I didn’t achieve it the way I remember it. But that might have been because:
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Eukaryotic transition, on the player’s end, doesn’t work. The times don’t line up. Once you become a eukaryote, you probably don’t have access to the eukaryotic counterparts to your build’s parts. Getting access to those can take two to five generations, potentially more - endosymbiosis is unreliable, and you may not have had enough of your key parts to auto-unlock their upgrades (see point 3). Once you have them, it takes several more generations to replace your old parts. After both of these mini-stages, you can finally be a true eukaryote, able to fully engage with eukaryotic play… but by this point, you’ve long had access to the Multicellular stage. There’s no particular challenge to achieve it - you just need a signaling agent - and once you’re in it, it’s cheaper to build cells. So you may as well proceed to Multicellular without having really finished Microbe.
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The atmosphere and compounds are not stable. Oxygenation has become broken again; oxygen can easily race to over 50%, far outpacing your new inability to quickly strengthen yourself against oxygen toxicity (not that this is a particular concern, since tolerances are dull-toothed). It eventually falls back, but it still hovers around 30-40%. This oxygen doesn’t disseminate well; one part of the surface may have 40% while another has 0.1% (I observed this mid-run, but didn’t analyse the patch atmospheres at the end). The result is that you can survive in one patch with two metabolosomes (therefore not receiving mitochondria early as a eukaryote), but can’t ever leave that area because oxygen concentration is halved outside it and you’d starve. As well, iron and sulfur don’t disappear like they’re supposed to as oxygenation wears on; they were still prevalent after two stages and thirty generations.
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Predation in the Multicellular stage is just frustrating. Despite being objectively bigger than everyone else, you’re still vulnerable to engulfment attacks unless you keep your cells big - something you aren’t supposed to need anymore (although point 5) because of the specialisation system. Becoming larger also makes you grow and move slower. As a cell colony, you already lose a lot of speed and maneuverability, meaning that dealing with spike attacks is very difficult. A spiker can get lodged behind the wings (point 6) of your colony and constantly do spike damage you can’t really do anything against.
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I didn’t have tutorials on, so I didn’t get the proper Thrive explanation of specialisation, but I did notice that a tooltip for specialisation on your fullview doesn’t exist, and the specialisation percentages you see on cells, cell types, and the full species don’t give you the numbers on what they’re doing and how beneficial you are. Additionally, in order to get strong specialisation bonuses, you have to put a lot of copies of the part in the cell. I’m not sure if that’s a problem, but it runs oddly counter to the design philosophy of the Multicellular stage, where instead of having one cell with five kinds of parts, you have five cells with a single kind of part each. Under this philosophy, instead of adding more of a part to a cell, you’d add more of that cell type. Yet you’re still incentivised, for some reason, to continue enlarging individual cells, because this makes you more resistant to engulfing and boosts specialisation percentage for some reason.
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The shape of your colony is just weird. It’s not even reliable; before I started arranging the growth order, I noticed that other members of my species just connected differently for no observable reason. Each new cell only connects to a single prior cell, so the beautiful blob shapes you made in the editor are completely mangled into spikes and wings. These shapes are difficult to keep clean. The obvious problem is that cells in a colony aren’t mandated to be roughly the same size, or roughly the same shape, so applying the hex map more directly is not easy. I’ve previously suggested finding some means by which to expand the walls of the cells to meet the other cells, in accordance with some images of real colonies that I saw.
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The food chain remains completely nonfunctional. Most obviously, the tab itself is useless, usually ignoring half the species, depicting extinct species, and depicting predators of prey species that don’t eat anything. There is no cohesion. In consequence, you, the player, can’t play any particular ecological role with any effectiveness. Brute-forcing being the apex predator using cilia isn’t even reliable anymore, because now there’s eukaryotes everywhere, and they all diverged from you, so they look the same and they have the same size. I didn’t try super hard this time, and maybe it would have worked if I did. But intermediate predators are also supposed to exist, right?
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I firmly support patches resetting every generation. I know HHry thinks it’s a bad idea for some reason, but the reasons in favor of it keep stacking up. Iron and sulfur clouds balloon to enormous sizes over several generations, and even if their concentrations were supposed to have decreased; dead species persist for generations after their extinction; player plants can quickly flood the area, exponentially as microbes or linearly (but arguably faster) as colonies; and, most glaringly, it just doesn’t make any sense for the entire environment, down to the concentrations of resources in your gut, to have remained exactly the same for one hundred million years.
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The stat graphs don’t record the full length of the patch’s history. I also can’t find any graphs for the entire world, only for the patch you’re looking at. This makes it harder for me to report on the overall or long-term effects of e.g. oxygenation.
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Eukaryosis and multicellularity suddenly apply massive MP pressure to the player. As a eukaryote, you need to be deleting parts and adding new parts as soon as you unlock them, and you need to be throwing MP into variant parts. As a colony, you need to be designing cell types, adding cells, customising your reproduction, as fast as you can because you receive very significant bonuses for specialising yourself as fast and as completely as possible. At minimum I would say that cell types should be diverged directly from existing cells in your body plan, rather than in an abstract genetic ether with no real counterpart; ideally, you could select several cells and diverge them together into a new type to immediately make use of specialisation.
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The global glaciation, at least on Normal difficulty, just isn’t a big deal, at least for plants. Everything’s harder and leaner for a few generations, but I’ve never been threatened so much that I actually have to reevaluate my strategy; I just have to hunker down and keep evolving until it’s over. 50% sunlight? No problem, just double my thylakoids. Cold? Who cares? Broaden my temperature tolerance.