I was playing in good old multicellular stage and I was swimming into a iron chunk so I could bring it with me and my cell grew so the chunk got stuck inside my cell which is obviously a bug but I was thinking. What if we could use the chunks and bring them with us or grow around them instead of just eating them for a one time gain or having to stay in one place so you don’t die. Think like turtles with islands on their backs. Then you could have a passive gain of iron or whatever. Though this may become a little over powered like how photosynthesis was at first but I thought it would be a fun way to evolve. Also since I had a source of iron it attracted other cells and they happily lived inside me as my cell grew and trapped them or they got into the crevices and fed off of it and I was thinking that with this we could also create environments for other cells to live in or form something like an alliance. They could offer you something (Tho I have no idea what that could be) and you gave them resources to live and a safe place. My cell with a iron chunk and phosphate chunk:
iirc even big iron chunks are depletable. Eventually it would just disappear.
well then that wouldn’t make it quite as effective especially if your taking a lot out of it as a bigger cell but could mean you would have to go around and get another one when it depletes forcing you to move. Meaning it wouldn’t be preferable if your really slow which could help balance it out.
Hilarious enough, I did a playthrough several months ago which was called “Ediacaran enclosing organism” that did more or less something similar. Great minds think a like! I need to try that idea again for other Large chunks when I have time.
How do you get enclosed multicell organism with the current multicellular editor repositioning cells to prevent organisms with such shapes?
I made an organism with a hole in it, where the Large Resource Chunk would be located. I think this was in one of the 0.7.X.X updates. Yeah, this is no way to guarantee that it works becuase of the cell repositioning bug in Multicellular.
You can get the shape with enough tries ig.
Where the iron chunk is I have a cell there so it effectively traps the chunk inside the cell
Thanks! I will use your suggestions the next time I have free time to play Thrive (which does not include FGs.).
Is the chunk always stuck or does it get ejected at times?
It’s always stuck. I did this for multiple generations and it never got ejected. It kinda just become a part of me
How was organism speed impacted?
It was just as fast as if and organism was pushing it but I did make sure my cell was pretty fast so I was able to get around just fine.
Interesting, this sort of gameplay could probably happen a more polished implementation of multicellular. I remember trying to do something like this but by actually engulfing the chunks, I was never able to get a cell big enough to do so though
The cells you attract can Offer either protection or be free food, they could also release excess compounds that your cell then also eats.
It usually takes a long time for a large chunk to dissappear. I remember in a playthrough where I tried to engulf large chunks it took multiple generations for the chunk to get noticeably smaller. This was many updates ago so it could be different but you could probably evolve your species to be able to quickly search for a large chunk when it’s young and then grow around it when it ages.
Yeah that’s the sort of game play I would like to see in the multicellular future. Also I was playing and I loaded my save from before I hit multicellular and I tried to repeat what I did so I could see how eating the cells I attracted would be but
- the cells were all recently broken off versions of me so I couldn’t grow big enough to eat them tho if they couldn’t get to the source then they would end up dying trying to get to it since I have my behavior set to majorly focused so I got their dead gas.
- the bug didn’t happen again, It’s the same save, same idea, almost the exact same cell but when I grew the part that would take up the same space as the chunk I would get shoved back tho I did end up being able to trap it in between the cells and lag it in (I could see it jittering at times) so I ended leaving a hole like AnthropocenianAge said he did and the cells ended up just trying to fill it in and grow around it which is the concept I’m thinking about but when I went back to the editor how my cell was arranged was mess up to fill the hole as well as round it out nothing major but noticeable and annoying to fix.
- the chunks do go away after while, you can use the same chunk for multiple generations but it does run out. So I started hauling as many chunks as I could keep with me (Again cell seeming to fill the hole I left but instead growing around the chunks) I left a long narrow hole down the center of my cell to (in theory)be able to haul multiple chunks but didn’t quite work.
I was also wondering how other cell behavior was determined because I was playing this game and not only were all the other cells trying to stick close to iron chunks but also I saw another one of my kind pushing around a iron chunk just like I was. This seems complex to be in but It looked like the cell was acting just like how I was to survive. It could have been a coincidence since it was definitely strong enough to push it so if it was just trying to stick close that would’ve been the outcome but either way it looked like it was trying to be me.
Iirc you need 100 size and storage to engulf them
If you trigger the problem with the chunk getting stuck in your cell colony, can’t you already bring it with you?
The chunks are size 100, but as you need to be 50% bigger to engulf something, you need engulfing size of 150. Being an eukaryote doubles your size so I think you’d need 75 total hexes of organelles to eat a big iron.
Is this size the same for all “big” chunks?
I didn’t check. The biomes.json file is on our github if someone wants to check.
Yes I can but I meant it if this was a feature I didn’t want to have to lag it in to use it.