Also I wonder if fungi will get any representation in the game at all…
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I certainly hope so, they play a vital role in the ecosystem.
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I can assume they’d be bundled as niches related to the flora and the decaying matters.
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I think this is a very good general plan, but I wanted to suggest 3 things I think you missed with this plan:
- The Statolith: An organ for detecting gravity/keeping balancing; also called: the Statocyst (Xenoturbella, Cnidarians, Ctenophorans, Echinoderms, most if not all Conchifera (Shelled Mollusks (Including Octopods and Slugs)), and Crustaceans, amoung others), the Statocyte (Plants), the Otolith (Vertebrates), and the Müller Vesicle (Loxodidae)
- The Holdfast: Used by Algae, Mature Sponges, and Juvenile Cnidaria, as well as Corals, to anchor themselves to the seafloor (auto evo might need this even if the player doesn’t want to be sessile, Algae and Coral are important to the ecosystem)
- The Water Vascular System: A type of Circulatory System used by Echinoderms for locomotion, food and waste transport, and respiration
Edit: Also, wouldn’t at least some colonial organisms basically be really big multicellular creatures? Could the caste system handle that? For example, the Portuguese man o’ war starts as one type of creature but grows into a collection of I believe seven types assembled in a way that can be mistaken for one really big one, like a multicellular organism budding more cell types into one larger creature. I am not sure if they all work that way, but that seems like something that the life stages/castes system might be able to handle.
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I am fairly sure all the PMoW zooids are already macroscopic, and so seems to be the larger collective organism.
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Yes, but like a multicellular organism, the entire colony is born from one egg and bud into a larger more complex collection that functions like an individual. In the original dev post I was responding to, the question of whether colonial organisms are beyond the scope of thrive was asked, but this type at least seams within it, and eusocial have been brought up enough times. I admit I am not totally sure what other types of colonial organisms there are, but these two fairly common types seem plausible, as do the plants that grow as a collective organism connected by roots but with each surfacing stem having all the parts a plant with one stem would have above ground (Pando)
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Wouldn’t this also be the case for regular macroscopic critters? One could expect that when a player has just entered macroscopic, no matter what they are by this point they would always produce offspring that ought to be microscopic.
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I really like your definitions of appendage vs limb, joint, and extremity, your idea for handling early macroscopic limbs, the constraints you outlined, and your consideration of tails. I just wanted to bring up a few things for consideration and make a suggestion for one way your second question might be handled.
From Wikipedia: Prehensility
Appendages that can become prehensile include:
- Hands and Feet
- The hands of primates are all prehensile to varying degrees
- The front paws of raccoons and many of their relatives are prehensile.
- The feet of passerine birds can be prehensile
- Tails
- New World monkeys have prehensile tails
- Tails of many extant lizards (geckos, chameleons, and a species of skink) are prehensile
- Seahorses grip seaweed with their tails.
- Several fossil animals have been interpreted as having prehensile tails, including several Late Triassic drepanosaurs, and possibly the Late Permian synapsid Suminia.
- Tongue
- Giraffes’ tongues in particular are prehensile
- Some other ungulates’ tongues are also prehensile to a lesser extent
- Nose
- The noses of elephants and tapirs are prehensile
- Lip or Lips
- Lips of lake sturgeon, orangutans, horses, and rhinos
- Upper lip of the West Indian manatee
- Tentacles
- Arms of octopuses, squid, and the cirri of nautiluses
- To a limited extent, the tentacles of sea anemones, hydra, and a few other invertebrates can grasp and move objects
One could argue that tentacle and tail graspers both outnumber feet graspers.
How would Cephalopod tentacles be handled? Or for that matter, a Giraffes tongue?
What about neck joints? Or how a waist or back bends? Would a spine be considered a long string of joints with limited movement, or something else? And what about the joints in a Jaw? Or the Neck?
A suggestion. Assuming there is a designated “head”, what if appendages and joints on the head worked differently than those on the body, and a joint that connects a head to a body was designated a “neck”. This could potentially help with eye stalks, ears, noses, tongues, jaws, and necks. It does still leave a couple of questions though.
- How would a creature without a neck, such as a frog or toad, be handled.
- This also does not address cephalopod tentacle or how backs and waists bend.
- Is a cephalopod beak considered to be on it’s head? How would that effect “jaws”?
Overall, I think you are doing a great job outlining/planning the future macroscopic editor. I hope this helps you refine a few of the things that need it.
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To my awareness what most people would assume is the cephalopod’s head really is an “organ sac”. The “head” then would be the region encompassing from the beak up to the eyes, but not the mantle above the eyes I suppose.
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Thank you for the feedback!
I think prehensility is something that can be implemented given more thought to the extremity system/catalogue. I’m sure it would revolve around the application of a certain extremity, and the altering of your appendage to better assist with whatever extremity you are using; for example, a prehensile nose, like that of an elephant, would be an extremity with a nose attached to the end of it.
Though I can’t sure for certain how that will work until we have more shared understanding/consensus on the strengths and weaknesses of this implementation, and a general catalogue of extremities.
I think a cephalopod grasper would revolve around the placement of a suction cup extremity on an appendage, which would tell the game to treat that appendage like a cephalopod limb. A giraffe tongue I think would be better as a modification to the mouth of an organism/limb (same goes with the mouths of teleost fish), as I’m sure blurring an appendage within a mouth could be really complicated to deal with.
Cephalopods are an incredibly charismatic clade with an extensive footprint on evolutionary history, so I imagine their iconic feature to be implemented eventually. Things like giraffe and chameleon tongues are more niche however, so I’m not sure when such features would be implemented.
Keep in mind that a “joint” in my post doesn’t actually correspond to an anatomical joint, and is more of a generic term to describe an editor that will let developers and players properly designate appendages - right now, limbs and tails. If we made it so that a “joint” refers to an actual joint, that would be really, really, difficult for both us and the players to manage; there are 33 joints in our feet alone.
So the way I’m using it, a joint is just a marker for tails on the torso currently, and for limbs on appendages. I argue for this in the belief that having a procedural animation system decide this without joints could lead to, first, complicated development, and second, frustration and loss of customization; what if the system designates something as a tail even if the player doesn’t want it to be, or says that the wrong appendage is a limb?
That could be an option, though I think we ought to focus more on how jaws and mouths work in the first place. Appendages and extremities are already an entire system in themselves, so attaching another important system - mouths - to appendages prematurely could lead to a lot of confusion. I think I’ll next focus on mouths, or further details on how some of the constraints can interact with appendages, limbs, and extremities.
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But they would be implemented eventually, correct?
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It’s too far out to say whether or not a less frequent characteristic will be implemented, but I’m inclined to think that a prehensile tongue would be a feature implemented by a volunteer who really wants to see such a feature in the game as opposed to something the development team actively goes for - considering how infrequent such tongues are in the animal world. If it is an easy feature to implement however, then perhaps.
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By the way, how much nonlawk features do you think there might end up being in aware for instance when compared with lawk features? So far in microbe we only have 3 nonlawk organelles to my awareness, so would the nonlawk amount in later stages also follow this ratio of nonlawk to lawk?
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TEETH
Teeth will be available to animals with an endoskeleton that don’t have beaks, and will allow for further diversification or amplification of the stats of the mandible. Adaptations to chitinous beaks and arthropod mandibles can reflect the function of teeth - for example, serrations in beetle mandibles - but are alterations to the underlying mandible structure itself. True teeth allow for an additional layer of customization to a mandible beyond its shape, allowing for more diverse function.
I have noticed that hardened cilia are not included as “teeth”, even though some Ctenophores use hardened cilia as teeth.
From Wikipedia:
Beroids
Beroe sp. swimming with open mouth, at left. This animal is 3–6 cm long.
The Beroida, also known as Nuda, have no feeding appendages, but their large pharynx, just inside the large mouth and filling most of the saclike body, bears “macrocilia” at the oral end. These fused bundles of several thousand large cilia are able to “bite” off pieces of prey that are too large to swallow whole – almost always other ctenophores.[57]
I believe hardened cilia should be an important addition to “teeth”, as players may end up using it before true mineralized teeth. I also understand it may be difficult to implement initially, as it modifies the cilia cell part.
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How would early birds with proto-beaks and teeth be handled?
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Three questions:
Fist: Will having more than one jaw be allowed. For example, the Pharyngeal Jaw, possessed by Moray Eels and Chichlids, is a double jaw, with the outer jar being “normal” and the inner jaw being “Teleost” (think Xenomorphs from Aliens).
Second: How will other forms of Cranial Kinesis, such as a Constrictor Snakes jaw, be handled?
Third: Have you considered the three part sawing jaw possessed by many better known species of Leeches, including but not limited to the species used for medical purposes for over 2500 years?
Edit: Forth Question: Would “Filter Feeding” be a teeth adaptation or something else?
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I think with the macroscopic stage, a cool aspect of non-LAWK can involve the loosening of biological constraints placed on certain adaptations. For example, tentacles as we know it on cephalopods are largely dependent on the presence of water to be effective in gripping, but what if that isn’t necessarily true in a given playthrough? It could enable certain interesting tropes in Thrive, like more fantastical land-octopi and the such.
I’m sure we’d end up adding some cool unique parts, but a big avenue of non-LAWK could just be loosening some constraints on existing parts to enable adaptations in settings that otherwise might not be fully realistic.
Could be a modification placed on a jawless mouth to increase ingestion rates on certain mediums. I’d imagine it not to work like the tooth editor concept, where you specifically design and place certain tooth parts, but instead an alteration to the mouth structure itself. A big innovation with teeth is the presence of oral structures without modifying the mandible itself, while for arthropods and jawless animals, adaptations would universally involve changing the shape of the mandible.
It seems that in practically every early bird in the progression between teeth and beak, instead of there being a beak with teeth on it, parts of the jaw would keratinize and lose teeth, while the parts with teeth are not yet keratinized. Here is a decent source: https://dinogoss.blobelgium.com/2011/04/youre-doing-it-wrong-birds-with-teeth.html
So I’d imagine that transition would involve the player specifically losing teeth on segments of the jaw, turning that segment into keratin, and then furthering the process until the entire beak is keratin and toothless. The exact manner of converting part of a mandible into keratin isn’t something I have a concrete vision for as of now.
I think that would exist as a modification to a teleost jaw rather than the placement of another jaw inside your mouth. I struggle to immediately conceptualize some sort of benefit to it, and since it evolved twice, I think it would be something that wouldn’t be much of a priority to implement unfortunately. Xenomorphs are a really significant sci-fi icon however, so if enough of the community really advocates for it, perhaps it might be more legitimately considered.
Good point to bring up, made me think of an additional stat concept! Kind of like in the Microbe Stage, I imagine that if your mass significantly dwarfs the mass of another organism, you can swallow it whole, which would lessen the need to chase and damage smaller and more agile prey. I can imagine such an adaptation would significantly reduce raw damage of your jaw, but would reduce the size discrepancy needed to consume an organism whole, meaning you can swallow larger animals more efficiently. I guess a sort of “Maximum Engulfment Size” stat.
That could be a stat I bring up on the development forums, though it’s somewhat niche enough that I wonder how useful it would be if implemented: if the mass of an animal is that much bigger than another’s, wouldn’t a single hit be enough to take it down, thereby making the implementation of a whole new mechanic completely unnecessary? Then again, it would be annoying to have to hit a really small animal multiple times if damage doesn’t scale like that in Thrive, so such a feature could be useful.
I obviously am gunning a lot for a future stage, but this is something that I genuinely think would be best to consider when we have a better idea of the actual gameplay in the macroscopic stage.
That seems to be a modified chitinous beak, which actually could be a variation of the chitinous beak I mentioned on the forums. I guess it can work in a hostile resource transfer matter similar to a probiscis if it was to be implemented. Could be worth cataloguing on the forums, though I’m not sure on how much it would be prioritized. Parasitism is more prevelant and better understood in the macroscopic stage, so I do think giving it some more love than we have given it in the Microbe Stage is worth it; so this might be an avenue for that.
Certain animals, like whales, do adapt their teeth for filter-feeding, so that would be one possible avenue. Manipulating the jaw or mandible can also create shapes better suited for filter-feeding. I imagine an ingestion rate to be a useful stat in this matter, where animals with jaws better suited for filter feeding are able to absorb more of a plankton cloud.
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Speaking of mouths, can it be assumed that a player would be allowed to make mouthless/repeoduction-only lifestages (like how many insect adults don’t possess a mouth)?
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