Here is a cool playthrough of Thrive by SpikeViper, recommended just for the entertainment value!
One thing that happens is that he gets so big that his ATP never runs out, it sort of gets stuck at 5 and never goes below that no matter how many flagella he adds.
So if anyone is interested in doing a bit of QA / Bughunting for us can you find the conditions under which this happens? What should happen is when you have too many flagella and your ATP runs out you take damage.
Basically just make a few cells and try and make them run out of ATP and see what happens? What happens when they get really big, can they run out of ATP and take damage? How big did you have to get before you no longer took ATP damage? Did your ATP get stuck at some value?
I did some quick tests, and I think I might’ve managed to recreate the bug, even with 2 mitochondria, some cytoplasm and around 6 flagella or something. Once you reach a low enough amount of ATP, your flagella will work slower, however 0 ATP won’t be reached. I think this may have something to with with that each simulation, a couple flagella use of almost all of the ATP, after which the rest of the flagella won’t have anything left and won’t do anything)
If you look at the video, you’ll notice that adding extra flagella won’t even speed him up that much, the only thing that works is adding extra mitochondria (since there will be more ATP, for the flagella to use). The same happened to me, where the only way for me to go faster was to add mitochondria/metabolosomes, and extra flagella would just do nothing.
I remember writing code specifically that if a flagella can’t grab the amount of ATP it wants it grabs as much as it can and isn’t as effective. So if it wasn’t removed.
I think this is it. And the right way to tell the player this would be to tell in the editor that they have too many flagella for their energy production and they won’t be as effective.