Have you ever felt like the compound clouds appear too often? That the clouds hardly yield any resources? This mod aims to fix that. The spawn rate of all clouds is reduced by 10x, but the size of clouds is increased by 10x. Everything else is kept the exact same.
I’ve felt for a while that something the game needs more is a better sense of survival. I touch on it a bit here (http://forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/improving-thrives-fun/313/12). Unfortunately I get a bit of a grinding feeling when collecting compounds in the game. I think if compound clouds appear less often but yield more they are both more challenging to find which will be more engaging, and more rewarding when found. I’ve found that this rebalance creates some interesting situations where you have to make tough decisions because of the rarity of clouds. My cell was damaged and I was desperate for ammonia to heal, and after searching for a while I finally found an ammonia cloud. Only problem was there was a toxin cell right in the middle of it. Do I go for the cloud and risk getting hit by toxins? Or do I pass up this cloud and wait for another? Who knows when I’ll find another ammonia cloud, I might need to take the risk. These are exactly the kinds of experiences and tactical thinking I think the player should have to face in the struggle to survive and thrive.
This is also a bit of a test for future releases, where we might rebalance the spawn and yield of compound clouds. So please, try the mod if you can and let me know what you think. Does it make gameplay more fun? Any changes you’d suggest? Are the changes too extreme?
Wide Clouds of Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide
Clouds are harder to find, but notice that when you do find a cloud it is much larger. Parts of the cloud are also offscreen.
How to install:
Backup your “scripts” folder from your Thrive main directory. This is in case you want to revert to the original settings without reinstalling the game.
Copy the “scripts” folder from the download and place it into the Thrive main directory, replacing all files/folders already there.
I liked it, it did make the game a bit harder but it also made it more fun to play. i noticed that whilst playing in the deep ocean their were way more clouds than normal, is that a bug?
Glad you liked it! I don’t think it’s anything to do with the mod, it might be with how the base game originally had the compounds distributed (Since I only multiplied and divided the values by 10).
In the interests of giving more opinions, here’s what I posted in reply on the old forum:
It’s an interesting idea. I tried it for a bit and really liked having big clouds to gather a lot of resources, but I never found an oxygen cloud because they were too spread out and died from lack of ATP.
I had the same issue as Oliveriver, maybe we could balance it out by also raising the starting compounds, giving the player more time to look for clouds?
Well how does the game start, was it from a asteroid like spore? Whatever the case, maybe the way the player arrives to the world would also carry a limmited of needed resources.
That wouldn’t really work though, as you’d need a bunch of denser clouds in the area every time you respawn (i.e. take control of another individual of your species after you die). The method of your arrival into the world hasn’t been discussed much to my knowledge, but it probably won’t be like Spore.
Unfortunately the game doesn’t have the functionality yet to make compound abundance differ between how early or late into the game you are, so that’s something we’ll have to add in the future.
The plan is that at the beginning of a new playthrough, the player will start in a “primordial soup” where many of the compounds will start in high abundances and slowly diminish to more normal abundances over time. As their abundances diminish the early cells will have to evolve and specialize each into their own way to survive in the early microbial world. We’ve discussed the topic a bit here:
