How would a society of connected coral-like creatures work? Could they be their own cities? How would the inability to send out individuals on tasks affect the gameplay?
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I would think that the gameplay in that case would be very similar to Plant gameplay
Because we won’t be having sentient plants coral societies is probably similar enough to not consider corals either able to make intelligent creatures to form societies:
Why couldn’t a coral-type creature achieve sentience? For example, a moving coral creature would have to be social in some way, as well as having the intelligence required to find food/mates and move towards it.
Also, would a mix of eusocial and colonial strategies be possible? (where the colony also has free zooids that leave the colony and do stuff outside)
Unless the “coral” changes from photosynthesis to some other energy source, we are just back to talking about sentient plants.
What if it was a filter feeder, like a bryozoon, that adapted to move to more planktonful water, and then evolved to eat solid plant matter?
Then I’d say it would be an animal that is made up of the coral cells. But reading wikipedia:
seems to say that the actual coral structure is some material the cells excrete to provide protection to them. So I’d say that moving around corals would need a lot of changes compared to what we call corals.
What about Bryozoa? They form colonies, and some species’ colonies are able to move. Also, couldn’t a stationary colony have free zooids/smaller mobile colonies to send out and feed it?
Gameplay for such a species would be vastly different from your typical life, and since we still havent entirely figured out how gameplay will work for multicelluar, the possibility of playing as a mobile coral cannot be promised. We’ll just have to explore the possibilities when we manage to define the mechanics for the multicelluar/aware stages.
Would absolutely love seeing such abstract organisms in Thrive though.
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