Playing as a “predator” at the microbial stage, I noticed that it is unprofitable to evolve into a eukaryote due to the fact that the nucleus 1. consumes a lot of ATP 2. significantly reduces the speed and this is very important because the photosynthetic bacteria that I hunted were very small and quite fast, this The problem could have been avoided if the prey had grown in size to encourage the player to become a eukaryote.
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If you manage to survive a few generations, then you have some remedies you can use: placing flagellum to increase speed back up, placing cilia and using the pulling upgrade to be able to pull in close enough prey to be engulfed.
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Well, with the Nucleus comes a great cost, but it unlocks long-term benefits. It does still give a large increase in size and storage. Perhaps that’s why it only evolved once on Earth.
I think this is an indication that indeed the nucleus mainly makes sense if you are in an environment with larger potential prey. But that is quite common, in my experience.
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Eh, while the new autoevo is definitely superior, it doesn’t generate that many big cells anymore.
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no more wild extremes of either having a 60+ size supercell, or a 100000 speed near-invisible cell with oxytoxy 
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Pretty sure that oxytoxy microbe swarms can still evolve, but supercells are very dead.
In real life, predation as an ecological strategy is actually rarer for prokaryotes for several reasons:
- They’re smaller, so phagocytizing prey is more challenging.
- They don’t generate as much energy as organisms with organelles do, meaning less energy for active mobility and predation.
- At that scale, most life seems to specialize around taking up food while minimizing costs, allowing faster reproduction.
Now, I’m not trying to say “get gud” or that we intentionally want this aspect of gameplay to be frustrating. We know prokaryotes eventually evolved some capacity for engulfing prey items, as otherwise endosymbiosis wouldn’t have been possible. But it atleast is a phenomena that is replicated in real life.
I think that ideally, besides making sure you have enough energy, we could try to make it so that the nucleus doesn’t completely transform your organism from being a capable predator to being completely immobile the next generation. That could be a focus of balancing in the future.
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Yeah, I’d always annoyed by how much I have to do to get my nucleus. Try evolving for a generation or two beforehand to get a ton of surplus glucose and move really fast, then it’ll just drag you down to average gameplay, and the mitochondria and digesting things will make it feel mostly worth it.
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These are called the lysosomes, and can infact be rather useful.
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- although prokaryotes are smaller, often autotrophic prokaryotes are only 1-2 hexagons in size, which is why even small procoriotic predators are able to digest them.
- The nucleus has a very high cost in ATP consumption (20 ATP for moving organisms), which is why the advantage of the efficiency of eukoryotic organelles is leveled out, plus, the nucleus slows down the cell very much, and due to the high energy consumption of the nucleus, it is not possible to install additional flagella.
- According to the mechanics of thrive, in order to reproduce the fastest, you need to extract a sufficiently large amount of phosphates and ammonia, and the fastest way to do this is predation
All these factors make the nucleus highly suspect for bacterial predators. As for me, the most logical solution is to reduce the ATP consumption of the core by half (from 10 to 5 (taking into account the movement of moving organisms, the core will consume 10 ATP)), and also slightly reduce the slowdown from it
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To refer to this part specifically:
Auto-evo should probably create some more cells that are larger, because this blocks them from being engulfed by small prokaryotic predators. Is the auto-evo currently capable of taking this defence against predators into account?
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According to my observations - no
I’m not very familiar with the miche system exact details yet, but I think this is the miche for avoiding being prey:
And sure enough the list of potential mutations to try when you are being predated on, does not include just adding organelles to increase size.
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I guess it would also include getting a toxin, since these make it a lot less appealing to eat an species.
It does actually, pilus and toxin, as well as anything that adds movement speed are the preferred mutations to try if there is a predator targeting you in the miche system.
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Hmm I guess the “downside” (more like just a characteristic) of the new miche system is that the developers do need to think about each individual possibility and implement them, same as with the miches themselves. For example, I also don’t see the “explicitly named as a defensive mechanism” slime jets here either.
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That’s true, slimejets should be there as they increase movement speed, but technically don’t contain a movement component that the code checks for.
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that reminds me, will there be a way for the player to become an endosymbiont by managing to reproduce inside another organism’s food vacuole? currently the best way to do that would be to not die after eating a phosphorous rock while having a nitrogenosome, and having an energy source that doesn’t rely on eating, and to use the mucocyst to stay alive long enough to reach mitosis
btw is the mucocyst supposed to let you gain reproduction progress by making ammonia and phosphate?
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That would be almost like making another completely different stage for Thrive that is a dead end for sure. If we take detours like that we’d never reach the actual end of the game. So this is very much a thing that can only happen if someone mods it or spends an absolute ton of time making it a proper feature for the game.
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