@aah31415 wanted me to play a hybrid hunter/photosynth, and @AnthropocenianAge wanted me to try playing Thrive at a higher AI mutation rate. So I’ll do so.
My specific settings for this run are:
MP cost: 0.6
AI mutation: 3 (coulda sworn the max was 5)
Cloud density: 1.2
Pop penalty: 1
Glucose retention: 0.6
Osmo cost: 0.8
Compounds on editor exit: Split (was this added yesterday?)
Fog of war: None
Free glucose cloud
No passive compound gain
Disallow switching
Limit compound usage
Organelle unlocks enabled
Thermosynthase enabled*
*as far as I’m aware there aren’t other non-LAWK parts
Start: Hydrothermal
Day/night: 180s
Include prototypes, easter eggs
My first experimental run failed. I was extremely successful early on. Other cells did not evolve at a good pace, except for two Hydrogenase-Spam cells, which independently acquired nuclei on the same round I did. I jumped the gun a bit on the nucleus front, because as it turns out, it’s really difficult to sustain a nucleus on hydrogenase. I don’t know how those other eukaryotes were doing it, because I couldn’t pull it off; it took too much glucose, and I ended up going extinct entirely. I’m pretty sure the save never even got to the Great Oxygenation. Turns out, you need aerobic respiration to effectively carry out eukaryosis. I’d been doing very well beforehand.
I made a second world with the same settings, except for having 0.7 MP cost and 0.7 osmo instead. I also started in a warm pond instead of a hydrothermal vent, to make it quicker to get to the actual experiment. This generated a smaller world which unfortunately had a swastika in its world shape. I reset, not because of the swastika, but because I’d accidentally added x2 MP cost instead of x0.7. I switched passive reproduction gain on at this point as it was too slow and set osmo to 0.9 to compensate.
I had a minor hiccup when my photosynthesis didn’t seem to be working. It turned out that it was just night. The editor should probably automatically use average or daylight luminosity instead of current. Evolution occurred at a suitable pace, although half of the species were I Added Six Hydrogenase in One Mutation Step, with two outliers in this category being one who used metabolosomes instead, and one who only had five hydrogenase. I think this is one of the most notable bugs in the current system and I’d fix it myself if I knew how to code. Or had the time.
Gases, by the way, are still ridiculous. Oxygen went up to 17.5% in my patch without CO2 dropping. It’s possible that my patch is leaching CO2 from neighboring patches, but if that’s the case, it’s not giving oxygen back. Got a good diversity of cells in my patch, so I think it’s just luck-based.
Being a prokaryotic hunter/plant hybrid is still completely viable. This may be because of a shockingly diverse patch, hosting a staggering 17 species. I moved to eukaryote without problems (although I was more of a hunter than a plant, despite having two thylakoids), save for my MP successfully going negative while manipulating the fluidity slider. Loving the new music, by the way. It’s almost a little ominous and feels very nature-like.
Remember when I mentioned there being 17 species in the patch? It was only 5 sentences ago, so you should. It turns out that, when I became a eukaryote, 15 of those species died. Only one species survived - one of the smallest (not the smallest), which diverged. It’s a shame, because the food web was really developed - I ate everything, two species ate iron, one ate random glucose, and the rest had no food source. (The general theme of this update seems to be ‘we added in important systems, but they aren’t really functional yet’.) The ecosystem returned to a healthy quantity of cells the next step. 5 eukarya, 3 prokarya. Auto-evo seems to actually like my species, since it’s holding on in several patches. I was very happy to be informed that I was Missing Cellulase, as it meant things were actually evolving to avoid predation!
I did notice a distinct, madness, in the cells. They really liked going into circles, sometimes while clustered. This is probably an AI issue, potentially related to ‘cells trying to eat things they actually literally can’t’. I also observe an odd tendency in my population graph; it moves slowly up, then crashes down. It’s stepped like this thrice. One of the crashes is when I became a eukaryote, but I don’t know about the other two.
The overall result was an active game. My player species diverged far more than normal; repeatedly I generated new kingdoms of life, just by existing. This meant I had a lot of eukaryotes to eat. Adding photosynthesis into the mix just meant I didn’t need to worry about glucose. I wound down the run, not even having acquired chloroplasts. All patches had been colonised, the environmental glucose and the challenge were gone, and oxygen was skyrocketing.
Results:
- Plant hunters are still viable.
- More aggressive mutation results in better auto-evo species, but doesn’t fix big issues like hydrogenase spam and perpetual total ecosystem failure.
- Broadly, the main issues with Thrive are still issues. There’s a hefty backlog still to work through. I don’t know if I could contribute; I’ll at least suggest some improvements to the name structure.