The tolerances system is scientifically accurate and makes patches much more significant, since you can’t make a beeline for the surface anymore. However, two immediate concerns leapt at my face:
There’s a UV slider, but not the one for more general radiation that I was promised.
The pressure slider is ridiculously finicky. I have to get it pixel-perfect - that is not an exaggeration - to get the bonus. I’m doing this with a trackpad.
Other people have mentioned it, but there’s no disincentive to pre-evolve UV or oxygen resistance, unlike with the other tolerances.
Rusticyanin is suggested for my cell in a 0-iron patch.
For some godforsaken reason, I’m able to leave my game idle with engulf active because a gigantic horde of cells is following me with single-minded determination to the point of starvation, for no apparent reason, staying targeting me even if I turn around and go the other way. In fact, I’ve stopped engulfing them because they all got too big to do so! They’re still chasing me and when they all divide I’ll start engulfing again, no doubt. Ridiculous!
This latter bug is unironically hilarious. Other notable attributes:
It seems to have no impact on the species’ population, although in one editor step they vanished without a trace and a new species appeared. (Editorwise. They’re still loaded in the patch.)
When I evolved four spikes this seemed to break up the cluster. The cells broke off in big clumps to chase free-flying cell parts or to escape my spikes.
I like the changes to the map UI, the silly engulf noise, and the clarification that MP is a percentage. I do note that 1.6% MP isn’t enough to take 1% MP changes to the Rigidity slider, which is confusing. Overall, I mainly have two suggestions, which are that the pressure slider needs to be made easier to use, and that the microbe AI desperately needs improvement.
3 Likes
AnthropocenianAge
(AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)
3
I will look out for this bug when I play next time. It sounds hilarious.
Also, out of curiousity, why didn’t you post your comments on 0.8.1 Release General Feedback, rather making a separate thread?
Problem is that pressures are ridiculously different on the surface versus the deep ocean (it was someone’s really good idea to make the Thrive oceans max out at almost 6000 m deep). What makes it easier to adjust is just clicking the slider and then using the left and right arrow keys to adjust it.
I’ve opened an issue about improving the slider:
I don’t know what to say other than this was not promised.
So it is just gameplay variety from stuff evolving. Though, this shouldn’t be too common as it leads to people reporting it as a “bug”. So hopefully it isn’t too prevalent as I have no idea what would need to be adjusted to make this less likely to happen.
So it did affect them? Probably the external effects dropping the population due to deaths on screen would have been very massive.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
7
I think the “if tolerance perfect, get benefits” system can do end up being great(er than it is now) if it sees some polishing done to it.
“Moving the two borders of the bracket” separately is much more finicky than what’s implemented for temperature. Especially since when you’re reducing your tolerance bracket, you can “push” the other border by accident. Temperature tolerance you can just center on your target temperature (though of course you have to a minor calculation to determine you got the “middle” correct), and then reduce your tolerance with the slider afterwards.
Indeed the range is very large, while you only get the “optimum” bonus if you set the bracket very narrow by comparison. Right now there’s only a few specific pressure values used by the patches. If that’s planned to stay this way, you might as well turn the slider into discrete steps like the oxygen tolerance slider.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
9
Speaking of the oxygen slider, you will generally never have to go above 45% tolerance on it as oxygen levels don’t really ever get higher than that unless you’re a superplant species of sorts.
I struggled for over 3 days with infinite MP exploits in the tolerances system. I simply could not get the same kind of slider configuration to work for pressure as for temperature. This is because the pressure tolerance range needs to be lopsided as species are much more resistant to higher pressures rather than lower pressures. Even the basic editing of the sliders had many bugs, but I was able to solve those. Though I could not solve the infinite MP exploits. So with just a few days remaining before 0.8.1, I had to switch the sliders up to have a separate min and max sliders for pressure. There was no other way. Unless everyone was fine with the infinite MP exploit and wouldn’t have reported it.
In fact based on this experience, I finally decided that we need to entirely dump the current backend logic for calculating remaining MP:
It was simply not possible to use the same slider setup for pressure.
Pressures are calculated from the depth of the patches, and the depths can vary quite a lot so (while the decimals aren’t shown) each patch should basically have an almost unique pressure value (based on its depth value).
Have you seen any of the recent new players playing Thrive on Youtube? They are absolutely struggling with all of the game systems even before tolerances were added. So tolerances feature in my mind has to be kind of optional to not overwhelm new players even worse. So that’s why the max debuffs are capped low enough that you could almost always survive sufficiently.
3 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
13
I see. Through that’s mostly the case (for being survivable) if you’re missing out only in one tolerance.
I figured that was the reason. I don’t remember if I tried the mouse buttons or not; I did have tutorials turned off.
I still feel like there’s a more elegant way to represent that sort of pressure change to make it less finicky at lower levels, but I can’t think of any, other than making the slider logarithmic or letting you zoom in and out.
Must’ve misread something then. I thought I heard that you’d be able to adapt to radiation present in the patch or something like that. Maybe that’s intended for when radiotrophy’s added?
It feels a lot more like a bug than ‘gameplay variety’. These cells are 1 cytoplasm, 1 thylakoid, diverging from me and again, completely obsessed. I think I saw precursors to this behavior last build - my guess is that it’s cells attempting to consume me but not having the right size, since there’s no other reasons for them to constantly chase it.
From what I recall, I had three editor steps:
In the first, there wasn’t any change to their population despite the gigantic cloud of cells I was eating. They seemed to have just appeared.
I didn’t pay attention in the second.
They were gone in the third.
Upon rethinking, I probably misread the first as ‘population doubled’ rather than ‘population just entered patch’ (the white and green numbers were the same). Seems that they did in fact go extinct because of their idiot behavior.
Maybe you could just make it an optional system for Hard difficulty?
Radiotrophy was actually added. If you add the new melanosome organelle, that increases your radiation tolerance (meaning that higher radiation levels are required before you take damage). And as an added bonus you can get ATP out of the radiation.
The AI logic should always do an digestibility check before trying to eat something (though there’s like a 10% chance to try anyway to make things more interesting).
Not really worth it in terms of effort if we start adding a bunch of new features to the game that are only active on hard difficulty…
Though I suppose the effect strengths could be made to depend on the game difficulty. I don’t see that as absolutely necessary but someone might implement that at some point.
4 Likes
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
16