>
> auto-evo needs to consider the maximum speed in a direction so it can't cheat by… placing sideways flagella that don't cost energy but in the simple calculations they give movement speed. Probably should cache the maximum speed direction and speed value for efficiency.
> At least the chunk and predation algorithms just take the simple movement force calculation, I think, and will need adjusting, or at least looking at to confirm that this isn't a problem.
>
> follow up to: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/pull/2754
> [@Meep](#):
>
> and starving within seconds in the actual game
There is like a 90% debuff in auto-evo from not being able to osmoregulate. It’s not 100% to allow species to exist that are just temporarily really bad. And also players might hate auto-evo even more.
> [@Meep](#):
>
> You could have specialization. Perhaps once a cell unlocks a protein, it’s cheaper to add more, and for larger cells (which are more evolved and adapted to their niche) it’s more expensive to add new proteins, or the more you have of a protein, the more efficient it is. A plant shouldn’t be able to suddenly unlock Rusticyanin,
See the link to the mutations code I linked above. Auto-evo is actually above your concepts of mutation costs etc. it uses an entirely different system to create mutated copies of species.
> [@Nigel](#):
>
> i think double posting is actually allowed as long as its a different statement and its from the OP…i could be wrong though
It is not allowed to double post immediately after creating a thread. The only exception I’ll allow if someone hits the character limit per post and they still have content to put into the thread.
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### Author:  [@Meep](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/Meep)
#### Post date: [November 15, 2023, 3:56am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/6 "2023-11-15T03:56:21Z")
> [@hhyyrylainen](#):
>
> It was intentionally balanced so as to not create bigger and bigger cells constantly.
This is understandable, but I still feel like it could be interesting to have more diversity of size. I’m not sure how you would reconcile these two things.
> [@hhyyrylainen](#):
>
> There is a bit of a feature in auto-evo to try to make cells specialize: energy source fitness uses a power function to try to exaggerate fitness differences between cells. This could use more work.
Still, the vast majority of species get food from multiple sources.
Here is what I meant by the absurd scenario:
This organism, with 323 hexes of cytoplasm, a speed of 2.1, and a glucose deficit of 2 per second, is predicted to have a population of 1634. This is because it has a good ratio of ATP production to ATP consumption and has a lot of potential food sources from predating on everything. In the actual game, it instantly runs out of glucose and is unable to move.
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### Author:  [@hhyyrylainen](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/hhyyrylainen)
#### Post date: [November 15, 2023, 7:50am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/7 "2023-11-15T07:50:47Z")
> [@Meep](#):
>
> This organism, with 323 hexes of cytoplasm, a speed of 2.1, and a glucose deficit of 2 per second, is predicted to have a population of 1634.
One thing to note is that if you are playing as that species, it is marked as the player species. That makes auto-evo kinder on the species. If I remember right the auto-evo strength is reduced down to like 20%. So if auto-evo predicts the population is 0 but previous population was thousands, the population will only go down a few hundred population per simulation step. Meaning that auto-evo might have actually predicted 0 population for that species but thanks to the previous population and being the player species the next calculated population is not 0, yet.
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### Author:  [@anon48518031](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/anon48518031)
#### Post date: [June 5, 2024, 11:32pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/8 "2024-06-05T23:32:01Z")
The game has plot armor? This is not something I would’ve expected in Thrive, though I guess it makes sense: the player goes through (semi)darwinian evolution, whereas the NPCs go through heuristic based evolution
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### Author:  [@aah31415](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/aah31415)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2024, 9:58am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/9 "2024-06-06T09:58:24Z")
It’s pretty easy to notice that auto-evo species die down faster than the player species. Player species infact can only go extinct if the player dies at low population.
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### Author:  [@hhyyrylainen](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/hhyyrylainen)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2024, 11:13am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/10 "2024-06-06T11:13:26Z")
Yes, there’s enough complaining about it (auto-evo being harsh) as-is so the player has 80% plot armor against auto-evo.
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### Author:  [@Deathwake](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/Deathwake)
#### Post date: [June 15, 2024, 7:51pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/11 "2024-06-15T19:51:13Z")
It doesn’t break my science-y immersion knowing that because the player also has the ability to, you know, think ahead, meta game, and see how good plans are before they try them with math or the game’s help. That’s nonsense as far as evolution goes, totally unscientific, but great game design. Letting players choose dumb stuff to be easy on them or let them get closer to a better build idea they had without dying off is totally cool coming from “ignoring the differences between evolution and creationism because it’s fun”. It might be interesting to make it turn-off-able so you could be stuck in a local maxima and never get to evolve anything fun. It’d be funny if nothing else.
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### Author:  [@anon48518031](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/anon48518031)
#### Post date: [June 16, 2024, 10:33pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/12 "2024-06-16T22:33:01Z")
One thing I feel is a VERY big problem with the current auto-evo is that some species will have entirely useless organelles that make no sense to have in ANY of the patches they are in. One big example would be thylakoids in volcanic vents, or anywhere else that has no light. I assume that auto-evo registers the thylakoids as beneficial because of either their glycolysis giving them an advantage in consuming glucose, or because of the size the thylakoids give giving them an advantage in predation; Both of those features could be otherwise provided by cytoplasm, but weren’t, likely because thylakoids gave the same advantage, even if slightly less efficient. The only other reason to evolve thylakoids would be to take advantage of the sunlight food source, meaning that there could be a bug with light as a food source existing in patches without light. If there is no phantom light source, the following solution should work.
My solution goes as follows: All non-cytoplasmic organelles (anything that isn’t cytoplasm) should only be placeable on cytoplasm. Ignoring the player side of things, possibly just limiting this to AI, this would work by selecting the position of a new non-cytoplasm organelle from the existing cytoplasm locations, meaning that the AI would only be able to move organelles, place cytoplasm anywhere, or place organelles on any cytoplasm. This would hypothetically prevent the auto-evo from giving organisms an advantage for placing thylakoids in a place with no light, assuming that the reason auto-evo does this is because of the advantages given by either a new hex, or by glycolysis, both of which cytoplasm provides. Of course, any (or most) organelles that don’t do glycolysis could have the cytoplasm requirement removed, but the extra hex benefit would still be there for those organelles, so accurate specialization would happen more often if every organelle did different things. For example, if every organelle decreased osmoregulation cost, there would be no selection pressure against different organelles in that regard, as they all decrease it the same amount. Similarly, every organelle increasing size gives the ability for organisms to use useless organelles in order to acquire food from the predation energy source, and glycolysis allows them to gain benefit from thylakoids in patches without sunlight.
Assuming my above solution would work, lets look at how it could be implemented into the player side of things. Pretending that balance isn’t necessary, we could just prevent the player from placing organelles on non-cytoplasms, giving them a tutorial explaining this in the editor, and it’s done. However, this offsets the current balance of the game, so in order to get things back to the way they were before, we could have all organelles have subtracted from their MP cost the amount of cytoplasm that would be required in order to get them. This set the balance back to the way it was, except possibly for organelles that take up more than one hex, and especially for the nucleus, which would cost negative MP. For multi-hex organelles, extra work would be needed, either allowing certain organelles to be placed without a cytoplasm, as in the auto-evo system, or balancing these organelle’s cost by hand, perhaps making them much cheaper, but still not free. This change would also give players a reason to use cytoplasm other than to change size to become a predator: to allow placement of organelles.
Now, it may seem redundant to do this, ignoring the nucleus, as it would give the player the same net cost overall for most organelles, but I think that this would not be the case, as it would allow the player to save up MP without directly carrying it over to the next generation. On harder difficulties, or just difficulties with higher part cost, this is even more important, at least if the player needs to evolve in order to survive.
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### Author:  [@thriveuser1454](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/thriveuser1454)
#### Post date: [June 17, 2024, 10:26pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/13 "2024-06-17T22:26:20Z")
I agree with most of the stuff here. What I want to bring up specifically:
1. Other than organisms evolving for every food source, I also recently saw an organism, living on a seashore, with a massive amount of rusticyanin. Not sure how to post fossils but I did fossilise it. I think auto-evo shouldn’t evolve anything which has no impact in the local environment. The random selection doesn’t really work.
2. The microbes give basically no challenge, most of the time, once you have a nucleus, because they don’t bother evolving one of their own. Nuclei are rare. I’m not sure how nucleus-microbes react to the obseletion of their proteins, but if I had to guess, they don’t notice and neither delete the inefficient proteins nor refrain from adding more. However, that’s only a guess.
3. Auto-evo bloats. A lot. I don’t think that’s fixable. But it does slow down the game a lot.
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### Author:  [@Rathalos](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/Rathalos)
#### Post date: [June 17, 2024, 10:59pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/14 "2024-06-17T22:59:13Z")
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> - The microbes give basically no challenge, most of the time, once you have a nucleus, because they don’t bother evolving one of their own. Nuclei are rare. I’m not sure how nucleus-microbes react to the obseletion of their proteins, but if I had to guess, they don’t notice and neither delete the inefficient proteins nor refrain from adding more. However, that’s only a guess.
Equally important in my opinion, is that there need to be more species branching of your own after you place a nucleus yourself. This happens quite rarely right now, I think the problem lies with a combination of:
1. Auto-evo not always matching what is beneficial and optimal for the player to design.
2. Auto-evo does not conform to MP limits, meaning AI species are far faster to approach what auto-evo thinks is optimal.
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### Author:  [@thriveuser1454](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/thriveuser1454)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2024, 11:09am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/15 "2024-06-18T11:09:06Z")
I’m wondering if the auto-evo’s soft-cap of 25 size should be boosted up to, say, 50 or 75 with nucleus-having cells. It’s definitely an issue that the nucleus, despite providing objective benefits in almost every respect to the player, doesn’t really show up in AI cells. And I’d have to guess it’s the primitive auto-evo’s fault. If it tries to encourage 25-size cells, no nucleus cells will really be able to work. They need more size, and probably coding so that they actually use their organelles. And maybe there needs to be more pushing for the auto-evo to generate nuclei independently of the player, so that there’s a possibility that eukaryotes spawn in before the player evolves a nucleus. That would be interesting, I think.
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### Author:  [@thriveuser1454](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/thriveuser1454)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2024, 6:45pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/16 "2024-06-18T18:45:31Z")
1. Specialisation
One way to encourage specialisation would be to make organelles cheaper the more you have of them. (This would apply more in the Multicellular stage, when you can specialise whole cells, and then even moreso in the Aware stage once you’re designing tissues.)
2. Food Web
Auto-evo should build a food web in each region which is (what it thinks is) the order of predation in the area. You can view this food web on region screen. This would be taken into account during auto-evo.
3. General Auto-evo issues
Other threads have described basic issues in the auto-evo logic that result in dumb cells, like mostly-rusticyanin omnivores in a tidepool.
4. More Aggressive Extinction
Make competition more aggressive, and if it’s not taken into account in auto-evo, put it there. I want to see that tree of life get trimmed.
5. Auto-evo takes into account local resources
Auto-evo should take into account local resource availability and which species use how much. (X% CO2 in environment means that there are Y points of CO2 for cells to use and produce.) This would possibly help prevent the omni-generalist cells that keep being generated.
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### Author:  [@hhyyrylainen](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/hhyyrylainen)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2024, 7:19pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/17 "2024-06-18T19:19:49Z")
I moved the above post here as it is basically talking about how to improve / fix flaws in the auto-evo system.
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> Auto-evo should build a food web in each region which is (what it thinks is) the order of predation in the area. You can view this food web on region screen. This would be taken into account during auto-evo.
Auto-evo already creates predation relationships which give energy to the predator species.
Though you are right that the “food chain” tab for visualizing this information has been missing for years and years.
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> Make competition more aggressive, and if it’s not taken into account in auto-evo, put it there. I want to see that tree of life get trimmed.
Competition already uses a raise to a power function to exaggerate differences in fitness between different species that use the same energy source (this is the auto-evo strict niche competition which is on by default).
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> Auto-evo should take into account local resource availability and which species use how much. (X% CO2 in environment means that there are Y points of CO2 for cells to use and produce.) This would possibly help prevent the omni-generalist cells that keep being generated.
Each energy source has an absolute maximum cap which is split between all species using that energy source. So this is already in the game and for example photosynthesis is also limited like this (there’s imagined to be a limited water surface area that species must compete for).
I know there isn’t a good overview of auto-evo anywhere as it would take a ton of time for someone to write that. Maybe someone who learns how auto-evo works would take the time to write such a thing to help out everyone who wants to talk about auto-evo. But for now the only source of truth on what auto-evo does is the source code:
> **[Thrive/src/auto-evo/simulation at master · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive](https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/tree/master/src/auto-evo/simulation)**
>
> The main repository for the development of the evolution game Thrive. - Revolutionary-Games/Thrive
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### Author:  [@thriveuser1454](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/thriveuser1454)
#### Post date: [June 18, 2024, 9:10pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/18 "2024-06-18T21:10:04Z")
Auto-evo occasionally creates species that emerge due to unspecified ‘different selection pressures’. They start off with a notable population that isn’t 0, and then go extinct, in a single mutation step. What?
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### Author:  [@hhyyrylainen](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/hhyyrylainen)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2024, 6:31am UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/19 "2024-06-19T06:31:52Z")
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> Auto-evo occasionally creates species that emerge due to unspecified ‘different selection pressures’. They start off with a notable population that isn’t 0, and then go extinct, in a single mutation step. What?
There’s various display bugs with auto-evo claiming species went extinct when it doesn’t really, most likely existing issue that matches what you saw:
>
>
> I noticed that a species that "emerged due to differing selection pressures" see…ms to always say "went extinct from the planet" when in reality that's not true. And at least in one case I followed through that species still had population and was doing well in the next cycle of auto-evo. So that message is quite clearly incorrectly printed about them.
So it seems like what I saw is that emerged due to differing selection pressure is always claimed as having gone extinct. Which is not optimal but we have over 600 open issues and nowhere near enough programmers to take care of them all.
I’m not fully sure if you saw this, but I think maybe it is possible for species to go extinct while they emerge. I remember adding an internal tweak variable that makes species not able to go extinct immediately after splitting, but I turned that off as it seems pretty random to me that a unforeseen force would protect a species when it should go extinct.
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### Author:  [@Rathalos](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/u/Rathalos)
#### Post date: [June 19, 2024, 6:04pm UTC](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989/20 "2024-06-19T18:04:41Z")
> [@thriveuser1454](#):
>
> Specialisation
> One way to encourage specialisation would be to make organelles cheaper the more you have of them. (This would apply more in the Multicellular stage, when you can specialise whole cells, and then even moreso in the Aware stage once you’re designing tissues.)
I’ve held the opinion for a while that the first organelle of any type should have a very high MP cost, with the rest after having a fixed low cost (similar to just cytoplasm). That solution could also work though. In any case, developing a new type of organelle like a mitochondrion is a far greater evolutionary step than doubling the amount if you already have some, and the game should probably reflect that.
Though I have to mention: this would not change anything about the auto-evo right now. As far as I am aware auto-evo throws around a number of trial mutations, but it does not follow any MP costs.
[Next page](https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/flaws-in-auto-evo-system/6989.md?page=2)