If we compare the stages of thrive with real geological eras, then the analogue of the microbial stage in our real life is the Archaea, the analogue of the stage of awareness is the Cambrian explosion, and the analogue of the late multicellular era is the Ediocaran era. And this is what I thought: in order for an actively moving organism to appear, a nervous system is needed, which is why it turns out that actively moving organisms are by default at the stage of awareness, and organisms at the late multicellular stage will be inactive or not mobile at all. Therefore, we need to figure out how to keep the player busy until he moves to the stage of awareness.
the best solution in my opinion is to make a strategic gameplay where the player’s task is to distribute resources
The Aware Stage begins with the player controlling their species that has just developed a nervous system and gained sentience. They will experience generations of evolution until they have evolved full intelligence, or sapience.
Actually, it is assumed that the aware stage occurs after the multicellular stage.
This is actually a pretty interesting point and one that I don’t recall hearing about related to Thrive yet.
For now I think the plan is to just keep the continuity from early multicellular stage and just let the player be mobile even before they define a brain / nerve cells. Even if not fully scientifically accurate (we’d need some theorists to weigh in here), this would lead to much better (and easier to implement) gameplay transition.
I just don’t have a very good idea of how a multicellular macroscopic organism without a sufficiently developed nervous system, sensory organs and musculoskeletal system can be actively mobile.
I mean microbes can exhibit surprisingly complex behaviours. So maybe there is some basic movement or something that cells by communicating with each other could achieve even without the presence of neurons.
There is also another solution to this problem, you can simply speed up time for organisms that have slow movement (such as jellyfish and other Ediocaran biota)
in my opinion, this is the perfect balance between realism and fun, besides, the option with actively moving organisms without a nervous system would not be suitable for LAWK
there is no need to speed up EVERYTHING many times, it is enough to only speed up the speed of movement of organisms and their metabolism, this will hardly load the CPU
But then what difference does that make compared to just having species in that part of their evolution be able to move at a reasonable speed in the first place?
This is ecologically important, because once the player has developed a sufficiently complex nervous system and musculoskeletal system, the process begins when actively moving fauna begins to displace passively moving ones, this in a sense emphasizes the difference between the late multicellular stage and the awareness stage, because after the start of the awareness stage with With the development of the player’s musculoskeletal system, time will begin to slow down to a 1:1 ratio to the speed of real time.
my view on the late multicellular stage and the transition to the stage of awareness it all starts with the fact that your colony becomes macroscopic and tissues form in it, now you play as a macroscopic organism that feeds on clusters of bacteria (we do not consider the photosynthetic option because it is a dead-end branch in terms of further development), the gameplay will consist of eating clusters of unicellular organisms for the purpose of reproduction and, accordingly, entering the editor in order to adapt to the ever-increasing competition.At first, your body will have a very slow metabolism and a speed of about 1 mm/min, for a start this will be enough, but over time the competition will increase, other species will evolve and develop adaptations thanks to which they can win the competition, and in order to keep up with other types.
The key characteristic will be speed, because it will allow you to grab more food than other types, but it is impossible to simply increase the speed because movement requires energy, and this requires accelerated metabolism, and in order for accelerated metabolism to supply food, the digestive system is needed, which -To deliver this energy you need the circulatory system, and to coordinate all this you need the nervous system. Thus the need for a more active lifestyle will create complex organisms.
In my opinion, the main meaning of the late multicellular stage is preparatory. It will determine the basic morphological basis of the species (for example, will your creature have a notochord like vertebrates, or will it have a chitinous exoskeleton like insects?).
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Deathwake
(i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)
14
Please don’t triple (or double) post. You can edit older posts. For example, of you want to respond to someone without making a new message, you can quote them, sends a notification and everything.
I’m not sure about everything you say, but I do think this is important.
Cells in-game don’t need any sorts of systems to be able to exhibit their variety of behaviors. This is partially a nod to real life and partially the fact that it would be impossible to play the game (unless you’re a programmer) if cells were stupid and algorithimic.
At a large scale, this idea breaks down. Either you have to break from realism (which Thrive hates) or you have to force late multicellular creatures to be mostly passive, which is boring and therefore needs skipping. I’d err on the side of breaking from realism, but I’m not really sure, nor am I a Thrive dev or necessarily representative of Thrive’s playerbase or development goals.
Something would really need to be done. For a more complicated suggestion, I’d suggest nerfing the player’s capabilities in Early Late Multicellular by having their simplicity be simulated by, say, a small view distance, slow movement, general simplicity. Then, large-scale predation would evolve. This would simulate the Cambrian Explosion; with this strong pressure (I’d suggest giving the player a head start, but tweaking auto-evo so it’s likely the player will, at this point in LM, have at least one predator), you’d need to spend MP to evolve more complexity in just about every respect. Sensory organs specifically would need robust simulation at this point, on both player and AI ends. After all, half the point of Thrive is having convergent evolution appear without being specifically coded for.
One thing for sure is that these systems will take a while to get developed, so that they simulate how it is like in reality but at the same time are simple enough to run on older devices without cooking them.