Gameplay at the late multicellular stage and sedentary organisms

Yeah, being a bottomdweller doesn’t mean that you’ll become sessile (but also doesn’t exclude such posibility).

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I don’t really like this. Nothing in Thrive should be plotted out. Stuff will happen. Ideally, without any direct causation by the game. The options are there, the evo is auto, and things occur.

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Well, the player can plot what they want their species to be like beforehand…

The point is that the organism must develop a concave digestive cavity, in the case when the organism immediately moves to the bottom to feed on cellular mats, it will develop external digestion like belgiuminsonia and similar organisms.

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Oh look, an another place where the filter changed a species’ name!

But starfishes also have external digestion to my knowledge.

After looking at the developers’ forum, I also thought that the transition to the aware stage should not happen as soon as the body develops a nervous system, this is due to the fact that the appearance of a nervous system will not mean a strong change in gameplay. Look at sponges, jellyfish and bilaterians, jellyfish have a nervous system which means that they, like bilaterians, are in the aware stage according to the thrive classification, but the lifestyle and structure of jellyfish are much closer to sponges than to any bilaterian animal. I think that the boundary between the late multicellular and conscious stages should be the appearance of actively moving organisms (Nycton).

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To be in aware stage, you need to have a “proper brain structure”, which jellyfish lack.

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Think of it like this. A nervous system is required to develop a brain, and a brain is required to be aware. So, when your nervous system is developed enough, there could be an “evolve a brain” button, and hitting that would take you into the aware stage. Or the option to evolve a brain could require so many nerves, and actually placing one could make the button appear. Something like that.

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Transistion to aware will most likely be rather smooth, not any abrupt changes in sight may be there in the final shape of the stages…

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Yeah, it could also allow for more decentralized brains like octopuses. You could get more use out of neurons by clustering them together, then you could upgrade the cluster to a ganglion, and from that just level up intelligence. If any of them were copies of another you could upgrade them at a discount (for two headed creatures or octopuses) and if the connection between the big clusters or brains and anything else got important enough you could level those into something like a spinal cord, which is actually able to handle some reflexes alone.

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I can imagine there will be some requirements for unlocking higher “intelligence levels”, like upgrades to other organ systems of your species.

It shouldn’t just be some requirements like unlocking organelles. Instead, I think it’s better to make the brain a very energy-consuming organ, and also one that requires a good supply of oxygen, so players will need to make sure they’ve made an organism that can extract enough energy from the environment before they can put in a more advanced brain.

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Could anaerobic brains develop?

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Our brain and muscles use oxygen, but that is also what we breath on a cellular level. Maybe if we breathed a different element on a cellular level, our brains and muscles would use plenty of that instead?

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I meant more if you should be able to achieve aware stage by using hydrogenosome proteins and no metabolosomes…

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I don’t think that hydrogenosomes are capable of providing the same amount of energy as mitochondria, besides, the huge amount of oxygen on the surface is destructive for anerobes, perhaps they could have developed at depth near hydrothermal sources feeding on chemosynthetic bacteria, but they would not have developed into a civilization due to the problems of underwater civilizations.

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Do you really need to be an aerobic respirator to survive on the surface? Perhaps with enough tolerance anaerobes could survive up here too…

I read the developers’ forum, it says that increasing oxygen resistance via the slider will be very limited, the main contribution to increasing oxygen resistance will be made by metabolosomes and thylakoids. In addition, the efficiency of hydrogenase is inversely proportional to the amount of oxygen in the environment, regardless of resistance to it.

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Most forms of microbial respiration other than Mitochondria are either:
A: A fraction of the efficiency
B: Extremely Oxygen intolerant
C: Both
D: Require rare elements that are not prevalent enough for macroscopic creatures to thrive on

Some could possibly support macroscopic life forms like sponges or flatworms in oxygen filled environments, and some could possibly support aware or better life forms in completely oxygen free environments, but none that we know of could compete with an oxygen breather when oxygen is present. Shame really. Limits the fun aliens we can make.

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But the game must follow what the scientific theory has proven…