So, here’s four things that have come to my mind while playing my current Thrive run.
Firstly, genuses are completely nonsensical. Most of the time, a new species will simply generate a new genus, regardless of any other unrelated species with the same genus. In real life, one would expect 12 related species to share a single genus, except for one or two which diverge enough to warrant a new genus. In Thrive, those 12 species will have 10 different genuses between them.
Also, I’m not sure how genuses are generated, but the generator seems kind of limited, and the stuff it produces looks like a random assortment of characters. Genus and species names are not memorable, and they don’t seem to be related to standard butchered Groman nomenclature. (Although that’s understandable, as it would be rather hard for Thrive to judge what, exactly, a species should ‘really’ be called.
Secondly, endosymbiosis. It seems pretty difficult to achieve, as half of the species on the list have gone extinct, and the remainder are either organelles I don’t need or there’s 50 individuals in a patch halfway across the world (naturally requiring me to scour every patch to find the species - a difficult task given the above statement, since all of the species names are essentially similar even though their names vary wildly, and lack distinguishing characteristics). It would help to have these species robustly checked to remove any which are extinct in the world, and to have the remainder be clickable to reveal what patches they are in. I’m not sure of the full extent of the mechanic yet - although I assume you have to have engulfed the cell several times in order for it to appear - so I don’t know how relevant any of these are.
Thirdly, metabolism and photosynthesis. In my run, both of these seemed to be broken. At a large cell scale, photosynthesis seemed massively underpowered, with each thylakoid producing less than 0.01 glucose, IIRC. Same with metabolosomes, which were extremely weak even with oxygen levels going up, with anaerobic respiration seeming essentially better. Oxygen levels are also bizarre. In my world, oxygen went up, but CO2 went massively down, to the point where my world’s oxygen+CO2 was far lower after 1B years than it had been at the start, with only CO2. This seems to be generally an issue with the jankiness of the Great Oxidation Event, as I’ve seen images of tiles with 100% oxygen.
And, finally, the music. It’s clearly been touched up since .6, but now there’s weird points where it just sort of cuts at my ears. I don’t know how to describe it. The notes are too sharp. It might just be the laptop I’m running Thrive on having a bad speaker.