Getting back into Thrive after a while, I got an idea for the Microbe Stage

(if something like this has been discussed previously, I apologies)

Basically a parasitic lifestyle of reproduction,

In microbe stage you could have an organelle that injects a spore or DNA into another cell that will force the cell to produce more of your which will eventually kill it, like viruses.

In Multicellular+ it could work like parasitic wasps do, by injecting eggs in to hosts that will hatch and become larva that eats an organism out, matures and repeats the cycle.

also thrive has progressed well, i can ply it with pretty good fps!

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This is a concept that is very interesting, and I like it, but it’s one of those things that becomes hard to progress into further stages in my head.

In the microbe stage, a membrane-bound virus setup could be feasible in principal (a special pilus to inject DNA wouldn’t be too hard to implement, I’d imagine) however it would be hard to balance against the normal heterotroph-autotroph dichotomy. Currently, the challenge of thrive’s microbial stage is the issue of gathering enough evolutionary resources (ammonia and phosphates) while using metabolic resources (glucose, hydrogen sulfide, and iron) to stay alive to gather those evolutionary resources. A parasitic lifestyle completely ignores the former half of that equation, and so it becomes difficult to balance that without just adding an arbitrary “infect before this hits zero or die” timer.

Balancing becomes easier the longer you go along, however, so perhaps it’d be unlocked as an evolutionary path later on.