One time I tried to make a photosynthetic species that produced such a massive glucose surplus that it would rapidly overfill and begin ejecting glucose into the environment.
It didn’t do this. When capacity for glucose filled, it simply stopped producing glucose.
I don’t really like this.
Desire: Make a cell that produces too much glucose.
Problem: Cell in real life wouldn’t overproduce glucose for no gain.
Solution: Overproduction of glucose by the cell results in other cells clinging to it, becoming somewhat symbiotic.
Problem 2: This behavior is too complex for auto-evo to account for. Also, if symbionts were to evolve without a specific mechanic being built around the concept, auto-evo needs to be strong enough to create cells which will take specific other cell species into account in their evolution and behavior. (If my cell farts out glucose clouds, another cell species will probably want to evolve to stay near my cell and defend it. Unfortunately, the evolution mechanics cannot really do this without giving cells brains.)
Solution: There isn’t, really, without making Thrive into an MMO (i.e. it has a set of servers which handle auto-evo, along with players designing most of the species and thus ecosystems organically), which is wildly infeasible (unless someone buys Thrive and uses their mountain of AAA money to make it into Outside).
Idea: Allow cells to evolve brains of variable size which interact with their resource needs and allow them to organically, without a mechanic coded in for it, react to specific species in specific ways.
Problem: This will require extremely powerful computers.
Solution: There isn’t, really, without making Thrive into an MMO (i.e. it has a set of servers which handle auto-evo, along with players designing most of the species and thus ecosystems organically), which is wildly infeasible (unless someone buys Thrive and uses their mountain of AAA money to make it into Outside).
Problem: Glucose production requires water and CO2. Plants IRL need to take in CO2, it doesn’t magically appear. Overproduction of glucose means that more resources are being consumed than needed.
Solution: The game as of now does not care about this need to acquire chemical compounds for photosynthesis. Therefore, this isn’t an issue.
Problem 2: I feel like it’s unrealistic that cells don’t have to manage oxygen and carbon dioxide as compounds, along with compounds like phosphate and ammonia.
Solution: Add this as another piece of resource management (possibly gated behind the multicellular stage).
Is there anything I should be aware of about this? Compound spewing is apparently a bug, but shouldn’t there be a way to design a cell that spews compounds?
Well there really isn’t an intended way. But like you said there are some bugs / unintended features to spew resources. One way to do it would be to have a bunch of storage filled up when you are ready to reproduce and then reproducing to split your storage in half, depending on some factors this might allow you to eject resources. One way that’s basically guaranteed to work is to engulf something when your glucose is full, digestion won’t stop if you are full on a compound but just spew it out.
The main reason why cells don’t spew extra resources is that the compound processing system would produce ATP at extremely high rates if there wasn’t any limit and basically make all cells deplete their glucose super fast and then die.
It would need a specific case for that. And I assume that any process that uses non-infinite inputs (so non-environmental compounds) would also need to be limited. Then we’d be in really fun territory if we had process A that produced compound 1 and process B which used compound 1 and made glucose. If process A used environmental compounds (so infinite inputs), I’d assume you’d want process B to be able to produce excess glucose and eject it.
Also way back when the bugs were more common for spewing out compounds, players reported those as bugs. So on top of the technical implementation being tricky to get right with all situations covered, the feature might result in more bug reports, which is not excellent. So there’d need to be careful design considered how this feature is explained to the player.
I still think it might be a fun idea. Allows new gameplay styles, and in a dream realm, maybe auto-evo can even account for your overproduction and have other cells evolve to react to your overproduction (as I mentioned). Also, Thrive is partially biological Factorio (Factobio?), so maybe figuring out more complex compound behaviors would be nice.
I suggest, for any issues with infinite environmental compounds, to have cells be forced to manage their amounts of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water. Would work with the planned environmental toxicity.
(What if the game started out with no oxygen, and oxygenation was something that happened due to cells evolving photosynthesis?)
The great oxygenation event is planned to be in thrive I think, but as for managing resources, I’m pretty sure the best way to deal with that would be the ability for the player to be able to manage the rates at which certain processes go, with excess glucose production being something the player can choose to do if they want. This might also be helpful for being a plant in general, though I doubt it would unless some cells could sense cell processes
for the compound spewing, perhaps there could be a vacuole upgrade that lets the vacuole store any compounds that are being produced while their storage is full, but any compounds in it can get ejected along with any agents getting ejected from the cell?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
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