Fun fact in the editor tutorial, if you change the genus all the NPCells will share that genus.
This lasts 4-5 generations before a new genus is born.
Yes, that’s the way it’s been since like 0.4.0, I think. Species inherit the genus of their parent species with a small chance of becoming a new genus.
I really like the Hydrogenase and Hydrogenosome ideas! They definitely tap into a niche we don’t have yet. I do have some comments though:
As you already mentioned, the Iron in the Hydrogenase isn’t actually consumed. I don’t think you should start adding enzyme components into processes, because many, many enzymes and other molecules need metal cofactors (chlorophyll has magnesium for example, nitrogenase uses iron too), and the amounts involved are very small compared to the other consumption and outputs. It wouldn’t be consistent to add iron consumption to one random component (at most you’d need a tiny amount of iron to reproduce).
On the Hydrogenosome: It doesn’t actually use hydrogen, it produces hydrogen. It actually uses H+ ions (the byproduct of hydrogenase) and turns it into H2 gas (the substrate for hydrogenase). Those two should really be distinguished. So, if anything, hydrogenase should scale with hydrogen (gas) as you show now, and the Hydrogenosome should scale with H+ concentration. Interestingly, H+ is mostly everywhere, and it’s the thing that mostly makes acidic water acidic (That’s what the pH measures). So, that’s just a case of whether the Thrive team wants to track acidity as a separate biome variable.
By the way, you can imagine a cool scenario here where a species using Hydrogenosomes produces H2 gas, which is consumed for energy by a bunch of Hydrogenase-using bacteria swarming around it. Of course, that doesn’t work if you model H2 as a global concentration as is the case with O2 now.
Encapsuling certain parts of your cell’s internals by allowing inner membranes (being able to make your own organelles like nuclei)?
I don’t know if anyone has already mentioned any of these before, I would like to share this sentiment anyway.
I don’t like that thylakoids produce glucose; because carbon fixation is done by RuBisCO - which is located outside the thylakoid. Instead, it should be an ATP generator just like metabolosomes and rusticyanin are (only that it harnesses the power of sunlight unlike the other two). That’s what thylakoids are in real life anyway; just that, in chloroplasts, the ATP generated is immediately spent on RuBisCO to make glucose.
I’m also not a fan of “prokaryotic structures” in general; they’re just a collection of proteins anyway - with the exception of thylakoids of course - and it kind of ruins the immersion to see, for example, clusters of iron minerals for rusticyanin, and whatever that thing is supposed to be for nitrogenase. As far as I know; rusticyanin is a protein found within the periplasm (the space between the inner and outer membrane). Though I saw an image somewhere in this forum that suggest that this will be changed in a future update (where they are in the “protein collection” instead and the only visible structures left is the thylakoid and probably BMCs like carboxysomes as well).
Edit: I’m just gonna expand on the “prokaryotic structures” bit. I’d like to share this:
It has references to 30+ scientific papers btw. So instead of basing the cell structure on component placement; you tune it to the ratio of different structural proteins. Complementing to this as well with surface structures; where cell movement can be influenced by its’ shape as well as the flagella’s placement.
I remember that someone in my class said “Thanks, Rubisco!”
I think I remember someone telling me prokaryotes won’t be able to go multicellular, but if I did hear that correctly, can someone tell me why that is the case?
technically the person who told you that is right considering we describe multicellular organisms as being eukaryotic. But “multicellular” non nucleus containing microbes already exist in the form of filimentous cyanobacteria. they tick off nearly all criteria for what we would consider “multicellular”. these cyanobacteria aren’t the only ones; there are other forms of prokaryotic life which also vaguely tick off the criteria for what we would consider multicellular like bacterial aggregates and multicellular magnetotactic prokaryotes.
i think making a nucleus compulsory for the evolution of multicellularity is reasonable though for the sake of simplicity.
So I was trying to play as a scavenger and I had a quick idea:
As a scavenger it seemed way too hard to get glucose. Obviously I could get it from the clouds, but so can everyone. Clouds are completely OP in the game so to properly call myself a scavenger I felt like I had to ignore them. The problem was, cells dropped almost no glucose.
You see, when a cell dies in this game, 90% of the time it’s from starvation, because the cells don’t know how to conserve energy properly. A cell that starved obviously had no glucose stores, so I couldn’t eat from those. I wasn’t getting any glucose at all. That doesn’t make any sense. Intuitively, I know that an animal that starved still has some calories in it. But how?
It turns out, that most cells can actually turn proteins (the thing organelles are made of) into glucose. A starving cell can’t always do this to itself, because that would mean self-destructing. But for a scavenger it’s their main source of energy! The process is called gluceogenesis. It is done in the mitochondria of eukaryotes, and by special digestion proteins in the rare prokaryotes that can do it.
In-game it would just be an extra functionality of the mitochondria, and a special prokaryotic organelle. Anytime a microbe with one of those organelles engulfs an organelle, it gets glucose equal to some percentage of the ammonia/phosphate dropped.
What do you think?
This is the opposite for me in the game. Both cells and clouds rarely spawn, and spawn in super low concentrations. This could just be my bad game luck. Thrive definitely needs difficulty settings.
Have you tried forcing the spawn system a bit? I show it in my abyss video: if you swim around a cloud enough more clouds will tend to spawn around it.
In my game I and my fellow species became the Great Filter… 4 patches are just my cell, don’t worry we are hunter/photosynthesis cells who are dumb as the AI keeps trying to eat iron despite not having any way to process it.
That’s something that I’ve seen in my saves too, the AI tends to engulf everything it can engulf
on earth bacterial organelles can be broadly classified into 3 majors groups.
In real life certain proteins involved in respiration are situated within the cell membrane rather than the cytoplasm.
Some proteins may be found free floating within the cytoplasm. But others are compartmentalized within lipids vesicles or protein capsules. You could probably alter an existing concept like the [Passive Enzyme/Protein Slots System] to make this mechanic work. My frame of thought is that it works like this:
-Protein X is mutated into the genome and the cell begins to produce Protein X within it’s cytoplasm.
-From here the protein can then be compartmentalized in a vesicle or capsule which would increase the rate of reaction/efficiency of a protein at the cost of increased ATP usage or some other debuff.
-Or instead it could be modified and implanted within a cell membrane where it could then be modified and used for something else. like respiration.
-In another example, implanting Protein Y into a cell membrane could result in unlocking the [Bacterial flagella]
-in yet another example, implanting Protein Z into a cell membrane and having Protein W in the cytoplasm would result in unlocking the [Bacterial cell wall]
I was reading the dev forums a bit and came up with this concept.
I am assuming that in order to fully enter the multicellular stage, you are required to have signaling proteins and binding agents.
Anyways, there didn’t seem to be a consensus on what would happen when you bonded to another cell and created a colony without entering the multicellular stage. What I propose is that if you bind to another cell (or more) you would still only control your own cell. The only difference is you would be attached to the other cell(s) until you turned your binding agents off or swam away from the colony, pulling yourself off. This would make sense as you would not have signaling proteins to tell other cells what you are doing, and could push you into adding signaling proteins. this would also simplify the whole colony thing, as the only difference between being in a colony and not is that your cell is attached to others. some NPC cells could break off or join depending on certain conditions, and so could the player.
And a mini-concept on what would happen if you had signaling proteins, but not binding agents. When your signaling proteins are active, other cells of your species will follow you, or if signaling proteins could be modified in what they signal, follow whatever the signaling protein says to do. This links up to the binding agents theory, as you would still need to bond with members of your species to fully enter the multicellular stage.
This isn’t really a full concept, but I thought id say this before I forget.
Except there is?
See this:
And especially this:
Which lists a bunch of implementation details I asked for. I think most of those have already been implemented in the binding agents pull request: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/pull/1868
Ah, I didn’t read the second thread, only the first one.
The player should have a name generator. I think it’s quite strange for the player to go through the whole stage with the same species name. Many of us aren’t that good at giving their species scientific names so I think the player should have access to the name generator the ai cells are using.