Ideas for the Microbe Stage [Put your ideas in this thread]

I have some ideas for organelles
Myoneme
The myoneme would be an organelle that connects two locations. It could be changed to be more like a muscle or a real-world myoneme
Joint
This would be a joint in the cell wall. It would be placed on the outside of the cell, and would act as a gap in the cell wall, allowing parts of the cell to rotate relative to the rest of the cell
Cosmetic Unit
This would be like cytoplasm but in the background and it doesn’t interact with the world. This would be useful to make internal structures like a stomach or crop
Holdfast
This would be a structure that could attach to either the background in certain patches, or to other cells when on the surface.

These organelles would allow more complex cells

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So… IDK if anyone else does this, but one of the strategies I use when playing thrive is sheltering myself with iron chunks. This probably isn’t an intentional feature, but what if it could be? The multicellular stage brought up binding agents and cellular matrices, and if they can be attached to cells, why not everything else? It would make building shelters as cells much easier, and you may be able to make a shell around you. If you are an iron eater, it will be literal heaven where you find a rock every generation. Some real-life amoeba already do it, so why not us?

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One issue with a holdfast is that it wouldn’t be very fun playing as a sedentary creature currently. Same story as playing as a plant in later stages.

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Something akin to this has been mentioned in the official Thrive wiki I believe, where microbes could attach to iron masses and crawl around/pull on them with certain cohesive agents. However, not much detail has been put into this concept and not much benefit from this feature has been thought of that extends to just being able to attach to iron and drag it around/float around with it. I think this idea could have potential, but it definitely needs more detail; maybe starting a seperate thread where community members could focus on thinking of other mechanics attached (pun intended) to this feature.

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What if there was a temporary holdfast, that could be detached to allow motion?

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I think improving the organelle sprites would be an interesting improvement. That and having a reset button, so you could restart your cell entirely.

One feature I’d like to see is a sort of ‘evolutionary reversal’ button. I had a play through where I tried to continuously evolve to each patch without changing my structure. This of course led to me ending up in a patch where I couldn’t get the necessary chemicals to evolve. I had evolved into a dead-end, and couldn’t revert back to a biome where I could get the right chemicals. It seems weird to me that I’d have to go extinct or restart the game in order to try again.

Maybe there should be a button that allows the player to revert back to the previous state of their species (including location) for a small price, like -50 population.

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Expanding on ‘more photosynthetic organelles which specialize in different wavelengths’, one obvious choice is microbial rhodopsin - which seem in simplified terms to be very basic pumps to generate ATP from the wavelength of light they best absorb (green-blue light, thus appearing purple). Simpler than photosynthesis (doesn’t fix carbon) and the source of our own monochromatic low-light vision. They also tend to coexist with photosynthetic species as they don’t directly compete for wavelengths of light and may benefit from compounds those produce.

The simplified form seems pretty similar in implementation to rusticyanin’s current implementation, using a different resource.

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Genetic simulation. This idea is probably dumb or said before, but hear me out. Each generation of your species has different parts in different coordinates of the system. They also (should) have different fundamental properties of each element of the system. Now, in real life, genetic material (GM) can grow, and can turn on and off, as well as mutate. Of course, the actual code to GM is a bit complex for the player, and it is probably better to simplify it all. Let us assume we have the four basis proteins still, but they do more specific things and are renamed. Let us name the four, as well as describe what they do:
Positionine affects the position of an element in the system. Scaline affects the size of something in the system. Masomine affects the mass of the element. Finally, growenine affects the change of all other types of nucleotides (kinda like how kal 1000 works in KSP breaking ground).

Selecting an element of the system (an organelle, the membrane, the segments and elements within the organelles, etc.) will allow you to access the gene editor that controls that specific element. This allow more overall complexity, but it doesn’t stop there. Remember what I mentioned about turning on and off genes? Well, after you delete a part, the genes don’t just leave, but rather turn off during point mutation or something. They probably will degrade or be recycled for good after many generations, but they can still be turned back on. This means old great grandpop john with his lovely lovely thermoplast can spread the power to you, or your brown eyes can turn back to your grandma’s blue eyes. This also makes to add a new challenge in the game if wanted: Unwanted mutations. Lets say when using the GM editor for the nucleus, it allows you to mess with the mitosis in some way (more developed cells, releasing toxin while splitting for safety, etc.). During the split, you can get an unwanted mutation, that you’d have to fix. Now, during the cell stage this would be pretty rare since the chance of a single cell out of maybe billions of others getting mutated is low. For multicellular and aware creatures it might be worse with having cancer, deformed offspring, and more. You’d then have to collect proteins to preserve your cell, maybe being possible when the behavior tab is added so your species can have it instinct to go out to get you stuff that can benefit you. IDK, this is a really rough idea. Maybe the GM editor can have a cool UI of an actual double helix spiral with all the chains. This concept can be added or subtract from, names can change, it might be too dumb to add in. Anyways, thanks for reading this.

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(Sorry if this is a Necropost or a hijack, I just have an idea)
What about a fog of war? Currently you can zoom-out to see more so why not have anything that your cell can not sense be unreadable? What I mean by this is that the cell is drifting along and the player zooms out, but instead of seeing the iron particle and the chunk of iron all they see is a grey particle with ??? as what it is. A way you can increase you ‘sensing range’ is by using communication agents to form a ‘pack’ of your cells or by evolving to detect water movement from other cells.

The most distant parts of the environment can just be blurred, or without the eyespots you can’t zoom so far away.

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The sides of the screen are already a little blurred. And eyespots wouldn’t really make sense as they’re made of a number of highly specialized cells. In real life, cells are oriented by chemical gradient. I’m not sure it’s doable in Thrive. I think the easiest solution would be to increase the zoom ratio as the cell grows. Or decreasing the blurriness as the cell grows. I’m not sure what’s better.

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Buckly, Dev forums:

Dark spots, sun spots: Instead of a day/night cycle, we could instead introduce locally varying light levels within patches. This could be as simple as patches of darkness or light in the environment that the player would need to avoid or seek; Or as complex as an ever changing gradient of light and shadow where the player would constantly seek out the brightest spots whilst avoiding the darkest. This feature could probably work better than the day/light cycle, however it could arguably make photosynthesis somewhat similar in gameplay to other features such as chemosynthesis.

The eyespots could detect light gradients within (did I use “within” right?) the patches.

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Link to that post if anyone wants to read the entire thing:

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Remember when everyone was fighting over player perception with different senses? Here is what I thought:
image image image

Concept #1 shows a cell with a sphere of strong sensory output, showing to the player what he is sensing. This is the chemoreceptive “smelling” being shown. I imagine by default, all cells start out with a protein that can sense chemicals both within, without, and within other cells. The radius and strength of the proteins depend on the amount, and gene modifications of them. The cell shown their only has one, yet has grown without adding anymore. Therefore, the visual radius is shown to be a lot smaller than the default full screen. There are also indicator markers showing where and about how much of a chemical is, while out of the visual sensory range. Although you may be to far away to strongly smell something, the smell may linger around for a while, so waiting a bit would be beneficial for more compound absorption and better tracking. As I said before, you can see the chemicals in other cells, better determining by “smell” if they are worth eating. This also leaves a hazard in which cells that are big enough to eat you, will just be tracked as big globs of compound that can be moving due to a current. You also wouldn’t see a background, or any actual models themselves, but just compounds and things that contain them. If a rock is in front of you that isn’t a compound listed in your olfactory senses, you won’t read it, and will just bump into it. Radioactive substances that were proposed before would be more of a danger!

Image #2 Shows photoreception, which is a bit of an upgrade since now you can see things for real. You can track light, objects you couldn’t before, basic radiation, fluid dynamics, other cells, and sizes of other cells. If you have more than one sense system, I’d believe you can choose to isolate them or overlap them. However, focusing them leads to better accuracy within that sense field. This adds strategy to what senses you should use, and also takes in mind atp usage for fuel consumptive systems. Anyways, the image shows the senses overlap, showing the semi colourful inner workings of other cells (and you). It also shows indicators of other chemicals although sight is being displaced and is not rendering the compounds as brightly, and the compounds look duller in colour, and have low opacity. Of course, pressure, density, temperature, and so on, will take a toll in any material’s (including your own) appearance.

Image #3, the final image, is basically a heat map shown with cells in the Ice Shelf biome. This is a good strategy for predation, but would distort other senses in the process, and the longer you have it isolated, the longer there will be an annoying after image of the last frame of the heat map slowly loosing opacity (since I think the heat would take time to dissipate from the organelle/organ, and would add a cool little feature). The thermoreceptive protein would have a max heat view threshold you would be able to customize slowly over time. More proteins increase the threshold range (as well as speed and radiation), and if that range is surpassed, it will only show null. The thing works by slowly turning on, collecting heat, and then averaging the heat in a radius, then taking the extreme heats, and slowly uncovering them. Of course, because of how heat works, especially for large creature builds, heat sticking to the system will be a problem if you have it on all the time, and will be better for only finding a target while you are still. Kinda like how snakes have heat pits that they don’t really use while moving.

Well, that’s mainly all I can think to add. Any questions, comments or ideas?

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As a suggestion to compensate cell walls’ mobility malus, evolving a gas vesicle could increase mobility.

Possible Variables: Gas type, Gas quantity, Pressure

EDIT: Woops, I just noticed it was in the features backlog.

Why would Gas vesicles make the cell more mobile? Sure, they’re light, but no matter how light something is you can’t cause a net decrease in the cell’s weight.
In the article you linked it says they’re used to move vertically by controlling how well the cell floats, which makes sense except Thrive is in 2D. You can’t move up or down.
Maybe they could make it easier to migrate to patches on different heights?

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The thrive format is hopefully going to switch to 3D assets and environments, while having a top-down view, but we can still integrate movement on the vertical axis even in 2D currently. One feature I was looking for was adding multiple layers which the player can swim up and down to, adding a vertical axis. If you are near the surface of a body of water, you may be able to catch a ride on evaporating water droplets, enabling farther control and options on migration.

I’ve said this a ton of times, but I’ll say it again: the microbe stage is rendered in 3D. The organelles are 3D models, the membrane is a procedurally generated model, but it is flat.

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I keep forgetting to mention and integrate that the organelles are 3D in my messages. But the membrane and environment are still 2D assets. I would like to know whether you still plan to tackle this or not for sure.