The water has a lot of drag in the microscopic scales[1]. The cells or shrapnels wouldn’t be able to move very far. Might as well use a pilus.
Reynolds number is proportional to characteristic length and inversly proportional to viscosity ↩︎
True, but it could still be adapted for the late multicellular stage, were there is less drag.
or just hope the physics engine doesnt account for drag
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how about a hard explosive vacuole that launches a pilus really far, like halfway across a fully zoomed out screen when not upgraded and the pilus does more damage the faster it moves, obviously one of the upgrades would be making it be coated in something nonpolar to reduce drag and pierce through water like it does air. and one of the upgrades is just making it bigger to increase the distance the pilus moves
Wouldn’t that kill the shooting cell since it’d destroy membrane?
How about a pilus launcher for Soldier?
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Even if a physics engine wouldn’t implement it. We would still consider the realism when thinking about adding it to the game. This is impossible basically for the same reason as electricity zap attack for single cells: the scale is too small for it to do anything when single (or a couple) of cells try to perform it.
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one thing that would be great to improve the visuals of the multicellular stage is to have each cell morph to fill the gaps between them. if you look at pictures of plant or muscle cells you can see that the cells don’t have any gaps and they change their shape to fit better. Of course, the multicellular stage is a prototype and this is most likely planned to happen, but I just wanted to say how cool it would look if your creature didn’t look so weird with all the gaps.
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That has been suggested many times before. Here’s the suggestion about it: https://suggestions.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/posts/33/intercellular-matrix
There was a PR trying to start work on that but it was never finished: Add a Intercellular Matrix by GameDungeon · Pull Request #4123 · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub
As that got closed due to being inactive, I’ve now opened an issue to track (and remember) this issue:
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I made some models of possible parts for macroscopic stage, based on the recent Dev forum post by Deus:
First line: extendable proboscis for swallowing smaller creatures, a stabbing proboscis, a mouth proboscis (with eversible pharynx), 2 tail fins, and 2 side fins.
Second line: villi for increasing surface area, a radiator frill(?) for the same purpose, 2 different filter feeding extensions, a seta ‘leg’, a stinger, and a clump of seta ‘fur’.
Third line: spatial / motion-detecting setae, mesoglea, 2 types of jaws, a set of mandibles, and 2 types of digestive system.
And finally: open and closed circulatory systems,
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Those look very neat! Though I don’t think this is the right thread to post those (this is for creatures made in the editor). If you want them to be seen you should probably post them elsewhere.
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This was the most relevant thread I could find with the suggested threads search for “multicellular” so I moved the post here.
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Wow, these are great images. I appreciate the interest you showed in the topic!
I think the current concept is for “macroscopic parts” to be very broad and elastic; not a lot like Spore, where you place down a different jaw model for different stats, but something a bit less explicit and defined.
In my head currently, I’m envisioning something like placing down a very basal part or feature that indicates to the game that you want said to form, then having a good amount of customization options based on the niche you want to occupy. So for example, you’d place down a generic mandible, but then customizing length, shape, etc. will define its function.
And for surface area expanding appendages, I envisioned something as generic as limb-like, broad-leafed extensions that had very little function attached to them besides surface area stats. A bit like the Edicarian freak shows.
We’d ultimately have to see however as concepts mature a bit. These are a great visionary tool in the mean time, and they’re great to look at.
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If users are able to produce organs, why not create a community library?
Then again the moderation of the content may have to vary from the version:
currently, if you have a nucleus, even if you have multiple cells, you can’t remove it. in real life cells dump their nuclei all the time, they just can’t reproduce afterwards. that said, it should be possible to remove the nuclei from your cells, but doing so removes the cell’s ability to grow and reproduce, as well as putting it on aa timer that kills the cell when it runs out.
obviously, this would require a warning that pops up if none of the cell types you’re using have nuclei, saying that if you don’t have at least one nucleus in your organism you will be unable to grow new cells or reproduce, as you have all your genes in your nuclei, and removing your nucleus in unicellular mode would effectively set your population to zero if you didn’t heed the warning and revert the decision.
there could be upgrades to the nucleus that allow you to choose chromosomes to keep when dumping it from a cell type, removing the countdown to the cell’s death if you choose wisely, but those should probably require dying a few times because your cells without nuclei died before the resources to replace them were ready, to unlock, or dying because you dumped the nuclei of your neurons and they died before you reproduced.
the reason i say this is that there aren’t only blood cells that don’t have nuclei, but there are entire organisms that, in their adulthood, only have nuclei in their gobelgium, like the fairy fly.
TLDR: i suggest nuclei being removable get added so we can make cell types that don’t grow or reproduce, are much smaller, lighter, and less energy intensive; and that we can still modify. removing them in unicellular stage would either be impossible or guarantee you don’t survive until you can use the editor (excluding with the use of cheats) with a warning before you leave the editor
an example of an organism that dumps the nuclei of cells other than blood cells is the fairy fly who dump the nuclei of their neurons to save space and condense the rest of their DNA as much as possible
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Thanks, I’m glad you liked it. I didn’t think that the parts would necessarily be predefined - it’s more a collection of the kinds of parts that could be added and some of the ways they could end up looking. Players being able to fully define their parts would be great for making the game more engaging, and making creatures more unique and characterful. I might try making an animation at some point for what it might look like in-game to add a proboscis and customise it.
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But that feature would only be useful for species that live less than 120 days* or for tissues that are continuously regenerated such as blood. I can try to think of a few hypotetical uses.
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There can be a milk that contains cells and given directly to the bloodstream of the offspring.
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Do we really need fat cells to have nuclei? They can remove their nuclei. And when the body needs to increse the amount of fat in the blood, there is no cell that can respond to that demand so the body can send a few white blood cells and burst those fat vacuoles.
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If our cells could throw away their nuclei when they are infected with a virus instead of autolysing themselves, the viruses would still run rampant. But if all the ribosomes were on their rough ER and they threw that out as well, this would prevent the replication of the viruses that are still inside the cell. So there’s no need to have any casualties. The cells wouldn’t be functioning anymore though. Can a new nucleus be added to them from a neighboring non infected cell? There can be 104 viruses in a cell before it bursts* and for their numbers to be reduced by 4 orders of magnitude it may take 21 days (at 35 degrees c)* so it is possible. They just need to wait until that cytoplasm is safe again.
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that’s only if the player doesn’t get the nucleus upgrade that keeps chromosomes of their choice in the cell, but they would need to have their lifespan shortened before they can lengthen it with said upgrade
an upgrade to that would be exploding all your lysosome vacuoles in the infected cells to shred the remaining proteins and prevent the virus from bringing any functional ribosomes into the cell.
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Extremely fast mutation rates simulating the explosion in diversity coming from this period
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