Small Suggestion.
Sorry for asking for something during the restructuring but In the Multicellular free build mode can there be a reproduction type that spawns you in fully formed. I think it would be neat to try playing as full animals before it’s truly been implemented.
Pregnancy? Budding? Clonal fragmentation?
yes, but also eggs.
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If you want, you can use Unlimited Growth Speed and Infinite Compounds cheats in early multicellular to quickly grow up.
If cheat menu doesn’t work in that stage, you can activate them in Microbe stage and it should persist when advancing to the next stage.
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I heard a bit of discussion about starting at different stages, and I wanted to put in my ideas.
The world would definitely have to be a preset or save because of how many things would need to already be there.
The player would pick from a species list, perhaps ordered from closest to the chosen stage to the farthest, and then either get sent straight to the editor or play at least one cycle with that species, if they’re not at the player’s chosen stage. The player would have a little more freedom to edit their creature compared to them evolving to that stage, but not total, in order to keep the player from making somthing that can’t survive in their environment. After they reach the stage, gameplay resumes as normal.
Edit: I got more ideas
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During early multicellular, what if instead of duplicating cells in the organelle tab area, thing (forgot the name), you use the modify button on a cell to turn it into a different cell type? It would make more sense then using all your mp on something thats not even on your organism and helps players add new cells without having to place and delete any or wait until next editor session to place it. Expanding on this, we can also make it so the player can’t edit a cell that is not a part of their organism.
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So I heard that there’s a problem with players disabling the tutorial and not knowing what’s going on during new updates. This game https://thewanderingvillage.com/ has a system where the game adds tutorial stuff for new updates even if the player already finished it. Perhaps on top of this, when the player disables the tutorial and starts a new game, there could be a pop-up asking if the player wants a tutorial for the new updates. This could help with the skipping tutorial issues.
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Compounds & Shells
In real life, calcium carbonate shells were mostly lost by arthropods who entered the land, since such mineralised shells are difficult to make in an environment without ambient minerals. This brings to mind - how will shells and skin work in the multicellular phase?
Managing all the nutrients of the body seems… difficult, to me. We can’t simulate every amino acid, after all. Nutritional deficiencies could be interesting, but you’d need to have to an organism’s diet be a defined mechanic to make that work. Nonetheless, I think that there should be more growth compounds than just ammonia and phosphate once organisms become more complex. Perhaps one would be calcium, used to varying degrees by different organisms. If calcium proves too difficult to acquire in a new habitat, the player species may decide to switch, and use a different shell such as chitin.
If the game complexifies in such a regard as this, with the specific diet of your organism becoming a significant mechanic (which seems inevitable to me), then perhaps the additional compound management might require new methods of organising the compound menu to make it more sane. I’m unsure.
Size
Instead of size being measured by the amount of hexes your cell takes up, it should become a new slider in the macroscopic editor. This seems feasible to me. The slider would allow you to simply scale your creature. The square-cube law would need to be involved somehow, though. There’s all sorts of limits on size in real life, like oxygen uptake and internal heat, suggesting to me that those might also need to be managed at the higher level, so, uh, that’s a lot of UI simplification that’ll be needed.
Toxicity
Environments will need to be more aggressively dangerous in the multicellular and macroscopic stages, in my opinion. Single-celled organisms are generally, well, generalist. They can get everywhere without much of a problem. At larger scales, environmental toxicity should be more of a factor. How saline is the water? What’s its pH? Such and such. I know toxicity is already on the menu, though. My thoughts boil down to ‘you shouldn’t be able to move to a radically different environment if you want, you need to adapt to it slowly’.
Timescale
Right now, the timescale works… basically fine. The default day length doesn’t really impede photosynthesis much - although, obviously, photosynthesis is much, much less powerful.
This won’t work just as fine when you’re playing critters that live over time periods longer than a few days. (Assuming that the default day of 180s ~= 24hrs on earth.) Macroscopic creatures will live for weeks, months, years, and for the largest ones, decades. How will the timescale handle that?
Player speciation
It seems odd to me that, if I adapt my organism to a patch far from where it started, and then move to the surviving population in the OG patch, it will have the same things that I evolved far away. That isn’t how evolution works. I’d suggest (partially as a way to deal with low speciation from the player) that speciation take into account the less derived forms that remain in the environment when you evolve. Earlier morphs sit around, don’t they? If they’d be more successful in the environment than your creation, then they should speciate.
Phosphate production
The lack of phosphate production feels wrong, to me. You can make ammonia, but not phosphate. You should be able to make phosphate. Is there a LAWK way to do so?
This would be helpful for sessile players.
Cluster rendering
Here’s a new thought/complaint. As of now, the Multicellular stage renders cells as basically all being individual cells, but connected together arbitrarily. I suggest that instead (possibly in combination with some slider for controlling how connected your cells are) the cells render as being connected; their membranes/walls would be parallel and very close together, so the cell cluster looks like a cohesive whole instead of a cooperative of specialised cells (which it also is, but more primitively).
Start off with five cells
I’ve described this earlier, but given how you need five cells to become multicellular, I suggest that you start with five cells arranged in a >-< formation in the cell editor. These five cells are either stem cells, or they can be five different varieties of cell, so that you can immediately begin specialising them.
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Kleptoplasty.
Of course, you can’t have this just be exclusive to cloroplasts. So.
Kleptochondrioplasty?
Kleptoplasty but chemoplasts?
Whatever, just the stealing of organelles temporarily.
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is this for multicellular, cell stage, or both? I think thats an interesting idea, but I’m unaware of it’s prevalence in earth, might be a fun non-LAWK option.
it’s actually an extremely LAWK thing, leaf sheep do it, there’s a whole superorder of leaf shaped slugs that do it, there’s at least one species of microbe that does it, and there’s still like 4/5ths of the wikipedia article left!
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Oh yeah! I have heard of that, thanks for the wikipedia article I could have easily found, I feel silly.
Eh, it could exist in any stage, really.
I was just unsure, but yeah having read the wikipedia article now, it could totally work for all stages and sounds like a fun mechanic. Especially the less LAWK other organelle theft, imagining an species that lives in an anoxic environment but if oxygen gets in, instead of being outcompeted it eats all the little oxygen-loving creatures coming to invade and steals their mitochondria, and migrates to another anoxic environment where it can live safely enough to reproduce.
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