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My cell has:
Some combination of this has lead to this scenario where mucilage is produced faster than the shield consumes it. Thus making my cell eternally invulnerable to external attack.
I think this was explicitly something you wanted to avoid?
I suppose the extra mucilage production value that allows this to happen comes from the slime jets? Because Iโm pretty sure mucocysts were heavily balanced to prevent them from producing more mucilage than the shield consumes.
Was my initial thought yes, but the reproduction progress definitely factors in, because this species does not achieve this in the base form.
As far as I can tell from quickly looking at the code, the mucocyst shield keeping active cost is just a constant 0.7 per second. So as long as you produce more mucilage than that per second, you can keep it active indefinitely.
Oh, donโt know why I assumed this was specifically supposed to be countered. Maybe I am misremembering a discussion from somewhere?
But thank you for checking!
I think it was probably meant to be countered, but thereโs no evidence in the code that thereโs any attempt at making the cost scale based on mucocyst count or the cell size. I pinged Deus anyway on the dev discord about this.
Could you just multiply the production of mucilage by 0 when using the mucocyst? Or does the game not handle production and consumption as separate variables?
I think itโs separate processes in the processes tab, but perhaps this solution would bring some unwanted problems?
Thrive is a simulation game where systems are designed to do consistent things, like the bioprocesses donโt just suddenly freeze depending on the cell status. So it would be an extreme abuse of the current game structure to make it so that enabling the mucocyst would be able to free one or more bioprocesses the cell would otherwise be running.
The bioprocessing system actually has no knowledge that it is converting compounds in a cell, it just has access to a list of bioprocesses it should run and the compound storage associated with the process inputs and outputs. So it would dirty up the clean design of the bioprocess system to force it to know about the cell state and specifically suppress hardcoded processes when the cell is in mucocyst state.
In many cases like this (and for example Deus commented on Discord that it might be nice to only allow using the mucocyst once per life) it would be easy to design specific gameplay effects we might want to see, but Thrive is not a game like that. Thrive is built as a simulation that we try to control to also have good gameplay, but that is often very hard as messing with the simulation is hard to get the right gameplay effect.
I didnโt realize it worked that way, but that makes a lot of sense. Iโm very new to programming and just embrace the spaghetti code, so itโs really interesting to see the designs of people who know what theyโre doing.
So I suppose at least the youth of a species canโt use this strategy, which could possibly lead to some interesting behaviours emergingโฆ
Oh they absolutely can, just need 4 mucilage-producing organelles. The species from the start of this thread just had 2, so needed to double them to have enough.
If all members of the species can be 100% immune, Iโd call that a broken strategyโฆ Though endospores are popular amongst real life microbes already so the strategy is rooted in reality somewhat I think.
Is this affected by whether the Mucocyst or Slime Jet reproduces first, or does the reproduction order not matter?
They said with enough you can achieve the effect without even growing
Iโm pretty sure the slime jets and mucocysts produce the same amount of mucilage so their individual counts donโt really matter, just the total and that you have at least one mucocyst.