Lets figure out Thrive 0.4.1 guys

The Conclusion. Part 1

I dont think that I’ll be able to find something more to tell that wont feel repetative or redundant, so I think its a good time to stop and recap on everything I said.

First of all, this went much better than my attempt at breaking down 0.4.0. I am willing to take that as a success. I hope that I can do twice as much for 0.4.2, but we’ll see.

Now lets talk about Thrive.
Compared to the previous version, Thrive is definitely much better and bigger. Cell stage now has some sort of separation between early, mid and late game. However, early prokaryotic stage is too short and the late game is not really pronounced at the moment.

Thrive v0.4.1 is centered around ATP production. You generally want as much of it as possible. Basically, ATP costs is the only thing worth considering now.

Generally, you dont want to play around other cells builds, it is much more profitable to just go with the build you intended. There is only one species of cells that can really posess any danger to you and that is the toxic prokaryotes. If you encounter them, you probably want to have some mobility. Killing them off is a bad strategy, since they explode on death and they are reproducing way faster than you can kill them.

In most cases the best course of action is going for two metabolosomes into a quick nucleus. You’ll have some trouble with moving around since you wont have enough ATP production, but that is definitely worth it.
If you cant keep up with ATP costs at some point, you are in a very bad spot. The only reasonable option is scavenging, mostly on your own brothers and sisters.

The best organelles in the game are mitochondrias and chloroplasts. You want to have at least three mitochondria and at least one chloroplast. They give you a lot of hexes, which makes engulfing stuff way easier and mito-chloro combo is the best source of free ATP. Other sources of ATP and glucose production can work for you as well however, the choise is yours.

Toxic organelle is the best late-game tool availible to you. Getting one of them turns you into an unstoppable killing machine. Going for flagellas is another good late-game choise if you want some speed.

Anyway, I think that is everything you need to know if you want to thrive. In my next (and last) post I’ll talk about some things that might or might not be a good idea to implement in the game.

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The Conclusion. Part 2

After everything said in the previous post, it is time to talk about improving some parts of the game. I have decided to separate all of this into four categories:

  1. Things I haven’t talked about since they are planned already

Lysosomes - I have never explicitly said that but hunting and scavenging is the go-to strat now, since organelles give you a huge reward on eating. Lysosome is a beatuful solution to that.

Patch differentiaiton - well, I dont know many details now, but it is a really interesting concept. Changing the environment might make some of the less-useful organelles and playstyles more viable. Dont want to speculate however.

Resources would become more scarse over time - seems cool, idk how it will affect the gameplay. Probably just means more hunting

  1. Things that are already planned

Every species derives from player species - now this is a game changer. In the current version the competition comes from the fact that you’re catching up to everybody. That means that other cells can change way slower than player and still get away with that since they have a headstart. I cant wait to see how everything will turn out in the new version.

Other cells pushing you shouldn’t count as moving - nothing to add there

Progress bar - just cool

  1. Things that are might or might not be planned.

ATP bug fix -for those who dont know, your ATP production doesnt grow when your cell grows. This essentially means that your cell needs twice as much ATP-producing organellles. This bug is the biggest reason behind the current ATP-centered meta. But, after fixing it, ATP production of everything should probably be nerfed since 0.4.1 was balanced around that bug.

ATP production rebalance - since ATP production is the variable the game is balanced atm, I want to say how I see the game work: Everybody already kind of agreed that 15 generations is about enough for a cell stage. I want to divide it further. I think it would be cool to have first five generations be centered around prokaryotic gameplay. The player shouldn’t be really able to afford the nucleus until gen5 (maybe gen4 if he is willing to take a risk). Next five genetarions should be centered around producing enough ATP to have a surplus you can spend on other organelles. The late game is where you can start putting really good organelles.
While I’m not really confident in how I see the mid and late game, I am fairly certain in my vision of early game. So:
Oxygen levels on start should be low enough for glycolysis to be better than oxygen respiration - this would make metabolosomes and mitochondrias the investment for the future, since they’ll only be better with time.
Glycolysis should also be nerfed, since 4cytoplasm+ nucleus produces 20 ATP while draining 14. That means that gen3 nucleus is possible. If the ATP bug is fixed, glycolysis should probably become twice as slow (1 organelle makes only 2.5 ATP per second). This would prolong the early game, which is very much needed for prokaryotic organelles to shine.

Glucose consumption should increase for every ATP-producing organelle. Also, I don’t like that cytoplasm has its own glycolysis now, it adds complexity, but no depth to the game. Might be just me though.
But, increasing glucose consumption will also make chloroplasts even more OP. It is ok for now, but later it would be great to add some more ways to acquire glucose (for example hunting could give you some, idk). Overall, this decision will do more good than harm to the balance.

Severe buffs to F-tier organelles are needed.

Toxin vacuole should be nerfed. Increasing ATP cost is an easy solution, but there is another one. It would also be cool to make them less accurate. For example, give it a random(-20, 20) degree offset, so the player would not be able to really aim. Offset decreases with the number of toxin vacuoles.
I think it wont be a huge nerf, since the shooting distance is not that big, but right now you only need one toxin to easily kill everything. Accuracy debuff would make getting a second toxin a valid option.

  1. Other stuff.

Auto-Evo should be more aggressive in changing other cells, especially since everything starts with the single hex of cytoplasm.

AI-controlled cells of the player species should also have an impact on player population - while not a big concern now, it might become a huge limiting factor later. I’ve talked about that in that post (last paragraph): Lets figure out Thrive 0.4.1 guys

Well, I suppose that toxic prokaryotes won’t be able to evolve from a single hex of cytoplasm, but if they are - prokaryotes should not be able to get eukaryotic organelles.

Amount of distance you can zoom out should probably be nerfed.

Well, I hope this list is not too long and complicated.
Thank you for sticking with me for these two weeks and farewell, until Thrive v0.4.2

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Thanks for doing all this investigation, I’ve appreciated reading it.

I think seperating out the patches is going to change a lot of stuff. For example things like chloroplasts being op will change because in most patches they wont work at all. Also there will be a lot of places where energy is a lot more scarce which will be a bit reason not to be a small eukaryote, you won’t really be fast enough to move between energy sources.

Coupla minor problems:

Biome doesn’t change unless you die.
Iron clouds are the same color as ammonia.

As for the gameplay, it’s not great. Basically, just swim around absorbing smaller cells, add random things in the editor, and that’s about it. Secondly, I have no idea how people in this thread talk about certain organelles being ‘unbalanced’. I can’t even begin to keep track of their actual effects. You need to add numbers to the game - give us the literal conversion rates, as they happen! I usually have no idea why my glucose suddenly shoots up, or what organelles are actually effective (especially the ones using oxygen or CO2).

Finally, the pace of the game needs to be slowed way the hell down. It’s not a FPS. Players need to be able to analyze their situation and understand how their cell operates. I’ve mentioned Cellcraft before as an example of a similar game that is perfectly executed. There is no need whatsoever for this breakneck pace.

On a positive note, the environment looks absurdly good. Better than I would have expected of a professional studio.

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You are absolutely right.
This game severely lacks the tutorial and it really doesnt give much information to the player. Right now conversion rates need to be manually calculated and the game has a bug, which makes ATP conversion even more difficult to understand. It will be fixed.

You have no idea what organelles do exactly because of the poor organelle balance. Some organelles are so good that if you by pure chance put one of them, you wont even need to put anything else. Others, on the other hand, give you practically nothing.

If by “pace of the game” you mean time between evolutions - that is partly because hunting is OP. It will be nerfed a bit, so that might help. If you mean that the core gameplay is too fast and you want it to be more strategic - well, that’s more complicated. Since hunting is OP the game pushes you to be a hunter. Hunters need to be more active.
But, playing as any other viable build is action-oriented as well. I think it is a problem, but not the problem that needs immediate attention.

I dont really think that Thrive can become a slow-paced game. I mean, you need to actually become a sentient creature, and that should take less than 300 hours of gameplay, so some parts of the game should be sped up. I am not a developer though, so I can’t really give you feedback you want.

I think that the pace off the game is currently off for several reasons:

Chloroplasts, mitochondria, chemoplasts and other endosymbiotic organelles are trivial to rush

I could write a detailed post about this, but suffice to say, the major eukaryotic organelles should NOT be purchaseable for a trifling 55 MP as soon as you get nuclei. The game should make it a random chance, heavily modified by environmental and ecological factors whether a species unlocks a new organelle at the end of a generation. Furthermore, unlocking said metabolic organelle (excluding mitochondria) should drastically decrease your chances of unlocking the other metabolic organelles (so possessing chloroplasts should massively decrease your chance of further obtaining chemoplasts as well). This would make your choice feel actually important and heavily determine your future playstyle.

But you shouldn’t be able to reliably beeline towards such a drastic evolutionary step, since it discourages any other tactics and cheapens an otherwise massive change in a phylum’s history.

There is almost no way to improve your cell apart from just spamming more and more organelles onto it

It isn’t possible to, say, gradually make your bacterium more and more resistant to extreme pressure and other environmental conditions, or to make it’s metabolosomes more energy-efficient, or develop the ability to utilize additional wavelengths for photosynthesis, or increase your cell’s perceptiveness to compounds in the environment, or develop new chemosynthetic pathways, etc.

This means that really the only ‘tactic’ that’s even possible is just adding more and more organelles. A logical outcome of this is that gameplay feels way too fast, since you’re going to rush getting new organelles to the detriment of everything else because there isn’t actually anything else to do.

The world is static

You start out in a world already populated by eukaryotes, with oxygen already at 21%, there are never any upsets to the environment, etc. Even though auto-evo is in the game, you are almost never actually able to see it for yourself since the world is already heavily populated and a random species getting an extra mitochondria is basically imperceptible. It would feel far better to start as the LUCA, with nothing but you in the entire world. To watch as new phyla diverge from yours, and then give rise to their own subgroups. To watch as photosynthesis first appears, and the atmosphere begins to change, introducing new challenges and ecological niches. To watch eukaryotes appear and diversify into their own little niches. To see the occasional drop or rise in temperature or another environmental condition cause mass die-offs. To have patches get separated, change, etc. due to to plate tectonics and the like. I know that something like this is planned for the next version, and I’m very excited for it.

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Yup.

Nope.

Already implemented in the dev builds.

In all seriousness, random chances of unlocking organelles is a bad way of fixing a problem. You are correct - this will fix it, but random chances are inherently bad, because they take freedom from the player. It does not matter how you perform as a player if the faith of the run is determined by RNG.

This, on the other hand, is much better. Organelle and membrane upgrades are planned for the game, though not for the next release.

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Lots of interesting points in this thread. Imo there are two main reasons for organelle gluttony:

  1. Energy is super abundant, between glucose clouds, iron, light, H2S, marine snow and other cells you can easily feed an arbitrarily big cell. For some patches this is fine but in general it should be hard to get energy. You should be thinking carefully on each editor session something like “I really want to add organelle X but can I really afford the energy cost of doing that?” The hardest patches will be dark caves with only a small amount of iron, it will be a real struggle to find energy.

  2. In general I think you should almost never be able to eat something faster than you. Any cell which can run away should and this means if you spam and become a massive eukaryote you aren’t going to be able to eat anything. This means if you want to be a predator you need to balance for speed which means thinking carefully about which organelles to add. Being a predator and a phototsynthesizer should be challenging.

Though on the other side of point 2 I do think there should be some strategies which let you catch things faster than you: such as being able to deploy agents to slow other cells down, or something like a stentor which can use currents to capture other cells. But these should have their own tradeoffs.

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In the full game, almost all organelles are planned to be locked at first and require special actions to unlock. (from MP to mutate a flagellum into a pilus to the endosymbiosis where you need to engulf a special bacterium after which there’ll be a small chance to unlock the associated organelle, which is how you unlock the mitochondrium and chloroplast)

I however don’t know how the bacteria associated with the chloroplasts and mitochondria will work with the system of evolving bacteria.

I know that random chances aren’t exactly the most ideal of approaches. However, while I’m not a game designer, I genuinely can’t think of a better way to deal with this problem within the planned framework of the game. Mutation points are the main limitation here - whilst they work great for simulating the small-scale, gradual changes that happen over eons, they’re inadequate at representing endosymbiosis. I mean, adding more mitochondria to the cell, or changing the potency of an agent, or increasing your heat resistance - all of these are gradual changes that can be well-represented by the MP system since they can actually be quantified. It’s impossible to quantify the emergence of photosynthesis/eukaryotes/chloroplasts against adding an additional cyotplasm hex, or whatever. They’re just too big of a change that doesn’t even follow the conventional route of evolution and emerge only under very special circumstances.

If the game sought to represent their importance and rarity compared to your average mutation, they would have to cost way more than 100MP, and such a thing would be impossible within the 100MP-max framework of the game. It would require some sort of mechanic wherein you could stockpile MP points, and this would not only be jarringly unrealistic, but would also almost defeat the whole purpose MP points had in the first place, which is to force evolutionary changes to be gradual and make sense.

And I think that a certain amount of weighted chance would work OK. If the chance of getting chloroplasts was literally just 5% every generation, yeah, that would suck. But say it starts out at a low chance, but is heavily modified by environmental variables and your actual playstyle, and perhaps even the chance gradually rises as time passes and if you fulfill certain criteria, that would be far more fair, IMO. It would still reward players that play appropriately, while weeding out cases where evolving them absolutely would not make sense (e.g. if you live 5000m below the surface and there aren’t any photosynthesisers around).

And so far as I know, the current plan is to make it random chance. As Omicron said, it’s planned that you have to eat the appropriate prokaryote until the dice-gods smile upon you and you get the organelle. Personally, I’m against forcing the player to actually have to eat these prokaryotes during play-time itself, as that would likely become very grindy, very quickly. But a check of the player’s diet at the end of every generation would suffice, IMO.

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I like the idea of unlocking organelles, dont get me wrong.
Talking about the grind. In my opinion “eat 5 cells to unlock this” is better than “20% chance to unlock this on eating cell”. It feels good when that 20% chance finally works, but this feels really bad when you eat 20 cells and RNG is just not giving you the stuff you want.

Anyway, that is not the only way of fixing a problem. And I dont really want to talk about unlocking organelles since it is not in 0.4.1 and (as I am informed) not planned for 0.4.2.

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IIRC an idea that has been thrown around on the dev forums was a chance that increases a little each time, to stop player from getting stuck because they can’t get a specific organelle. (the first time you have a 5% chance, yet the 50th time a 70% chance or something like that)

Yeah there are currently no short term plans for organelle unlocks.

Personally I am not so keen on them. I don’t like grind in general.

I think what is interesting is giving the player a flexible cell making toolkit and then generating challenges for them to try to solve with it. I love how Kerbal just gives you this great lego set and you can use it however you like.

I think if you take a game which isn’t challenging and add unlocks to it then it’s just a grindy, unchallenging game. The thing is to make it challenging, varied and interesting.

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Why not only unlock all organelles that are relevant to the biome? If you live in a cave, photosynthesis organelles are not available. If you live at the surface of the open ocean, rusticyanin is not available.

Nice conversation, but it is offtopic. Lets move the discussion to a topic in the “future game” category:

I have a cell of two cytoplasms and a flagella. When I swam, the ATP went down until I took damage - it never damaged me in a previous run - and I had to stop to fill it back up. But then, suddenly, it costs zero ATP to swim and just reduces my glucose instead. So somehow glucose was not being converted while swimming and now it is, for zero discernible reason (I was not in a cloud).

First and foremost, the player needs to have some idea of what the rules are.

I totally agree that the game needs to give more information to the player and be more clear with the information it gives.
For your problem, I think I get what are you talking about and I think I can explain. First of all, it doesn’t cost zero ATP to swim. All cells have a certain max ATP production value(in your case, 10 per second). Then, all cels have an osmoregulation cost - an amount of ATP constantly drained from your cell, no matter what you do (2-3 in your case, i dont remember correctly). And some amount of ATP is required for movement. If your ATP production is higher than your ATP requirements, it would feel like moving costs zero ATP, but, if you take a closer look, you could notice that your ATP value is fluctuating around max value.
Secondly, glucose is always converted, but really slow, so you probably haven’t noticed. The fact, that you started to lose glucose might be connected with damage you took, since healing takes ATP and glucose.
Lastly, the cell will always take damage when you reach zero ATP. Idk why you wasn’t taking damage in your previous runs, either you managed to stop for a refill just before the first tick of damage or there is some flagellum magic going on.

It probably was, but that’s not the problem here. My question is why ATP wasn’t regenerating just a moment before, when I had just as much glucose on hand?

As I said, healing costs ATP so your ATP regeneration will be slower if you are not full on hp

I was running out before I was damaged (come to think of it, I think I was already damaged). The faster regeneration only started afterwards.