Lets figure out Thrive 0.4.1 guys

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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