Here’s a concept for what I will call the “Life Editor”
What is the Life Editor?
The Life Editor is unlocked after domestication has been researched during the late Awakening stage. Once researched, you will have a button for domestication. It is used for editing species your species has domesticated.
How do we access the Life Editor?
In order to access the Life Editor, you must first finish domesticating a species around you. In order to domesticate a species, you will need to hover over them with your mouse/crosshair and press the domestication button with whatever key it is set to. This will start a mini game where you will have to tame the organism, which can be done by giving it food if it is carnivorous or simply by standing near it for a while if it is an herbivore. Once the domestication is complete, you can go to your tech tree and to the side there will be an option for the “Life Editor”. Plants can also be domesticated by hovering over them and clicking the domestication button, although their process is more tricky as you’ll have to plant them in the ground over two to three generations in order to fill the domestication bar. You can domesticate species in the Strategy stages by sending pops to domesticate them, this is much quicker than during the Awakening stage.
How do we use the Life Editor?
Once you have domesticated your desired species, you will be able to edit it in the Life Editor. The Life Editor is pretty similar to the editor that the player uses to edit their species, except for the fact that you aren’t editing your species but rather a domestic. The Life Editor is also much more limited in the scope in which you can edit the organisms within the Awakening to early Industrial age. With the Life Editor, you can make a species more useful to your species/culture or simply change them for your own amusement.
How will the Life Editor change throughout stages?
The Life Editor will change drastically throughout your playthrough depending on what technology you unlock. Once you unlock “Genetic Engineering”, you will be able to change organisms in a far extremer fashion. When you unlock the Ascension stage you will simply be able to change any species however you see fit.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
I’m pretty sure domestication is a fair bit more complex than just taming, look at asian elephants for example
Also I think before gene editing the editor should allow the same degree of changes as the awakening evo editor at most
It’s meant to represent the complicated process abstractly in a fun way, I do intend for the minigame to be harder depending on the organism’s behavior.
I agree, although what I meant is that the minigame for domesticating organisms will be easier in the Society stage due to you being a collective rather than an individual, the actual changes you can make to the organism will stay the same until you unlock genemodding.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
4
Maybe in society domesticating a species would work like researching in the tech tree?
I do think domestication is something we would like to have. I’ve been wondering if we can also use something a bit similar to the Endosymbiosis system for this, at least for the beginning steps. You could set some things that you want to achieve, and thereby steer auto-evo in a certain direction. Deliberate breeding (actual editing) would then be a later mechanic.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
6
So would the endosymbiosis-like thing be an analogy to taming?
Not quite? As far as I know “taming” means making an individual organism obedient. “Domestication” is the process of genetically creating a domesticated species, intentionally or not.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
I’d think to domesticate a species you’d first need to tame lots of its individuals generally
Technically, you don’t need to tame them first. You need to raise and care for multiple generations. This would be easier if the individuals you are raising and caring for are tamed, but actually, domesticating them leads to the species as a whole being easier to tame, so you may have it backwards. Particularly since taming a few individuals is, irl at least, not the same as taming a species.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
10
Yeah now that I look at that silver fox domestication project thing it does seem like it’s the opposite of what I’ve thought
Since each generation your species raises would have a chance of being less hostile to your species than the previous, maybe the aggression levels of the original could effect how many generations need to be raised before they are considered domesticated?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
12
Also it should be noted that some species apparently can’t be domesticated (or are not worth it to domesticate)
The only way I could see that happening is if their reproductive and fecundity speed is very low or if the food they eat is super rare and inefficient to harvest
This is an interesting topic to think about, and one that really hasn’t passed my mind. I think “initiating” domestication could be a more complex mechanic, but we’ll have to see how bloated the societal stages are with our primary mechanics first.
Beyond that however, I think using MP points and utilizing an editor, like you mention, can be a good way to approach it (since it is technically an actual directing of evolution as opposed to the metaphysical one in most of Thrive’s playthrough). Extending on these mechanics a bit:
MP costs to do anything can be significantly marked up to represent the limitations of drastic evolutionary change in a (relatively) smaller time-frame. This will make smaller tweaks take time, and lock out larger tweaks by them being too expensive.
Certain tech unlocks can eat into this mark-up, representing advancing capabilities and understanding of the society when it comes to domestication and artificial selection. For example: developing rotational farming eats slightly into the plant mark-up MP %, developing wheels eats slightly into the animal mark-up MP %, researching genetics eats strongly into general mark-up %, genetic engineering significantly reduces mark-up %, etc.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
17
I think pandas would fit the first of these criteria, would a species fitting both be ultra-undomesticable?