Could we have the ability to do bacterial symbiosis at the macroscopic stage? (Such as the symbiosis of some squids with bioluminescent bacteria, digestive bacteria for digesting cellulose, nitrogen-fixing bacteria for obtaining ammonia, photosynthetic organisms for some photosynthetic ability, etc.)
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Considering there are so many cases of this happening as youโve listed, it should get into the game eventually.
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it will be good if it appear once
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Welcome to the forum @Nicsal !
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Welcome, @Nicsal! We look forward to seeing you in further discussions.
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Welcome to the forum, @Nicsal!
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Though this is an older thread, I want to say I do agree this is a good idea I want to have in the game.
It can also be a very good backup for if certain types of macroscopic life donโt evolve or completely go extinct. For example, if there are no macroscopic organisms with chloroplasts, then some other line of macroscopic life in symbiosis with photosynthetic microbes can take that place.
I do want to be careful though, I know that getting current endosymbiosis working was a big task.
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And making macroscopic endosymbiosis would probably require working from scratch I presume?
Would acquiring the symbionts be any different than in regular (endo)symbiosis?
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One of our programmers would have to come by to be sure, but I would guess:
- The logic for selecting a species to symbiose with could probably be at least partially re-used.
- Making species available for selection and advancing the symbiosis (if the latter would even still be a thing) would have to be quite different. Because weโre not dealing with one cell engulfing another anymore. Itโs one macroscopic species, and a microbe that is not even shown as an individual organism anymore, at most a type of cloud or ground texture.
- Converting into a part (temporary or permanent) would also have to be made anew, because weโre not dealing with organelles anymore. And that fully depends on how we end up implementing the macroscopic editor. My best guess is weโll have some type of pre-symbiosis tissue (or part trait?) capable of โinterfacingโ, that can then be โloadedโ with a microbe species, giving it a related property (for example, photosynthesis).
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I thought you would still be able to edit cells ALONGSIDE tissues and not just tissues?
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Well, in the latest concepts on the macroscopic editor, editing cells has not really come up. But if it does, editing the underlying cell is essentially just altering the properties of the tissue. The difference with the symbiosis here is that in a lot of cases IRL the endosymbiont will live inside the large organismโs body, but not inside the cells. Which means the microbe would become another cell type within the host tissue, rather than an organelle inside the cells, if that makes sense.
Of course, thereโs also still cases of microbes having come to live inside the cells of macroscopic organisms. But given the shorter timescales of macroscopic versus microbe stage, it feels like full integration should be a lot more rare.
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Would such non-cell-embedded symbionts be still able to harm you in some way like how e coli are usually semi-beneficial but can also be a great threat?
Which to me is a massive shame, because rather than reusing the cell editor we would do double the work of having a tissue customizing editor that basically needs all the features that the cell editor already has. So Iโd really love to see reusing existing parts of the game come back because otherwise I really hope someone else gets this task thrown on them as I wouldnโt really appreciate having to basically recode the microbe editor from scratch just because it is not fully bespoke for tissue type editing.
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To be fair, what I meant to say here is โediting a cell type in macroscopic is editing properties of the tissueโ. But Iโll keep that in mind. I think it should be possible to design for practically all โtissue-editingโ in macroscopic and beyond to be done via the cell editor. That probably just requires more cell parts to be added for the functions macroscopic tissues need to have (like we already have with the axon and myofibril).
Would probably also have big benefits in continuing to use auto-evo logic written for multicellular.
I am going to go ahead and call this โunlikelyโ for now, because โdiseasesโ (being infected by organisms on a smaller size scale) hasnโt had any great/fun design for it yet. And symbionts going rogue like that would be a sub-set of diseases.
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Well itโs not like disease and illness will be completely missing from the pre-strategy stages, right?
Also Iโve noticed now on mobile at least it seems like you canโt view both the composer and the topic youโre looking at at the same time.
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That sounds terrible.
I do hope diseases and illness and Macroscopic endosymbiosis with bacteria are added into the game.
Also, endosymbiosis does not make a connection between nodes of the former endosymbiont and host in the Clade Diagram. Would it be the same case for Macroscopic endosymbiosis? It would be nice and realistic to show this connection between host and endosymbiont clades in the Clade Diagram, if it isnโt too much work for the developers to implement it.
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The thing is it IS probably too much work for what it is.
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The primary goal of the cladogram is to show the descent of the main organism. So indeed it does not show endosymbionts, even though they did make a genetic contribution. And I am afraid that it probably would be a lot of work for purely a moment of โhey thatโs pretty neatโ (and I do agree it would be neat).
So this is almost certainly relegated to โif a volunteer comes along that really wants to do it and manages to do so without breaking the tree system in halfโ. Your best bet might actually be if we need to implement converging branches for something else down the line.
Also, it would actually be even less likely for endosymbiosis happening in the macroscopic stage, because those types of endosybiosis tend to be a lot less permanent, with the endosybionts often not fully integrated into the cells.
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Also isnโt the person who originally wrote the entire cladogram code gone now or something?
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