at the macroscopic stage, glucose is replaced by nutrients, nutrients, and ATP is used by the body for everything (yes, this is a simplification). The metabolism tab will be represented by sliders responsible for the processing of substances; the further to the right the slider, the faster the metabolism. Types of metabolism are inherited from the early multicellular stage (for example, you will not be able to photosynthesize if you did not have at least one chloroplast in the colony before moving to macroscopy), there are such types of metabolism as:
Aerobic: converts nutrients into ATP, produces heat for the body
Photosynthesis: converts sunlight and water into nutrients
chemosynthesis: converts hydrogen sulfide into nutrients
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I think there should be an exception for when a player gets into heavy symbiosis with other species in the late multicellular stage (before aware, when a proper brain is developed), since there exist real-life examples of that occuring (like the “sea sheep”, whom are gastropods with some rather deeply integrated algae).
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I really hope Thrive gets good symbiosis gameplay one day, that seems like one of the hardest things to game design for. At least we have a good start with some pretty solid endosymbioses content, but it’s one way as of right now, we have no example of being the little guy yet.
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I mean, what would the gameplay of a mitochondrion even look like?
Chilling, metabolizing glucose with all this free oxygen, then you get kidnapped, now it’s sweatshop simulator: cell edition.
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Would you be able to do anything to prevent your host species from going extinct?
I think if you get eaten by definition all your offspring now live in this thing, technically, some random bacteria is the most diverse, successful thing slightly related to it at all (assuming some of it’s relatives didn’t go extinct, because some bacteria are EVERYWHERE) because it’s in every one of your cells, and every other eucaryote’s cells. I’d say good in game options would be that after you get eaten you get to choose a descendant of the thing that ate you to play as, plus free mitochondria/chlorophyll/whatever, as well as possibly an alternate choice to play as another member of your species. This works if getting engulfed is like dying, because when you die you get to play as another member of your species.
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Hm, can autoevo partake in endosymbiosis atm or no? Probably not but if it could I wonder what would happen if you got engulfed by a species trying to endosymbiosize you.
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Only the player can setup their species for endosymbiosis. If an AI species was setup to endosymbiosise the player species, it should work without major glitches. The way it works is that it uses the normal engulfing pulling in animation and logic, but once digestion starts the endosymbiont entity is just immediately destroyed and then a new organelle is added to the engulfing cell. So it should just all work and the stage would then detect that the player entity is dead and you’d respawn after the 5 or so seconds delay the respawn timer is.
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Yeah, that was to be expected.
Is endosymbiosis currently supposed to be a player-specific feature or will the auto-evo species too unlock this ability in the future?
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They could, but we have still multiple years-old features in the game that the AI species have no clue how to use. So I’m not too optimistic that anyone ever comes along and programs the AI species being able to do endosymbiosis.
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Maybe we should get an update era (like 0.8.X for example) focused on adding these missing features to the AIs in the future…
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The microbe roadmap is complete, we can’t keep adding stuff to it if we ever want a complete microbe stage. 0.9.x version range is reserved for polishing up the microbe stage but even that is pretty well filled out with known limitations of the game.
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No I meant like in the further future, perhaps when the “evolution stages” will be feature complete already.
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I bet we have way bigger problems to take care of by that point. So even then this idea is probably completely buried and extremely unlikely that anyone would even remember it not even counting having a programmer volunteer to make it.
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I think aah might have been subtly suggesting that “AI able to use the game’s mechanics on a basic level” (not necessarily endosymbiosis specifically, it’s a bit of an outlier) might be less of a “constantly adding to the roadmap” feature and more of an “integral to the game experience” feature.
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I was kind of saying that auto-evo should at least be capable of doing these many things which are currently player-exclusive, not necessarily needs to be added at this stage of development tho.
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