Miche Suggestion thread

Future Game Microbe Stage
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Miches are at the heart of the “new” auto-evo system, and right now there’s a limited number. Essentially, in each patch only one species can exist per Miche, and right now Miches are essentially the different food sources in the game. I feel there is room for more, and having more would have benefits. For example, we could see more diverse species, and it would be easier for the player to find a miche.

To make clear the current situation: We have one miche per food source. A miche is one “slot” in a patch that a species can occupy. One species can fill multiple miches, but you won’t see more species than miches. Each miche has its own set of requirements to determine what species need to be good at in order to fill it. This is also the basis of the “food chain” screen in the reports you seen after every round.

Per the explicit request of the lead developer, miches should be explained in terms of real biological ecological niches. I would add to this that miches should also be evidently different when you see them in-game, using the game’s current mechanics. For example, feeding off sunlight or iron are two visibly different things.

We currently have the following miches in the game:

  • Glucose clouds (considers: glucose usage efficiency, and glucose cloud collection effectiveness)
  • Photosynthesis (considers: glucose usage efficiency, ability to conserve compounds, and sunlight usage efficiency)
  • Thermosynthesis (considers: glucose usage efficiency, ability to conserve compounds, and temperature usage efficiency)
  • Hydrogen sulfide chemosynthesis (considers: glucose usage efficiency, ability to conserve compounds, and hydrogen sulfide usage efficiency)
  • Iron consumption is actually split:
    • Big Iron chunk consumption (considers: Iron usage efficiency, ability to get iron from big chunks)
    • Small Iron chunk consumption (considers: Iron usage efficiency, ability to get iron from small chunks)
  • The big one: Predation (considers: glucose usage efficiency, and ability to predate one specfic other species)
    • We get one of these miches for every single species in the patch (even other predators!), so that can be a lot.

I would like to start us off with two relatively simple suggestions:

Iron cloud consumption:
The game does not just spawn iron chunks, it also spawns completely free-floating clouds of iron, not associated with any chunks. Utilizing these effectively has significantly different selection pressures from the existing iron chunk consumption miches. The small chunk consumption benefits from you being large enough and having a membrane that allows you to directly engulf them. Even the large iron chunks can be engulfed if you are large enough.

However, those adaptations are completely useless for collecting iron clouds. So a species in this miche should often end up smaller and with a “harder” membrane.

Scavenging/ cell chunk consumption:
Similar to the previous suggestion, but in the other direction. This represents both incidental chunks from cells dying, and the “marine snow” you can see in some non-surface patches. For the current glucose cloud consumption, there is no benefit to being able to engulf things. This new miche would require being large enough to engulf cell chunks, and having an appropriate membrane type.

At the same time this miche would not require species to be large enough to fully engulf other species, nor have pilus or toxins to kill them.

Thus, it should be able to diverge from the existing miches.

I will follow up on this another time, but that will probably with something that ends up “splitting” the current miches in some way, rather than “recognizing” food sources as I did this time.

Does anyone else have suggestions on what miches/niches should be added?

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That’s actually not true. Iron only spawns as chunks which then slowly leak out iron clouds, but fundamentally the clouds are all from the chunks.

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Oh interesting! I could swear I often see clouds without any chunks around, do the chunks just completely dissolve at some point?

In any case, that means, in my “using the game mechanics for niche identity” criteria, there’s no reason to create this separate miche (even though I think it might create interestingly diverging species) because they’re just consuming the same chunks in a different way.

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Iron chunks do dissolve over time and disappear. Small chunks are much more likely to do so as big iron lasts many minutes. Also theoretically iron-eating species when they die would be able to drop corpse chunks that could leak out iron before dissolving (slight clarification: if they have any iron in their compound storage, meaning they didn’t die from starving).

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Oh, I thought they couldn’t dissolve at all.

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So, I’ve been getting into the weeds of reading up on ecological niches (Ecology is not exactly my field of biology) and how to think up more potential “miches”. Essentially the problem is that right now one miche = one food source, while we might want more than one miche for each food source (as is the case with niches irl). So basically, what we’re looking at is Coexistence Theory, trying to find a solution to the “Paradox of the Plankton” (hhyyrylainen might recognize this as the “Thim yelling at lawns” problem). In other words: how does more than one species live off the same resource in one ecosystem, without one out-competing another to extinction?

Now, two quirks of Thrive’s auto-evo design (as I understand it) complicate matters a bit:

  1. Patches have uniform conditions in time across the 100 MY stretch that one editor is supposed to cover.
  2. Patches are uniform in resources in space. IRL when ecologists speak of “patches” this is also mostly true, but ecologists seem to mean much more limited areas by that. Meanwhile, Thrive’s “patches” are more similar in size to entire ecosystems. For example, within Thrive’s “Volcanic Vents” an ecologist might designate the area immediately around the vent (high concentration of resources, but also extremely high temperature) and the area slightly farther away (lower in both) as two separate patches.

Why do I mention this? Because IRL you can easily find two competing species surviving throughout a single ecosystem, as long as they outcompete the other in different patches or times within that ecosystem. For example Moss A grows the best on this grey rock, while moss B grows slightly better on that pink rock 3 meters in the other direction. You might still see both mosses on both rocks. Or, this is a dry year, which means tree C does better than its neighbour tree D, but tree D did better last (wetter) year. In year 3, you still see both trees.

So, IRL species can compensate for bad patches/times with good patches/times, population wise. Even in a situation where one species outcompetes the other in most cases: If the “less competitive” species is actually more competitive in some areas, some of the time, you might still see them in all areas, all the time. Just in smaller numbers. People call this the Storage Effect, and it’s kind of important for that whole “biodiversity” phenomenon.

So, with Thrive’s large uniform patches that are uniform for 100 MY you technically can’t simulate this, but I am guessing you can pretend that this is going on. For example, you could create a second thermogenesis miche whose “selection criteria” assume a lower temperature than the “normal” thermogenesis miche. You would then see them in a patch where technically they are being outcompeted by another species. But again, that’s technically more accurate to IRL.
The only thing I am not clear on here is: would the game systems be able to handle this? Could the algorithms just have the species compete to create a reasonable population for both? Or would you have to artificially reserve a part of the f.e. H2S for the species that is less adapted to the “current” conditions? (of the “year” the player plays in)

Having said all that, let me make two suggestions for possible ways to “split” current miches:

Predator Partitioning:
Just like how “be a predator specifically on prey species B” can be a niche (and is a miche in Thrive), “photosynthesize while specifically being able to avoid predation by predator D” can be a niche. This is entirely scientifically accurate, my only concern is how difficult this may be to implement.
I am kind of assuming the current order is autotrophs evolve → Predators evolve against those autotrophs.
If that’s true than trying to fill miches based on predators and going back and forth between predators and prey sounds like an exponentially escalating mess.

By the way, in a hypothetical environment where the number and types of predators are constant for millions of years, this mechanism does not work for niche differentiation between two species. But IRL the numbers of different predators and prey are in flux because obviously the number of each predator species is dependent on how much of their preferred prey is available.

Relative Nonlinearity:
To simplify a complicated topic: one species might be very good at using rare resources efficiently, while another might be good at using an abundance of resources to reproduce extremely rapidly. This is relevant IRL when colonizing “new” areas, or when resources decline and become more abundant year to year. For implementation in Thrive, I think you could for example take each of the existing “autotrophic” miches, and make a copy of it with the added requirement that they need to reproduce fast (so have a low number of hexes?).

I think this actually has a lot of potential for Thrive, because using resources more efficiently sounds like Eukaryote organelles, while reproducing as fast as possible sounds like prokaryotes to me. Thus ensuring you can maintain plenty of prokaryotes and eukaryotes in each patch.

Again, this would technically not work in Thrive’s uniform and constant patches, but you would be pretending they are neither.

P.S. I have just been linking to wikipedia for convenience, but there is of course quite a body of literature on this I could find if people are interested.

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Depends on what you mean by the → arrow. A single auto-evo step happens all at once, there isn’t a given order. The miche tree is built first to be able to evaluate how good mutations are, but all mutations are practically as a result generated “simultaneously” so that no species has an advantage on the others. And then all changes are applied also as a single step.

I would expect this kind of relationship to cause some oscillations, but those will be between cycles and not within a single cycle.

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Rathalos, in case you haven’t played it I DMed you with a steam key to Atoms and Time. In that game, particularly among the plant miches, there are a lot of examples of “grey rock vs pink rock” partitioning that I played around with. I think it will matter more in the multicellular stage, but in general I agree that we can account for a lot of diversity by branching out miches based on temporary conditions or “things that could happen”, although if you get too reckless with it you start getting exponentially large miche trees. I will read up more on relative nonlinearity to make sure I’m talking about the same there here.

Predator Partitioning is something I’ve never heard about, although it makes a lot of sense. I guess it sounds paradoxical to me: like is there a miche for not being eaten by grass, and everyone’s equally good at it? There actually is already a uniform “avoid predation” miche that is tacked on to the end of each leaf miche accounting for the need to not be eaten, but they don’t split the tree and make more possible positions for a species to fill…

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Just asking, is the miche system also planned to be the base of multicellular and aware stage autoevo? Just a lot more complex in these stages?

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