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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So I originally posted this in Lack of Pressure Specialization, but this is probably better here.

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Are we sure such miches could still be added in into the roadmap at this point?

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There will likely be rebalancing and adding of features to the microbe stage throughout the next couple stages, and possibly a revist much later. It’s not immediately needed, but eventually, it might be nice to expand miches. Particularly if that leads to something that can hunt the player.

Under Thrive’s Randomness: Weaknesses : “There also tend to be few natural predators of the player.”

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I guess so, but remember that the further we are from microbe, the more “complete” it feels and so less people will be willing to upgrade such a “complete” stage most likely.

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Also from Replayability of the Microbe Stage:

“I do think we should consider adding a few mechanics to the Microscopic portion of Thrive, BUT we should only make up our mind on those additions when we are developing the Multicellular Stage. That way, we can consider what design choices are necessary for Thrive’s next phase of development. I already assume we’d need to somewhat rebalance certain things to make the Multicellular Stage more polished, so it might be best to consider that then.”

Plus, I have a feeling future dev’s and modders will want to add a few things to the earlier stages.

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I think major new additions to microbe stage will only come after a large increase of the project’s popularity, most likely after aware development starts.

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I have returned! Now excuse me while I pretend it hasn’t been 3 months.

The positive side I think is that things like balancing, AI adjustments and Auto-evo adjustments are probably easier once there aren’t more mechanics and organelles being added every few updates. Adding new miches also does not require new icon, other art, and can probably use existing values without touching the other parts of the game too much?

I did actually play it after you sent me! The auto-evo aspect seems to work quite well! Though the interaction with it via selecting node objectives instead of the actual mutations is definitely very different. It’s a simple but fun enough game. I think it could really benefit from re-arranging things so that you need as little button presses as possible to accomplish the things you want to do.

I think you pretty much got what I meant there! And yes the exponentially large miche trees could happen. It all depends in the end on how much different potential species you want in a patch. You don’t want so much that the total number of species in the world make auto-evo take too long to calculate. But I do think the current number is too low. For example only having one photosynthesizing species in each patch is a bit sad.

Yeah, I guess here we’re running into the difference between the mechanisms of real nature and a model imperfectly trying to capture that. Of course IRL the fact that bears are somewhat more dangerous grass means avoiding bears or not is enough to separate two species (that are in otherwise “identical” niches), while avoiding grass is not. If in current Thrive you were to split the photosynthesis miche into one for each other species to avoid potential predation from, that would result in a lot of “be a plant and don’t get eaten by grass” miches. If everyone’s score for that branch is the same it might just grab a random species for each of those, and therefore you would get too many photosynthesizers. Unless in that scenario they would just deterministically grab the same species from the miche tree node above (maybe the one that performed the best there), then it would work fine!

Not sure if you were talking about Thrive or AaT here (since you mentioned “leaf” miche). But in general I would say that should split the tree. In essence you could even simply have a “side end-point” on the tree: so that you have one for simply photosynthesizing and one for photosynthesizing + avoiding predation. Not all miches need to be the same length down the tree I suppose. Similar to how in AaT you can choose to evolve to fit any step in the miche tree, not just the end.

Ah, that’s actually perfect then! Predators would try to adapt to hunt some autotrophs better, while at the same time some autotrophs are trying to counter specific predators and others are just focusing on their base needs while ignoring predators. That’s very close to my understanding of what you see in real ecosystems.

The only remaining problem would be that splitting the miche trees (let’s assume once for each autotrophic food source) for each already existing species would be expected to create an infinitely growing number of miches. Then again it seems like that could already happen currently with predators of predators (of predators, etc.). So it seems like there’s already something in place to stop that?

And finally, let’s actually suggest another miche I thought of, inspired by my last playthrough:

Endosymbiosis
Simply put, this miche first needs to have a node that only scores whether a species is flagged as being selected for endosymbiosis by the player. After this, the tree can still split to allow for pressure to be good at photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, etc. But without (or with greatly relaxed) pressures to avoid predators, manage their own storage, etc. After all, this species is now adapting to function well in the niche of being an organelle!

Biological significance:
I think this accurately represents how initially independent species adapted to become organelles. An organism adapted to live in symbiosis looks very different from an independent one.

Gameplay significance:
This instantly solves the problem of you endosymbiosis target going extinct because they were kicked out of their previous miche, which happens depressingly often. Though of course it very likely will still decline in population. If auto-evo is effective enough, you will also visibly see the species turn simpler and into something like an organelle before the process completes.

On second thought, the mich probably needs a selection criteria for what type of organelle you are trying to make. We probably don’t want an intended chloroplast to evolve into something that looks like a chemoplast.

I don’t know whether it is easier/better to only create this miche when the player starts endosymbiosis, or have it always present in every patch, waiting for a species to fulfil the “in endosymbiosis” requirement.

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Remember that at the same time autoevo for new stages will be under development, so it might be needed for the development of these stages to be “completed” too for any major miche works in the previous ones.

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I think Size based division of miches could achieve something similar easier, but with additional benefits. The smallest miches would be small enough to endosymbiosize, though a little relaxation on pressure to avoid predation for that size category is a good idea. A really large miche size could encourage there being something that can engulf the player. And, since multicellular organisms will likely out compete single celled organisms, having separate size categories for singled cellular and multicellular organisms could ensure singled celled organisms survive. It would also fix the only one photosynthesiser problem, as each size category could have it’s own photosynthesis miche, it’s own iron miche, it’s own sulfer mitche, etcetera.

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Are we sure every miche can support each of such size miches?

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The largest size would probably want to be handled differently, but given the likely hood that cells above a certain size would be more likely to be generalists, with smaller ones being more likely to be specialists, I think it could work.

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