How will it be determined which microscopic organisms (if any) continue to exist and interact with the player as we evolve into a macroscopic creature? I think the minimum would be to keep all other multicellular creatures, so they could possibly evolve into different kingdoms of multicellular life (like the plants, animals, and fungi on earth).
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Micro creatures will be represented as clouds similar to compounds clouds in macro stages. And indeed I am rather sure multicell creatures will still be able to evolve into macroscopy
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How would Multicellular organisms interact with Macroscopic organisms? I think Multicellular organisms are too large to be left as regular compound clouds, but could still end up being smaller than some Macroscopic organisms. Would Multicellular organisms be individual large particles rather than just simple clouds?
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No I think the compound cloud thing was for both the micro stages
And also I donβt think itβd be included how multicells see the macros
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Also how small could a macroscopic organism get? If there are macro-organisms smaller than multicellular microscopic organisms, I donβt see why the macro ones should be rendered, while the βmicroβ ones arenβt
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I think you would start at a size of 1 cm so maybe a mm or so
a mm of tissue still has LEAGUES more cells than the 20-ish a multicellular species can achieve at most before itβs doomed to be stuck between terrain structures
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Do we know what is the size of Large Resource chunks in terms of mm/cm? This is important for scaling, as Large Iron chunks are visible in Macroscopic. We know that Large Iron Chunks are 100 hex, since 150 hex size is required to engulf them.
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I am not sure we even know the precise size of 1 hex and even then a 20 cell mutlicellular would probably still be individually invisible to a naked eye
We could have had more macro-multicell interaction if there was a smooth transition but due to funding reasons I hope are obvious to people around here this was dropped. Also Iβm pretty sure these interactions that we still are going to get are still not fleshed out by the theory team so we donβt have many scraps to work with for this topic.
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For now, it seems the only interactions that carry over from Microbe and Multicellular to Macroscopic in the environment are interactions with Resource chunks.
Not that I think about it, if a Microbe/Multicellular organism was large enough to engulf a Large Iron Chunk or other Large Resource Chunk, would a Large Resource Chunk simply appear to vanish in Macroscopic as if it was depleted?
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I am pretty sure those resource chunks would also be individually invisible in macro btw
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Could we play as a microbe and have interactions (parasitize or what have you) with macro-organisms? I think that would be interesting
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I think the devs said they wonβt be adding that since itβs a dead end pathway and so a loss of dev time
Though autoevo parasites would surely still exist
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And hopefully, there will be Microbe and Multicellular parasites.
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Anyone who has the desire, skill, and dedication to program that feature in is welcome to do so, and I know several users would appreciate it, but our current Dev team would prefer to focus on other features that will remain relevant longer and have broader impact.
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And macro ones aswell probably
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The current plan (mixed of what I know is the plan and how I would design it) is that both Microbe and Multicellular species continue to be stored as part of the world. However, their auto-evo is not run, or run much less frequently than the Macroscopic species (We could run the βdoes this Multicellular Species become Macroscopic?β question more frequently though). Also, they wonβt be individually visible, but will be used to determine if, where and how much to spawn βmicrobe cloudsβ and βmicrobial matsβ. I think we will treat Microbe and Multicellular Species the same in this respect.
The appearance of different kingdoms in particular is something I really want to represent!
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Considering that the autoevo run times have not been changed between microbe and multi due to the hassle thatβd be making autoevo skip every other or so microbe stage organism evo turns when youβre in multi, Iβm not very optimistic that, besides to emergence of new macro lineages from multicellular ones, weβll see any kind of microbe autoevo in the macro+ stages
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In the case of Microbe/Multicellular that was an issue because:
- There was a desire to also still have them compete over the same miches.
- When looking at the IRL timeline there isnβt necessarily a justification to have them run on a different timeline.
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I presume in macro+, the micro/multicell species would only mutate once every 50 myrs as it is like now, or more commonly?
I would expect something like a 1 to 10 ratio of auto-evo runs. Years can be adjusted to whatever we like.
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