That hurt my soul… good thing I’m a ginger so I don’t have one.
On a more serious note, it sucks that he left and took his posts down. We made some good progress in this thread and I hate to see it all go to waste because one person left.
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Aw, the Goat left?
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Why did he leave?
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Have been away for a while. Great to see a lot of creative thinking happening here! Now to catch up on the thread:
Maybe there could be a separate Editor in Thrive where the player could create new “premade” parts that could be later just dragged and dropped onto the creature. Regarding the realism of this, we could still use Spore’s mechanism; the bigger the change the bigger the time period.
For an example, if you were to add a foot to your creature, the game would calculate that such an evolution would take… let’s say 1 million years, to keep it simple. Then, when you leave the editor and continue your game, the AutoEvo (Or whatever it’s called nowadays) would simulate the evolution of one million years to other creatures. Now the time it takes to evolve such things is kept realistic, other species keep up with the player and the player gets to enjoy the new foot immediately.
Also; could there be an option to share the parts made by other players through some sort of a “workshop”, so even if you haven’t made any parts, you can search if other have made it.
Now, I’ve never been very active in the forums; not in the old one or the current one. So could someone explain who is GreatEscapeGoat?
If I remember correctly, this idea was scrapped. This was because in evolution, every generation should be an improvement from the earlier one, so, for example, an big addition such as extra arm probably won’t happen, because the arm needs to take a lot of generation as a useless pre-arm that’s only wasting energy and therefore lowering the chances of the creature from reproducing and passing down its genes
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Someone proposed that premade parts would work if you placed them and then had to wait multiple editor cycles for them to be fully formed. So for example you could place a good looking arm and then grow it by getting to the editor a few times.
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Alright its been a while and since I don’t want to read the all the posts which is the size of a Belgium. (Am I using the word “Belgium” correctly?) Anyways anyone want to summerize what happened via development to this thread?
Summary
In this thread we touched up on the possabilities of premade parts and if they would fit Thrive’s goals for editing or not. We mostly seemed to have settled on the idea of having these parts be on a seperate tab that would be like a “mods” folder that the player would have to actually add to themselves via a community “workshop” of sorts or make their own and post it on said workshop.
This then brought up the topic of having multiple editor tabs for bone, muscle, skin, etc. and also having a simple and complex tab so that you don’t need a degree in biology and anatomy in order to play the game.
This then brought us to the topic of using premade parts as more of reference tools than anything else.
Now I do recommend that you read the whole thread if you wish to participate in it but keep in mind that one of the main contributers to this thread deleted all of their posts and their account so you may see some posts that look like the person is crazy and responding to the voices in their head, but I assure you this is not the case. 
Thanks for the summary. 
Ok, we already discussed putting stuff on our creatures, but not taking them OFF. It would obviously take time to remove something as mutation goes on. But would it take mutation points to remove something, as you are “evolving” a specific part off, or would you be able to take a limited amount of mutation points from something and put it somewhere else? The latter seems a bit sling-shotty as you could, say add a tail to a creature earlier on, then remove the tail gradually to upgrade something else gradually, while getting mutation points through the game to evolve faster.
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That was also part of this thread and a few other threads you should read are:
https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/traits
https://community.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/possible-evolution-paths
The plan is that any change costs mutation points, and that includes also removing things. So taking “points” from something else to add new things faster wouldn’t work. And I like it that way as the mutation points represents the changes that your species has gained during the millions of years that is assumed to pass between editor sessions. Extreme evolutionary pressure (your species is dying rapidly) could be a feature in the game that would give you more mutation points.
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I wonder… is there something possible to allow the player to life steal mutation points or would that not make sense in the game, aka scientifically sound?
One mutation point is equal to 1% of the possible change an organism can make in a given evolutionary timeframe. It is impossible to steal such a quantity.
Any attempt to add this would be simply gamey, like the 25 MP for eating a nucleus.
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I remember someone mentioning that bacteria can exchange dna, so it could be realistic to get more MP if you swapped dna with another cell. But I don’t really like this idea as I would imagine that this should lead to random changes not ones that the player can just spend however they want.
Speaking of which would random bonus mutations everytime you enter the editor be a thing when you get past multicellular? Like when you enter it something already started to change before you spent any points. This could be good or bad depending on how its implemented.
I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea. So likely no, to not annoy the player when they want to do something specific.
Wasn’t something along the lines of sexual reproduction planned, where the player would need a specific organelle to swap DNA with another one of the same species in order to reproduce, to give a boost to mutation points? (just like how sexual reproduction allows a certain species to have more diversity, and therefore faster evolution)
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I think the last time sexual reproduction was discussed it was sort of decided that once the player evolves that they will get more MP per editor cycle. And to do that they would have to find another of their species in order to reproduce.
A bit unrelated, but is the auto-evo to AI cells included in this new version, or will it come later?