Perspective

I think Thrive could gain a lot from perspective. Here’s what I mean. Humans evolved to deal with small things. The exact amount of cattle isn’t really important if you have enough anyway. When humans became more civilized we realized that these numbers were, in fact, beneficial for this kind of society.
Now, please shift your imagination to an alien race in the early years of its intelligence. On this planet, this species coexists with a hive-like entity. This entity sends out the organisms that live inside of it in groups of 1-100. All of these different numbers tell our hypothetical intelligent organism what the hive wants, needs, and predicts. Fast forward a million years and this hypothetical organism is developing a number system far beyond the reaches of a human mind.
This is obviously an exaggeration, but something like this could scientifically happen.
When humans look up at the night sky, we see hundreds of thousands of stars. When this hypothetical organisms observe the night sky, what they might see instead is an exact amount of stars. Humans fear the unknown, this is rooted deep in our minds, but if we didn’t fear this, this would change our perspective of the universe so fundamentally it is hard to say what we would do.
This theoretical organism may not fear the empty void that is space and I’m not sure how thrive could deal with this, if at all, but either way, it’s fascinating to talk about.

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There have been many discussions about simulating alien psychology, and I think that pragmatism will result in Thrive’s simulated sentience being virtually (in two senses of that word) human. By this I mean that the Thrive creatures will do things like fight wars, seek wealth, or make alliances. They will probably be curious and creative like humans because humans are the animals who make and play this game.

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I think this organism could have a cultural trait, “Embrace the Infinite” or something, by way of its large numbers. It seems a bit of a band-aid solution, but it could be applied procedurally.

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@Solitarian, agreed, however I think it should be noted that humans have different psychologies, some of which are radically different from each other. Also, people might actively try to have a different psychology when making a virtual civilization.