Currently, it looks to me like photosynthesis is downright useless. Thylakoids are massively underproductive, to the point where, in most cases, they’re actually a negative to glucose production. I don’t remember if I tested this against a completely sessile cell, but still, thylakoids seem downright useless. The most effective photosynthetic cell I ever managed to create in the current version was a single thylakoid, with nothing else - this was one of the few which actually produced a net positive of glucose. Generally, it seems that larger cells are heavily disincentivised in the current version.
On a less ambiguous note, I have a bug to report about turning off the day/night cycle. When you’re photosynthetic, and the day/night cycle applies, you’re given a warning that you cannot produce enough glucose during the day to survive the 10,000 second long night. I assume this is an implementation issue.
Yeah I’ve noticed that too, specifically that chloroplast gives you no extra glucose whatsoever, and that’s it’s incredibly difficult to make a large predatory plant, without having to depend on something else to offset the cost.
But then I’ve also realized you’re probably supposed to use
Metabolosomes and mitochondria to process the glucose, which made my life so much easier, but also made me realize that the game needs to show more processes your cell does in the editor.
since currently the only way to know if the part added did anything is how much atp it gives you, this resulted in me avoiding most of prokaryotic organelles because it said my atp balance was lower so I assumed it made my cell worse, or did nothing.
Well, this feature is designed with creatures that don’t move at all in mind
So it probably works better with sessile species. It would sense for it feel not all that great with primarily motile creatures.
Also, question how does the day/night cycle thing in the editor work? My cell never seems to change at all when I used it as a plant.
the best plant I made also eats rust, but when making a plant, you should create a good balance between cytoplasm and chloroplast. Use Metabolosomes to process sugar better. During the night you can either try storing as much glucose as possible or hunt nearby species, when your small use mucilage jets as your primary form of transportation, it doesn’t use much energy and it’s fast; If you’re a big eukaryote cell though it’s best to use pulling cilla and short bursts using flagella. It is critical to move only when strictly necessary or when you sense glucose, if you move too much and haven’t eaten enough to show for it you could starve.
I’d like to note some things about your large predatory plant attempts:
It’s completely reasonable for large predatory plants to be disincentivised. After all, the closest you get on Earth are jungle plants which supplement their nutrients with trapped insects due to poor nutrient contents in the soil. But I don’t know how closely that highly specialised and macroscopic example matches to prokaryotic and eukaryotic photosynthesisers.
It’s reasonable for adding photosynthesis to reduce ATP. What’s unreasonable is the addition of photosynthesis reducing the amount of glucose you produce. I don’t know if that’s because I didn’t add in respiration along with it, but…
Aerobic respiration is pretty useless anyway. Compared to anaerobic respiration, it’s vastly inferior, even though anaerobic respiration doesn’t have an organelle form. This is definitely a balancing issue. Thrive’s balance is pretty poor right now, and even on Easy it’s tough to get anywhere, especially if you’re big.
That’s a general issue anyway. Anaerobic respiration is just better than aerobic, but it doesn’t scale to a eukaryote, since it doesn’t have an organelle so you just have to spam it.
On the subject of the day/night cycle: assuming you have it turned on, the editor gives you four options; day, night, current (the time when you entered the editor and thus when you leave), and average. These have different levels of sunlight. Different sunlight levels change the effectiveness of your photosynthesis, of course, so changing the time of day will result in your cell’s glucose production changing in the compound summary. The compound summary will also tell you whether you can produce enough glucose during the day to survive the night.
Have you tried the new process panel button at the end of the right panel in the editor? That got a bunch of new stuff in the latest release to better understand what is going on.
It’s also quite often more useful to look at equilibrium balance numbers than max speed. Because the situation is basically always that your cell can process more glucose than it can produce. But the key point is that your cell doesn’t have to process glucose at max speed to fulfill the ATP need.
If you are looking at the max speed balance, then what I said above applies: you add glucose production but also potential glucose usage. And most of the time all organelles can process glucose faster than produce it (but this only happens if your ATP balance is not positive at maximum speed of all processes).
Of course, because otherwise it would be useless to have these buttons in the editor to check how things work during the night as compared to the day.
If people keep complaining about this we will get a hydrogenase nerf in the next release…
And the nerfs will continue until morale improves /jk
Well, there’s your problem, photosynthesis relies on CO2, and Aerobic respiration relies on oxygen. But are we talking 2% or 10%? In any case, at the oxygen levels I usually see after a few rounds of photosynthesis, aerobic is more productive than anaerobic respiration. Even before then, it is more efficient, producing more ATP per glucose.
IIRC, the oxy’s like 4% and the CO2 is 2%. I’m not sure. The system’s definitely working incorrectly because the total of oxy and CO2 is changing quite a lot and has dropped from the initial 8% CO2 only.
A different set of algorithms for changing compound amounts. It’s expanded to all compounds instead of just a few, but it’s also just different effects. And not tested, as you can see.
Hopefully these problems with the atmosphere will be fixed by 0.8.0. Experimental mode is currently a large notch harder/more annoying than the regular mode, which to my knowledge is the first time it became so different from the regular experience of Thrive.
To be fair, there’s nothing on experimental mode that says what it actually contains. My only guess when I ticked it was that it maybe added a new part or something.
I’d suggest expanding the UI so when you tick experimental mode it shows what the experiments actually are.
(Also, in respects to the game being unbalanced in experimental: even in non-experimental, the game still produces an awful lot of small cells. In my non-experimental run, with the rules for no passive compounds, you’d see a 1 cytoplasm 1 rusticyanin cell go extinct, only for an identical cell to evolve elsewhere, and I also saw 2 concurrent single-hex cytoplasms. Most of the cells in that run were either forks of the player race or tiny minimalist mixovores.)
