Now photosynthesis is absolutely imbalanced, it produces a huge amount of glucose, which is why there is no reason to refuse it when playing as a predator, you can create a superbacterium that will be both a super successful atotroph and a super successful heterotroph. I have some ideas to fix this:
(boring and non realistic) just decrease in speed from photosynthetic organelles
Reduce the efficiency of photosynthesis by 2 times and increase the light in the ice patch by up to 70%
Reduce the efficiency of photosynthesis by 2 times and make it square dependent.
AnthropocenianAge
(AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)
2
Correct me if I am wrong, but how exactly is this different from what it was before in 0.8.0.0? I am not chastising you, quite the opposite, really. To me, Photosynthesis plays the same as it always has. In fact, I almost always play it once in a while because, to me at least, it is the more relaxing way to play. Now, I have not looked closely at the numbers, so I cannot say how it has changed from before. @hhyyrylainen, have the numbers for Photosynthesis changed at all?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
3
The majormost problem with photosynthesis might be that all cells have roughly the same metabolism speed, meaning that photosynthesis in-game is made to support cells with a relatively high metabolism rate. Look at how high are the CO2 levels in-game as opposed to irl. To make them more realistic, one would need to introduce a way for species to lower their metabolism to a slog so that they can sustain themselves off so nerfed photosynthesis.
AnthropocenianAge
(AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)
4
I thought Oxygen now plateaus at 35%, which occurred during the Carboniferous. It can go even higher than that after being capped?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
5
CO2 only makes up less than tenth a percent of our atmosphere…
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AnthropocenianAge
(AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)
6
My bad. I was mixing up CO2 with O2 for a moment…
aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
7
And in a regular in-game world, CO2 levels usually do not stray below 10%, meaning they’re hundreds of times higher than those of Earth’s.
I think there was a slight buff in 0.8.0 due to complaints about previous nerfs making photosynthesis feel like totally useless (it was done at the same time as many eukaryotic parts got buffs as there were complaints that the unlocks system didn’t make it worthwhile to unlock them). There’s been also a complaint that chloroplast is not any better compared to thylakoids so I was planning on giving like a 20% buff to the chloroplasts for the next release.
I’m pretty sure all the changes to the dynamic compounds system makes CO2 levels stay much lower than before. So I dare say that this is outdated information. (Though patches with just one or no photosynthesisers still stay on pretty high CO2 levels, a bit over the 10% mark)
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
9
It’s still pretty high when compared with the real world.
I can guess that greenhouse effect for co2 will need to be nerfed for all homeworlds not to turn into venuses.
You can have a membrane that is more rigid and does not move, thereby reducing ATP consumption. In general, I would also like to have a slider that reduces the speed and costs of it, this will be useful for species that have too slow a metabolism to move at a standard speed.
Do you know where the parameter in code responsible for the amount of light in the patch is?
And what if we make a slider that adjusts the efficiency of photosynthesis? This would leave both those who like casual photosynthesis and those who consider photosynthesis too imbalanced satisfied.
I mean, the relevant IRL equivalent option is already in the game: it’s the different cell walls, rather than the membrane rigidity slider.
If the desire is to make a photosynthesizing predator unlikely or impossible, the trick is probably in rebalancing photosynthesis and the cell walls. Cell walls already block you from engulfing, so you would make sure you cannot both be a mobile predator and be able to afford your osmoregulation cost just from photosynthesis.
If that is the objective.
P.S. IRL plant cells for example don’t bother trying to prevent water from diffusing into them. It just flows in, the cell walls are what keeps the cells from swelling so much they explode.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
19
One way to achieve that would be to make photosynthesis way more “niche”, as in requiring far more specializations for it to be viable for your species to use at all, with these adaptations (or atleast many of them) conflicting with a predatory lifestyle.
I like the idea of adding in a metabolism speed slider, I think it’s an elegant way to make sessility more present in the game, but honestly, with the addition of tolerances there’s a lot of fiddly sliders. Complexity does need to be kept down.