I was thinking more of sliders for adjusting planet speed, but your ideas works equally well.
Sliders could also work alongside presets.
1 Like
The microbe stage is planned to last 20 generations. It doesn’t leave like any room for customizing how long an event takes as otherwise you are basically just playing the full microbe stage like on a snowball planet.
And it would be pretty pointless in terms of development effort to have an option to change glaciation event duration range from 3-6 generations to 4-8.
1 Like
So can multiple glaciation events occur (not at the same time) if the oxygen level “peaks” multiple times in a playthrough?
1 Like
That’s what happened on Earth, there wasn’t just one snowball period; Yes, it should be able to occur at multiple times, like vent eruptions aren’t just once per a vent patch.
2 Likes
No, it’s just a one and done thing. Otherwise you’d be stuck the entire microbe stage under ice.
3 Likes
I see. I guess the event is programmed to occur when CO2 levels fall below a certain level?
1 Like
Actually for some reason it seems snowball events are triggered by rising oxygen levels, so that’s how it is going to be implemented in Thrive as well.
So it will technically be possible to trigger the event multiple times if one managed to create a new O2 boom?
No, the event is literally programmed to trigger just once because it basically delays all photosynthesis builds for like 5 generations to not be able to really progress (due to the massive debuffs). So getting it multiple times would just make the microbe stage artificially longer randomly and probably be very annoying if you just wanted to try to play the game.
2 Likes
I see. This is a good nerf to photosynthesis, though we could use some also being applied to the overall process (which may happen thanks to domin2ktr’s work).
1 Like
- Balance
When playing Thrive, there are 2 main types of metabolism for surface biomes: heterotrophy and photosynthesis. And sooner or later you will decide to combine them, the game mechanics themselves hint at this: predation has an interesting, dynamic gameplay, but has big problems with energy and glucose, and photosynthetic gameplay, on the contrary, does not have problems with glucose and energy, but at the same time has a slower gameplay. Photosynthetic-predatory organism has all the advantages of both predatory and photosynthetic organisms without the disadvantages. As a result, you destroy absolutely all ecosystems of areas with more than 20% light. And even making osmoregulation twice as expensive and making day-night cycles as long as possible (and turning up other settings to the most hardcore values), you will only need one chloroplast for full autotrophic nutrition of a mobile predatory organism and this build will still be absolutely OP. And even if you crank up all the difficulty settings to max it will still be incredibly overpowered. - Realism
Moreover, it is unrealistic (since photosynthesis in real life is extremely inefficient) and encourages an unrealistic startegy of a completely autonomous (not dependent on obtaining energy from food) heterotroph-photosynthesizer, since it has all the advantages of both phototrophs and heterotrophs without the disadvantages. Although in reality, the niches of heterotrophic and phototrophic organisms are incompatible, and autotrophic-heterotrophic organisms that exist are essentially just heterotrophs that receive only a small part of their energy from photosynthesis and they still need to eat other organisms to survive and obtain energy.
@Deus What do you think about this?
3 Likes
The main problem is the lack of metabolism modification. If this existed, we could make photosynthesis only viable for organisms with a very slow metabolism.
3 Likes
Thing is that the split between adaptations for autotrophy and adaptations for heterotrophy are much less pronounced at the unicellular, microscopic scale. I found one study breaking down mixotrophy (cells which combine elements of heterotrophy and autotrophy) in marine, oceanic communities, and found this quote:
“Through the microscopic enumeration of cells that exhibit both chlorophyll autofluorescence and fluorescence due to ingested prey (9, 23), mixotrophic plankton have been detected in nutrient-rich coastal waters (12, 14, 24), in coastal and open-ocean oligotrophic systems where dissolved nutrient availability is low (25, 26), and in light-limited polar waters where mixotrophy may serve as a key survival tactic for overwintering (22, 27). Within these environments, mixotrophs account for an estimated 40 to >80% of the nanoplankton (2 to 20 µm) and 35 to 95% of detected bacterivory (25, 26).”
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2100916119?utm
So mixotrophic microbes are actually incredibly common, and are responsible for a significant chunk of predation at the microscopic level in several ecosystems. Many microbes actually rely fully on autotrophy during the day, and at night, become more heterotrophic. Many microbes use autotrophy as a bonus while being predominantly heterotrophic. It’s a spectrum, but it is extremely present in marine environments.
The split between autotrophy and heterotrophy becomes more pronounced as life scales up for multiple reasons:
- Photosynthetic organisms must maximize surface area, often resulting in flimsy appendages which are incredibly delicate and not well suited for movement, combat, or adaptations which make skin thicker or covered. Small cells, who are constantly exposed to the environment due to their shape and size, don’t have to worry about that.
- Photosynthesis requires constant light to be viable, which makes defensive measures, like burrowing and hiding, really difficult to do without suffering.
- Those factors, combined with photosynthesis being inefficient, means that keeping up the adaptations necessary for heterotrophy and the adaptations necessary for photosynthesis can be in conflict.
That means we’ll probably have to handle this question pretty particularly in the multicellular and macroscopic stage, but there are ways of doing that in the mechanics of those stages - adjacency bonuses for multicellular body plans encouraging specialization, some basic sort of surface area measure, etc.
So in a way, nerfing photosynthesis so that it is only viable for non-motile microbes is somewhat unrealistic; mixotrophy is a very viable and ubiquitous strategy in unicellular microbes. This doesn’t mean that tweaks to balancing are completely out of the window, but we haven’t really had much feedback recently saying that photosynthesis is really overpowered from a majority of the community to justify a significant nerfing (we’ve had a lot of those discussions in the past with the community, believe me).
So I again think that other facets of the simulation - varying light conditions, the day and night cycles, underlying metabolic processes - are currently better ways at making photosynthesis a unique metabolic pathway.
8 Likes
Welp that means that for now photosynthesis needs to further nerfs I presume.
1 Like
In fact, the changes I proposed in my patch are not as radical as they may seem at first glance, photosynthesis is already quite productive, reducing its productivity by 2 times will not make the photosynthesizer build incredibly difficult and mixotrophy will still be playable. In fact, photosynthesizers have bigger problems with storage than with glucose production.
This is a mod that reduces photosynthesis efficiency as per my pull request, please test it and give feedback.
I’m also wondering: will I get into the credits if my PR is accepted?
1 Like
I am fairly sure all contributors get credited.
1 Like
Though people need to ask specifically as we don’t have a wiki updater person who would have time to keep track of whenever someone makes their first contribution and then adding their name.
Except if I remember right the last buff to photosynthesis was less than 100%, meaning that your nerf suggestion makes photosynthesis worse than when there were last common complaints that photosynthesis was too difficult to play as. So we’d just go back to the average general player having a hard time making photosynthesis builds work.
And that’s not something I want because I’m the one who gets to read the endless complaints on Discord. Yes, I know it is kind of arbitrary to block changes that would probably cause more support requests, but I think I’m entitled to that until someone else takes over from me the as the support guy who answers everyone on our discord when they have a problem.
3 Likes
And such a takeover is most likely not happening until more devteam members can be afforded to stay as part-time of full-time employees of RG.
I think the problem is that players don’t realize they need more storage space by putting in more thylakoids/chloroplasts to survive the night. I think there just needs to be a better photosynthesis tutorial that explains how to make photosynthetic organisms. (You’re planning on reworking the tutorial, so that would be appropriate.)