Picked endosymbiont organisms go extinct in one or two turns (0.7.0.0)

I am not sure if this is intended behavior, or if I am just bad at the game, which is why I am posting this here. I have noticed in my most recent playthrough that organisms picked to be endosymbionts always go extinct before the picked organelle is unlocked via endosymbiosis.

Within the same patch, the moment I engulf an organism, the population of that picked species drops precipitously. The drop in population is so dramatic that if the species in question does not go extinct immediately, it does the following turn. Oddly enough, the same observed behavior occurs for all other species, even though I did not engulf those other species.

This is very frustrating, as I am attempting to eventually unlock all of the Eukaryotic organelles, one per playthrough, in different playthroughs as a Prokaryote. Of course, being a Prokaryote means this will take several playthroughs. Unless unlocking Eukaryotic
organelles as a Prokaryote is no longer a viable option in the current game.

I have yet to try to do Endosymbiosis as a Eukaryote, so I will see if this issue persists. Maybe this might be an issue for the Prokaryotic side, or even a weird artefact just for me since I have over 10-year-old hardware. It could also be a skill issue, since I always play with non-standard settings to make games easier.

In any case, I hope this post also helps someone else, either by engaging with the community, or getting a laugh at a poor noob who needs to quote-unquote “get gud”.

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A species that is the target of an endosymbiosis action gets no penalties or bonuses to its survivability. Except one: when you engulf an endosymbiont that species doesn’t get a population penalty for dying. So the player engulfing that species doesn’t harm it. If that species happens to die out while you are doing the endosymbiosis process, then that was just unfortunate. Though, there is one way to game the system a bit by not moving very much between generations. That allows cells that were previously spawned to stay spawned in so even if the target species goes extinct there can be members of it still hanging around.

When originally planning the endosymbiosis feature there was talk about a feature to make sure the endosymbiont doesn’t go extinct too easily. I did not have enough time to implement that when adding the endosymbiosis feature to the game, meaning that it was not added in the release that added endosymbiosis. And well as I’m always busy with high priority stuff to fix or either getting major features into the game (as we are trying to complete the microbe stage), I haven’t had the time to work on this. And no other programmer has volunteered their time so this is still undone. For reference here’s the issue about this on GitHub:

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I mean it probably also shouldn’t be like that the endosymbiosis target species is completely immortal for the duration of the process. Extinctions of such species should still happen once in a while.

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I feel like giving a population benefit to the endosymbiote would be fine but wierd if it makes them immortal, would also help the issue if endosymbiosis targeted the genus rather than the species (as long as the members of that genus carries the correct protein). this just gives that player a bit more wiggle room , if they evolve and split it doesn’t mean your out of luck. like a small boost to reproduction would be fine just don’t want to be screwed by what seems like RNG genociding a species that was doing fine when you started the process.

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The thing with the endosymbiosis process is that the player could artificially extend it, in turn potentially manipulating the way life evolves on a large scale if the system isn’t tweaked properly. So it needs good balancing.

Welcome to the forum!

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exactly, you could theoretically protect a species by never actually endosymbiosing them it might actually be good if the population boon is only given if you actually did the deed thus ensuring that you have to do it to protect them, which forces the player to progress the situation

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That’s a good solution. Though endosymbiosis doesn’t seem to be of high priority at the present so don’t expect much more changes related to it.

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Development focus is currently to finish the microbe stage and to do that we have a roadmap that has all of the features that have been selected to be worked on:

So anything not in the 0.8.x and 0.9.x roadmap features lists is not planned to be worked on before calling the microbe stage done. As a result anything else will take an extremely long time (if ever) to be worked on, unless someone specifically volunteers to work on it.

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And up until the end of the “evolution stages” development, all volunteering efforts will be put on finishing multicellular and aware, not going back to microbe stage most likely.

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How do you know? Are you secretly a mind reader? The key part of volunteer work is that it is volunteer, which means they aren’t forced to work on anything. So they can completely freely pick whatever they want.

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With microbe stage being ought to become the very 1st “completed stage”, it can be expected that volunteers will choose to work on that stage less frequently after 1.0.0, additionally since there’s going to be far less gaps of content in need of being filled.

so if i Volunteered i could do it, great now i just need to learn how to code :thinking:

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That usually takes a longer while to learn…

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While the current game version is no longer 0.7.0.0, completing endosymbiosis is still troublesome for me. I suspect it may be still be troublesome for other players (unless I am just unlucky).

I had to make two separate playthroughs for trying to get a proper endosymbiosis. In both playthroughs, I utilized Hydrogen Sulfide. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that I have not tried to unlock this organelle yet via endosymbiosis. The second reason is that I want to see just how broken an organism can be in a patch with Hydrogen Sulfide concentrations increasing from the unbalanced vent eruptions.

In the first playthrough, I managed to get to fourteen turns, but I gave up endosymbiosis initially. This was due to two previously selected endosymbionts going extinct one turn after the endosymbiosis process began.

So, I began another playthrough to specifically start endosymbiosis as soon as possible. Like in my first playthrough, the selected endosymbionts went extinct just as the process began. I even made sure my organism had five Chemosynthesizing Proteins so that future possible endosymbionts will have lower time frame for endosymbiosis. Thus, I gave up. Again.

Normally, I do not like leaving playthroughs “unfinished”, meaning not going through all twenty turns. I decided, why not at least “finish” the first playthrough?

Going back to the first playthrough, I noticed how high H2S gets when a vent eruption goes on for several turns. In my game, I believe it almost went to 100; I am not sure, but I believe the unbalanced vent eruptions may have contributed to the picked endosymbiont surviving for a longer period.

I also made sure not to engulf the targeted organism as quickly as possible, instead waiting for it to reproduce via passive reproduction. I have noticed that if I am approximately the same size as the endosymbiont, or slightly bigger, the organism gets more time than my own to reproduce. When I am the same size as the targeted organism, I eventually become bigger and slower due to passive reproduction. Although the chased organism also becomes bigger and slower, eventually, it splits and becomes faster than me again.

Fortunately, I was able to complete Chemoplast endosymbiosis as a Prokaryote. I do believe luck is a large factor, as the turn I completed endosymbiosis, the chosen organism’s population became so low it would have become extinct the next turn.

So, yes, I do think a population benefit for endosymbionts would be helpful for players.

I agree.

I like this as well. I do think the Chemoreceptor might need to be modified to find genera as well as individual species to have better synergy with the suggestion above, but it might be an unnecessary change to the Chemoreceptor. It depends on what the developers want to add, of course.

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In my 0.8.0 playthrough I had one vent biome with concentrations of around 250, most likely due to a poor state of chemosynthesis cells (not many of them were around).

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