And it is my opinion that your points kiiinda don’t fit in with the scope of this thread
It’s a dev build, so is glitchy. The main releases are often lacking in save destroying glitches and are quite balanced. We (Patreons) just get an unbalanced and potentially buggy preview before everyone else can play a balanced and stable version of the update
I mean, if one wants to argue being a plant is boring/waste of time, someone else could argue that being a cell is boring/waste of time. Different people find different things enjoyable/worth while. Not everyone is gonna enjoy x stage of certain gameplay loops, that’s true for any game, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that adding a certain gameplay loop is “a waste of time.” But yes, I think it should definitely be discussed if it SHOULD be implemented or not, that’s what this whole thread is for isn’t it?
Why is it that, when I say “plant strategy view bad”, people automatically assume that I’m trying to claim “all plant gameplay bad”?
When did I ever say that?
Let me spell this out for the people in the back…
I
want
to
play
as
plant
I am probably going to put more hours into multicell plant gameplay once it’s out, than over half the playerbase of this game will.
I am very invested in how the gameplay of plants in thrive work, and that is the only reason I am in this thread.
When I say “plant strategy view”, while taking the time to put it in quotation marks, I am specifically calling attention to the fact that we are talking about the “strategy view” portion of that statement, AND NOT JUST PLANTS IN GENERAL.
I have attempted to be very clear about this distinction in my wording, from the very start. Obviously, it appears I was not clear enough.
I hope I have made it easier to notice this time.
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Im now going to go through the responses that have been posted since my last comment, starting with the people who are actually trying to engage in the conversation.
[quote=“PositiveTower”]
Isn’t the strategy mode for plants kinda similar to managing a civilization in later stages of the game anyways? [/quote]
Yes, it is. That’s essentially the reason it was taken as a serious option in the first place.
However, the plan is for biological changes to be locked once you enter the awakening stage, therefore there are issues that wouldn’t apply to the later civ stages, that will affect “plant strategy view”.
Additionally, all organisms that reach those civ stages will be transferred into strategy view, universally, whereas only plants would have a strategy view in multicell.
These two points are the root cause of some of the issues, that I have already stated:
Firstly, the capability of the player to go from being a sessile plant like organism (apparently requiring a strategy view), to being a motile organism (which would not require a strategy view) and vice versa.
This is an issue, because figuring out how the interaction (going between controlling a single individual and an entire species each editor session) takes up development efforts both in the conceptual phase, and in the bug fixing phase in order for it to work properly.
There is currently no plans as for how the transition should even work, as far as I am aware.
Secondly, the capability of the player to create an organism that is both motile AND sessile, once the caste and life cycle mechanics are added.
In case you haven’t read about these yet, the caste system is supposed to allow us to create multiple forms within a species. Think like how ants have worker and soldier castes, or even just how sexual dimorphism in a species like lions works. The caste system will allow you to split your organism into multiple forms each with their own attributes and behaviors.
So what would happen if I wanted to create an organism with two castes, one which is motile and one which digs itself into the ground to become a plant? Would I be in first person, controlling the motile caste, or would I be in strategy view, controlling the entire species?
Similarly to the first issue, figuring out how it should work (and then making it work) eats up dev time, and there currently has not been any attempt to do so.
I’ve stated other issues, and there are probably other unforeseeable issues as well, but these are the ones that directly relate to your question.
This sounds like a reasonable enough compromise. So long as it’s applied universally, then it’s no longer a drain on resources to patch up a gameplay dead end, but a mechanic tied to the actual core gameplay.
The question then becomes: do we actually want to have a strategy view in all these early stages? Which is a completely different discussion, probably deserving of it’s own thread, unless it already has one.
This is actually one of the points I made.
Not everyone is going to enjoy playing as plants regardless, therefore there is no point in trying to shoehorn a new gameplay mechanism just to make them entertaining.
I’m likely going to enjoy it either way. I’d just rather it not add to the content bloat, for the sake of more streamlined development.
The core gameplay of thrive is to go through each of the stages in order to reach ascension.
A mechanic that applies to organisms that cannot reach ascension, and nothing else, is categorically a waste of time, assuming the goal is to complete the game as efficiently as possible.
That is actually the stated reason that underwater stone age civs will not be given their own special technologies.
They are stuck in the Stone Age, therefore giving them special underwater whale-stables would be a waste of time, for example.
They can’t reach ascension, therefore all they will get is technologies that would be added to the game anyway.
It seems logically inconsistent to then give a strategy view mechanic, given that they also cannot reach ascension (unless the plantoid thread comes up with something), and that doing so causes issues (which I have firmly established several times over).
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The rest of the responses below are either complete misunderstandings, flagrant strawmen, or mis-characterizations of my statements as purely opinion and nothing more. It pains me to see names that I have recognized and respected in this list.
My intentions are not to insult, nor degrade anyone. However, I will also refrain from sugar coating my thoughts here, just for the sake of sparing feelings.
I expected better from each of you, therefore my criticism of your comments will be harsher than the ones previous.
The scope of this thread is “plant gameplay”.
The gameplay that has been suggested for plants is a “strategy mode”.
My points are about how the “plant strategy mode” will cause issues concerning other planned systems.
Referencing the existence of other systems does not constitute a breach of scope for this thread, as they are directly related to how the “plant strategy mode” will function within the game.
Referencing underwater civs does not constitute a breach of scope, as I am using them purely as a frame of reference and as an example to explain a point.
You have been here long enough to understand these things.
You managed to miss the point of my statement here so hard, that you ended up in opposite land.
I am using the patron build as a POSITIVE EXAMPLE of how sessile gameplay is being allowed to exist in the game, without needing a “plant strategy mode”.
You passively receive phosphate from the water, meaning you can create a well-defended cell that doesn’t move, while still being able to reproduce.
that is exactly how I have been saying plant gameplay can function, and it is already being added to the game.
That’s irrelevant.
He joined the conversation. when his statement was challenged, he painted my entire position as an invalid opinion, and refused to address any of my actual statements, other than to nitpick tiny portions of what I said, for reasons that have nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
I don’t care what their job description is, or how important they are to development. If someone behaves like this, I am going to call them out on it.
I don’t have time to read every single post everywhere. I feel like a lot of the time I’m the only developer who really even tries to read most things and reply when it’s important. As such I can’t debate the finer points of your posts. I just don’t have the time or mental energy to do that, and if I attempted it would negatively impact my development of Thrive.
I still stand by my statement that your claim, that the strategy view for plant gameplay is not important, is your opinion and not an objective statement. That’s because by showing how much people talk about it, by definition means that many people are interested in that gameplay style.
Not once have I disputed that people find it important.
The popularity of an idea doesn’t change the fact that it is a mechanic entirely separate from the stated core progression of thrive.
Therefore, it is not important to the completion of that core progression.
The amount of people who like and talk about something, doesn’t change what that thing is.
…and until someone shows how a sessile plant can reach awakening and beyond, it is CATEGORICALLY a side grade that will not intersect with the rest of the game.
You cannot refute this point. No one can.
Because. That. Is. Not. Opinion.
Even if it was, you continue to ignore the fact that all of my other points WILL need to be addressed. Period.
You can stick your head in the sand and refuse to acknowledge them outright, but they will come up. It doesn’t matter what my opinion is about them, someone will have to figure them out.
The caste system is a thing. Lifecycles is a thing. Switching from motile to sessile on a whim is a thing.
Are these things less popular than plant strategy?
I’m not asking for a point by point.
If you don’t have the time for that, then don’t.
…but you are making it seem like you are refusing to even acknowledge these points were even said, and using “opinions” as a cudgel to shut me up.
Stop. Doing. That.
Your mental state is not the only one that matters.
It would have been more professional, if you had simply allowed the conversation to continue, instead of coming in with “akshully, thas ur opinon”.
It’s degrading.
Even if you’re correct, and people misunderstood you (which it appears they may have) you have to think of two things.
I would like to point out that on Thrive Talk: Plantoid Species I have came up with how plants could go beyond awakening, and am still looking for feedback.
I have some questions about plant gameplay:
How do we define if the player species is a plant, or an animal?
Is it simply the presence of chloroplasts? I don’t see why an animal couldn’t theoretically evolve chloroplasts of some form after not being sessile, when conditions are rough enough, although, admittedly, this has never happened IRL (Excluding some slugs that have stolen chloroplasts, but that doesn’t count).
In the editor, when you transition from microbe to multicellular, is that when being a plant would be locked in? Would the player have to make a choice to be a plant, if so, what choice would that be? A choice of menus?
Could the player accidentally turn themselves into a plant, simply by abusing chloroplasts?
Currently you can actually be highly mobile and still have chloroplasts, can you not?
What would be in the gameplay to stop someone who was previously a plant, from manually changing their species into an animal, since natural selection does not apply to the player?
I think that the question is not whetever or not is something a “plant” or an “animal”, but if it’s sessile or not.
I’ve seen a post on (I think) dev forums sometime ago already where it was said that you could evolve a “sticky flaggela” of some kind that you could then attach to a rock. When that happens, you’d have the option to become a sessile organism.
Also, chloroplasts IRL are quite heavy, which is why there are little to no animals have adopted them. I guess that in multicellular this effect will be more noticable than in microbe (see Euglena organism).
What would there be then, to stop the player from just, making their plant no longer sessile?
Obviously this couldn’t happen in real life, but many things the player can do can’t happen in real life.
I guess that It’d cost a LOT of time and MPs to allow a player-controlled plant to even move (which stems from the idea that, the more the player has evolved in one direction, the harder it will be for them to move towards another direction in their evolution).
There is nothing which defines the player’s species as a plant. When referring to single-celled organisms, it’s essentially a meaningless distinction applied to cells we associate with plants. At a macroscopic level, it’s a question of whether an organism survives to reproduce by conserving energy as much as possible and feeding off of whatever resources happen to be nearby, or by moving around to seek out the most effective resources to feed on.
There’s nothing to stop the player going from one to another, but the devs have specified that they are going to ensure that it’s not possible to become a plant with a brain, or anything like that. The reason is that it’s not possible to get enough energy for a creature with a nervous system, muscles, a brain, etc. to move around with just the energy from the sun. It would be possible to have some overlap between plants and animals (such as those creatures that steal chloroplasts), but they’d have to be one or the other. There’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t have a microbe with chloroplasts evolve into an animal with chloroplasts on its skin. I’m sure a lot of player creatures would have that, and they would get energy directly from sunlight, but not enough to survive on for long.
earth plants can’t have neurons because of their cell structure and the material they encase their cytoplasm in, corals, which are animals that use algae to take a similar niche to plants, have a chain link fence for a brain, but they do have neurons, and only most of them also filter feed. the main difference between plants and photosynthesis-specialized corals, aside from their lineage, is that one has soft, membranous tissue, while the other only has hard, walled tissue. neurons probably shouldn’t be locked behind not having chloroplasts, not being sessile, or not using cellulose, but behind having membranes that can stretch without breaking, having something to get signals from, and having something to send signals to. quite a lot of earth plants produce more than enough energy to sustain a small collection of neurons[1], and most plants would only need a couple thousand to benefit from it in terms of making themselves taste bad faster, getting poisons ready faster, being able to use some cells to make tiny darts they throw in the direction of leaves that are getting eaten, cutting off circulation to infected body parts faster, and so many other things. so, most plants, though it would cost a bit of energy, could definitely afford to have the same level of nervous system as corals, but no plants have neurons, and even if it wasn’t able to benefit them and they had soft tissues at least one would have a neuron. so the most sensical way to limit players’ ability to have a brain as a plant is simply not allowing cells with a wall and no membrane to have axons, and make neurons be more beneficial the more glucose they can absorb
(the human brain is billions of cells, weighs between 3 and 5 pounds, and only uses 19.4 watts an hour, so a few thousand cells with the same energy demand as human neurons should be no problem for something that gets as much energy as a basil plant) ↩︎
The point of having nerve cells is to transmit information at a high speed. It should be locked behind muscles. Hormones* (signalling agent?) carry information fast enough if you only have the other tissues. And yes, muscles require cells that can stretch. Corals probably had jellyfish-like ancestors that used muscles.
I believe I once read an article debating that the root systems of plants were analogous to a decentralized nervous system, and that plants may in fact be sentient, even more so if a plant evolved to have a centralized root system - I linked it somewhere on the forums, though I can’t recall the exact discussion
Mentioning it cus it seemed loosely relevant to Willow talking about plants lack of neurons. I believe the article was backed up by some evidence, though I think it was still largely speculative in nature
Anyway, not saying that we should have thinking plants, but was an interesting tidbit I figured I’d mention
Edit: if that didn’t make sense, I apologize. my sleep deprived brain thought it did lol
plants do actually have cells to transmit information over long distances, but they don’t do it fast enough to be specialized in that function enough to be called neurons, and they’re mostly for telling other plants connected to the same fungi to start tasting bad or to start losing/growing leaves when they get eaten or daylight hours start getting longer or shorter
As was mentioned previously, plants (or any other sessile organism) would probably play like a tower defense if they aren’t going to be played like a civilization. For now I am going to ignore how the AI would play this as that is its own thread. What I actually want to talk about is how this tower defense gameplay would actually work. For this, I would like to take inspiration from the plant game mentioned previously, and Creeper World.
In tower defense games, you place towers, and try to prevent enemies from getting to your objective. Plants though, are a unique case, as they are both the tower, and the objective. This is where Creeper World comes in. In Creeper World, you build towers to fight back the Creeper fluid, which can destroy your towers if they get too close. In each level, your goal is to get totems, and power them. Already, there are many ways this could be applied to a Plant Tower Defense.
I propose the following idea: we take from the plant game and make plant parts placeable during the gameplay. Similarly to creeper world, once you place a part, it will take time to be built as the resources get sent to that area of the sessile organism. Different pre-made plant parts would be placed in the editor, where you would make different parts as well as decide where you could place place them onto other parts, which would take the place of a body editor for any creature that used this system.
Instead of totems that you would have to power, there might be burrowing organisms in the soil, along with nitrificating bacteria that you could negotiate with so you would want to navigate your roots towards them, and rocks and other obstacles that you would want to navigate your body plan around whilst maximizing energy production.
Now, earlier, it was stated that most plants cannot move, however, that is actually incorrect, as there are plants like venus flytrap. As plants and other sessile organisms would function like a tower defense, movement would be your abilities.
With this, the only feature missing would be a way to speed up the time, so that you don’t have to watch as a plant takes days to grow. Because insects would move at lightning speed when you speed up the time, there would probably need to be a time stop/slow whenever something interacts with your plant, which brings me to my next point: you probably wouldn’t be able to see much as a plant.
In fact, are we even sure you should be able to see yourself? Well, I think we should, since your cells can see themselves, and it’s probably communicated throughout the entire plant. This means that we would have to identify what threat is attacking us via what our plant is sensing, and use our abilities (if we have any) accordingly. If not, then the next best thing would be to set some structures to be rebuilt. However, this is not realistic. Not all plants regrow from where the part was cut off. Why is this? I don’t know. Someone please tell me.
What do you think of this idea? Please feel free to tell me how dumb it is and why your idea is better. Don’t forgot to like and subscribe!
Peace.
I really like the idea of building up the plant manually during the session! This could be an option in the Reproduction Type selector. This would have to be restricted only to sessile organisms, but maybe non-LAWK games would allow it for any species to choose. Imagine the kinds of freaky creatures we could end up with!
Also, manually controlling the growth of plants could allow for some interesting gameplay challenges. Such as a Thrive bonsai contest - try to grow your species to maturity while restricting it to be as small as possible. There could also be an achievement for capturing an animal with a plant with no ‘moving’ parts - by growing into a net or web shape, or blocking a creature’s burrow, for instance.
There are still a lot of questions about how this kind of thing would work, and how to connect it to the rest of thrive, but I think it could be a really good addition to the game.
I do have to wonder why plants are the only type of organism (that I know of) to be able to change how they grow while they are growing. After some continued, albeit light, research, I’ll assume that it’s a mixture of the continued presence of the maristem, which is full of stem cells, and also the fact that the plant kingdom branched off from the animal kingdom a while ago. If anyone knows the answer to this question, I would be curious to find out.
Assuming that the reason that plants changing the way they grow is an ability they gained after branching off changing their path from the animal kingdom, it would then concur that animals have a similar ability, albeit to a lesser degree. After thinking for a little bit, it came upon me that animals such as zebras have different stripes for different members of the same species. However, similar to the different fingerprints of the Homo sapiens, the species I am currently maining, I assume that the stripes on zebras are from genes and not from adaptive growth. A better example may be the nails that grow on humans instead. As a human grows, their nails can change how they grow: they will grow at a slower rate sometimes. Even still, it may be seen as a greater concept to look at how a developing fetus grows; Although I am not very familiar with the process myself, I assume the process is controlled by the presence of various hormones telling the stem cells what to become. Unfortunately, these hormones seem to be controlled by genetics, rather than any sort of adaptive design, though I will point out that the growth of a plant is also still controlled by genetics.
It is then, on the same topic of hormones, that we come to the related topic of puberty, which as found in humans, does control the growth of certain features, such as facial hair. Although the player of the Homo sapiens does not get to control where or if the facial hair grows, nor do they consciously choose when, there is a part of the brain that is responsible for choosing when. Because of this, as well as what I read in various articles, I assume that plants control their growth through similar hormones, that would perhaps be released in the presence of sunlight, or in the lack thereof. This would seemingly explain the phenomena that many have experienced seeing plants grow towards light sources, while still somehow staying within a set of parameters that make it obvious that 2 members of the same species, are in fact, 2 members of the same species.
Maybe then, it could be assumed that it is not that animals are unable to change the way that different body parts appear and grow, but it is simply not advantageous. However, as not all animals have the ability, it could then be assumed that there are genes needed in order to cause different parts of the body to appear in different places, which would make sense if the method of control were hormones. Therefore, it would make sense that, instead of the choice of building up the body being strictly limited to plants and other sessile organisms, such as coral and sponge, it were simply disincentivized(why doesn’t the forums word processor register that as a word) due to being inefficient and inept. Maybe, assuming both that the responsibility for controlled growth of plants goes to hormones, and said hormones will be added to the game, we could choose how and when said hormones are released, though if the system strives for realism (aka, the plant presumably doesn’t sentiently choose where the hormones are released), it would end up risking the tower defense type gameplay ending up more like setting up a macro to play the tower defense for you. This could then be fixed by having the controls over where and when hormones are released settings being relegated to AI members of the same species. This however, also comes into contact with a similar, although different, problem: sentient creatures would be able to choose how they grow, when that shouldn’t be the case. I do not know of, nor have I thought of any solutions to this problem, beyond just adding a toggle for if you want to be able to choose or not, though there should probably be a better solution than that, as it would be unrealistic for mobile, and especially sapient organisms such as humans, to be able to consciously choose how to grow up, and when.
In conclusion, I think that the manual building up of a creature should be disincentivized rather than disabled, because it would likely be more realistic, and would hopefully be more interesting, though it could be rather hard to implement and balance.
Our genes say that we should have 4 limbs and some hair on top of our heads but it doesn’t give coordinates for the every single hair follicle. The same is true for our fingerprints. It follows a pattern, but it can end up in many different ways during fetal development.
There is a constraint to our macroscopic shape. And plants have constraints in the shapes of their parts, but how many copies of those parts they will have and how they will be positioned can change.
Why is that the case?
Because they need their leaves to be in certain shape, but they don’t need their whole body to follow a blueprint.
But why do we have a more or less fixed shape? What do plants and corals have in common that separates them from us?
Its because they are sessile. Thats their commonality.
The thing about centipedes is that they have so many legs that it wouldn’t matter if they had some more. 2 more legs for a centipede is like 5% more hair for a human.
A human with 4 legs would fundamentally have to walk in a different way but for centipedes, the legs are proportional to body length. Mobile organisms have fixed body plans and the only exceptions happen when the length of a section is defined by the number of subsections rather than having a fixed number of them and scaling together. I hope I come up with a satisfactory idea that can be used for the game.
Initially, your sessile species would be no form. But the individual parts can gain symmetries.
Then the species would become mobile. To do this, it would start to distinguish its front and back, and become radially symmetrical.
Then it would start distinguishing its up and down directions and become bileteral.
And lastly it would fix the number of segments it has between its front and back. If you have a heart in one segment, it wouldn’t make sense to copy that heart, so it makes sense for each of the segments to start to specialise. And when you come to something like a giraffe, it no longer makes more bones to make its neck longer, instead it elongates the existing vertebrae.
