Plant gameplay

[doomlightning (The Invisible Aztec Dodo God. Real Plant Torturer, Ltd.)]

According to their definition symmetrically:
Plants do not have a completely definite symmetry, but they do have a definite pattern repetition, though not all of them. (Example in favor - broccoli flowers, pine cones. Example against - red algae, bamboo)

As someone who has botany as part of his undergraduate degree, I have a few things to add and clarify:

@50gens

Because they need their leaves to be in certain shape, but they don’t need their whole body to follow a blueprint.

The leaves themselves also look different from one to another (from species to species), but if we talk about technical details, all leaves must be thin, because a broad leaf is not able to do its job, which is to absorb light. You will find slightly wider leaves in leaves that are in dark places, where far red light is more common and therefore - more relative distance is required to receive the same amount of light that reaches a sunny leaf (leaves that are in direct exposure to light). In small or even prehistoric plants, they do photosynthesis in their stems instead because heat is a serious factor when it comes to light absorption - because light is a heat source and too much heat breaks down and leaves are not able to disperse heat so well compared to stems and trunks.
Therefore the first plants did not have leaves until the world cooled enough for the development of leaves.

When It Was Too Hot for Leaves

@50gens

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.

@50gens

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.

You can also include sponges, sea lilies, sea anemones, tube worms, deep sea corals and fungi in the same category of sessile. Some of them have a defined symmetry and some are very flexible.

The immobility can be due to other reasons and not necessarily a lack of flexibility - such as food accessibility, hunting strategies, energy needs, etc.

Of course, with this comes a price they have to pay, but most of them solve it with all kinds of solutions - regeneration, stronger armor, more vigorous reproduction and even in some cases - reinventing a way to move (as in the case of sea lilies and sea anemones and both of them do not have complex muscles like us ).
Corals in general are animals that have created a symbiosis with phototrophic bacteria or algae, but they are still filter feeders, especially those that live in deep water (on which, I am doing a seminar on this topic).

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Plants have another problem that they use to an advantage that the other creatures I mentioned do not have - they have a cell wall - which provides protection from predators and osmotic changes, but limits their ability to move (although not completely). So plants are not exactly able to create muscle-like cells without giving up their cell wall - which is more of a disadvantage according to what we see (but there are some that did - oocytes - fungus-like algae that cause diseases in plants [the main cause of diseases in plants]).

And if we even have to talk about the fact that jellyfish, Echinodermata and Slime moles (which do not have bilaterian symmetry), have the ability to move, and some of them are even more effective in their ability to move than bilaterian creatures?

To conclude - plants do not move because of physiology (cell wall, symmetrical shape) and survival (energy consumption, protection) constraints.
Symmetry has no significant effect on a creature’s ability to move, although there are exceptions or evolutionary constraints that lead to it.
Or alternatively - just luck - we don’t really know why it happened that way - maybe there is a certain advantage, or it’s just luck that it happened that way.

[50gens]

@doomlightning

Symmetry has no significant effect on a creature’s ability to move, although there are exceptions or evolutionary constraints that lead to it.

There are sessile creatures that are symmetric, but what about the other way around, mobile but not symmetric? Maybe mobility is only achievable by the creatures that evolved symmetry while they were sessile. And I mean fast mobility.

Could slime molds become as fast as fish or insects and start behaving like an average animal without obtaining a radial or bileteral symmetry?

[doomlightning (The Invisible Aztec Dodo God. Real Plant Torturer, Ltd.)]

These are questions that are not easy to answer.
First of all - we don’t know things. Currently - we don’t know about an asymmetric creature that moves quickly.
For speed, it seems we need some support and not necessarily symmetry.
Jellyfish have the matrix which supports their movement
In sea lilies it is the osculus that supports their structure
But in many biliteral creatures such as insects, molluscs or vertebrates, there are external supports such as external carapace, hydro-pistons or bones, to support speed.
So as of now - we haven’t found an asymmetric creature fast enough to compete with, for example, Daphnia.

Movement Asymmetries: From Their Molecular Origin to the Analysis of Movement...

This is the closest thing to what I said.

As an aside - asymmetries play very important roles in biology, but in terms of movement - there is not much information.

So as of now - you can say you are right until proven otherwise.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

@50gens

but what about the other way around, mobile but not symmetric?

I can guess that assymetric claw size crabs might fill this criterium.

[Zixvir (Zixvir Zjghamn, the unpronounceable)]

@50gens

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.

@50gens

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.

Based on this, and other comments, it seems like the default behavior for growth should be placing cells during development, as well as any tissues or cells that the player has made (tissues would basically be the part equivalent of the early multicellular stage, and could function as a repair tool for plants in the later stages). During the editor, the player could create cells, tissues from those cells, and parts from those tissues. The body plan could then be made from a combination of cells, tissues, and parts. Tissues and parts would have the added benefit of, if they are able to regrow, regrowing in the correct shape, though tissues would probably only just have the cells regrow, and parts would only constrain the tissues to grow in certain locations. To continue the centipede example, the centipede segments would be a part, and the part would have the segment of the centipede, as well as the legs. Of course, it wouldn’t get placed instantly, that’s not how growing works. Growing takes time, so the question would be how to represent this within Thrive.

To explain my idea, we would want to start in the editor. When creating a tissue, you will get to to decide how that tissue grows and develops. Maybe you create a tissue by placing a bunch of stem cells in a certain order, then telling them to develop in a specific order. Maybe it would better to have the ability to place a bunch of stem cells, then editing them to be created in a specific order, then also having the ability to tell those stem cells to specialize, also using the same order, so lets say I tell a tissue to make 3 stem cells, specialize 1, create 1 stem cell, specialize the 2 previous stem cells, then create another stem cell and specialize the 2 remaining stem cells, each instruction would get a number, ordering how it would happen. Then, the parts could use a similar system, but with the addition of being able to use tissues. In addition, parts could probably use other parts: Centipedes have segments, and those segments have 2 legs each, but the segments could be seen as separate from the legs.

Unfortunately, there is one issue with this tissue system. IRL, tissues grow and develop based on signals that are sent between parts. I don’t know how this could be implemented into thrive, though, so it might not be very fun, and it may be best to simplify the system to something like what I came up with.