So I’m an amateur biologist, and I’m thinking about how in earth’s evolutionary history, we see that multicellular animals started off as sessile and passively motile creatures like sponges, corals, and jellyfish. I highly doubt too many people want to just sit and watch a coral sit on the ground, or a jellyfish float w/o any control. Do the devs have a plan to cut down on this possibility turn off to the game?
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Welcome to the forums, @RomanSkull! The Thrive devs have a tentative outline of how the Macroscopic stage will play out.
Early Macroscopic will be equivalent to the Ediacaran. As more organisms evolve movement, predation, more advanced anatomical features like calcium exoskeletons seen in Cloudinia and Corumbella (also one of the earliest known sessile animals with a gut), primitive eyes or tentative limbs, and possible turnover of microbial mats to a Cambrian-like transition, gameplay will become faster. I am not sure if the devs have decide on whether the time duration between turns will get shorter or not, since a recent paper suggest Ediacaran organism may have had lived for much longer than expect (from .53 to 40 years!).
Also, common misconeption, but as far as we know, sea jellies did not evolve during the Ediacaran, but during the Cambrian. There were organisms that moved actively during the Ediararan, like Spriggina floundersi (organism with head, segments, and possibly the earliest active motile organism with handedness), Kimberella(a possible early active motile mollusk), Yilingia spiciformis (the second earliest known active motile animal with possible decision making, after Uncus, and has nuby appendages), Uncus dzaugisi (the earliest known moving animal with chitin), and Plexus ricei (a possible segmented tube swimming worm).
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Welcome to the forum, @RomanSkull!
It is still being debated, but I believe the suggestion currently leading is essentially to have time seemingly move faster as a seesile macroscopic organism, then readjust when aware creatures learn to move faster. In this way, as a macroscopic organism, subtle movement could be seen as normal movement, and when faster movement evolves, the subtle movement would then effectively be sessile. Example, Sponges can actually move a few millimeters a year, which, when playing the Macroscopic stage, could be depicted as moving at a medium speed, but when the game switches to the Aware stage, they would essentially stop moving.
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Reducing the time a gameplay round takes for an entire stage already seems to be a hassle, so I can’t imagine this being done in steps over an entire stage.
Welcome to the forum @RomanSkull !
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You already had a bunch of good responses, but to add:
We’re partially banking on the idea that for example the Bilateria pretty much entered the IRL “Macroscopic Stage” already motile, and most of them stayed so. If that’s the case, then sponges and jellyfish would already have split off in what’s our Multicellular Stage.
Since this at least is a hypothesis held by some, we think it’s reasonable for you to create a motile Multicellular Stage species and then be motile from the start of Macroscopic.
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Would being motile require myofibrils?
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Or even Contractile Vacuoles instead for those with more rigid membranes?
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I am not sure such vacuoles were ever planned for Thrive…
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Oh that makes sense. I was under the assumption that bilateria evolved out of some form of jellyfish ancestor, kinda like sea pigs evolved bilateralism after becoming motile. Thanks for clearing that up for me!
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Right now I would design it as requiring actomyosin, or movement via other means like flagella/cilia.
They would be more-so Hydraulic Vacuoles, but that would indeed be an actomyosin equivalent.
So, not on the roadmap, but suggested.
Interesting reading, it likely was indeed extremely small: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbilaterian#Reconstructing_the_urbilaterian
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The later wouldn’t be a viable way forward into aware, right?
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Ctenophore sea jellies are the largest ciliated organisms to exit (can be 1.5 meters), so it might be still be possible…
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I mean they surely aren’t making it into awakening
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There would just be obvious limitations of what you can achieve without muscle(equivalent).
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Well I sure do hope no one will try and argue for cilliated civs or something
Considering it’d just be an ever more extreme version of the societies beneath the waters
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