Quick Question Thread

It has occurred to me that the reason Macroscopic creatures develop Hearts and Lungs, or Plant Vascular systems, or Echinoderm Water-Vascular systems, is because as they got bigger sharing compounds (including oxygen) amongst cells became harder.

Would it be possible/make sense to make the system colony microscopic/multicellular organisms use to share compounds get less efficient as they grow in size, and/or make oxygen needed for Mitochondria be less available to internal cells and need to be moved inward biologically? For purposes of having a reason to later evolve to improve something that right now seams perfectly efficient.

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I donโ€™t know why you replied to meโ€ฆ it seems like your post is totally unrelated to mine.

And Iโ€™m no theorist so I donโ€™t have anything to say about your ideas.

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I think it would still be too early in the muticellular, especially considering the colonies are flat

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Current Multicellular stage has 2D organisms. In suggestions website, someone suggested adding front and back layers for Multicellular stage to give more depth to cells. But it would still not be enough to make the cell unable to use energy efficiently. I think Macroscopic stage with 3D organisms could be the one to do this if they havenโ€™t evolved vascularization.

It seems diffusion up to 100 ฮผm is possible in tumours without vascularization according to a scientific article. That would be about 5 to 10 cells thick organism before the limit, depending on the cell type. There could also be exceptions like non-vascular plants.

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How would things like cytoplasmatic bridges between cells be implemented in the game?

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I was asking you, the head programmer, how hard of a feature it would be to implement. I donโ€™t know how the current feature is coded. I chose reply instead of @ because it was faster.

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A system like this is likely for Macroscopic, and under discussion for Multicellular.

Nice details! But also, our Multicellular stage should probably be interpreted as using a few cells to represent more. Itโ€™s a technical limitation.

I mean, we technically have those right now?

Probably better to point design questions at the game designers first. I think your question is more of a design matter than a โ€œcan this be implementedโ€ matter.

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Yeah but for plant-likes for example wouldnโ€™t there be some basis to develop phloem like tissue whichโ€™s characteristic is a large degree of cytoplasm transportability?

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Phloem is long-distance vasculature. Itโ€™s the same thing as talking about blood circulation systems (though without the heart pumping part).

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Oh so this is how itโ€™ll be handled. Makes sense.

I am assuming fusing cells or having highly polynucleate (so for instance creating giant โ€œunicellularโ€ cells) will have minimal to no support?

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I mean if all you want is a rising debuff as you get more and more cells, that would be easy. Simulating when non-active resource transport becomes a bottleneck in a species, thatโ€™s going to be extremely difficulty mainly due to the lacking theory side of how such a system would need to actually work.

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Pretty sure any such debuff would only begin taking place in macroscopic, by which point we can probably just assign it to the functioning of resource diffusion (that then forms the basis of respiratory, circulatory, excretory and digestive systems)

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Would the new cell specialization mechanic for the Microbe Stage have a pronounced effect when Players start to make a colony for moving onto the Multicellular Stage?

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I am nut sure that usually involved getting only one organelle type dominate over any others. I suppose the energy making organelles would get a slight boostโ€ฆ

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Is there a reason we cannot click and sort by the โ€œTime Readโ€ Category for Users?

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Maybe there simply isnโ€™t such functionality even though the elements are there. Like how you could very likely be able to search for the oldest post about something with what discourse already has but the forum itself doesnโ€™t provide the function to do that directly.

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It just applies to Microbe Stage cells in general, no colonies required.

Unless youโ€™re talking about the cell adjacency effects. In which case, I didnโ€™t think about that yet, but I can imagine it could be a lot of extra work to implement it for early colonies at all.

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I think early colony specific stuff like that is too much effort for too little effect

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Yeah, that is 100% not getting implemented for non-multicellular colonies.

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Btw, should advancing to multicellular require you to also have unlocked the progress to the editor (aka ready to split)?

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