Reproduction and the Gameplay Loop

Current Game Microbe Stage
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Yes it definitely is a complete shift in the design of Thrive, so I would think it would only be considered if the problem remains despite other features being implemented. I still wonder about the transition from having a focus on just getting enough phosphate/ammonia as an abstract representation of cellular reproduction to having reproduction be based on a less abstract representation based on more multicellular methods we are more familiar with and can easily envision. Then again, that ties into a discussion of how sexual reproduction will be introduced and incentivized which is way ahead of us.

Would clearing the game world only effect compound clouds or other important aspects? If the former, I definitely think it’s conceptually good thing for the sake of Thrive, as it makes sure you aren’t spawning in the same cloud that got you to your current editor trip. Also, because the presence of various compounds such as glucose will shift throughout time, it wouldn’t make sense for the compound clouds of a more abundant/barren world to be present in a new situation. Each editor trip represents a significant jump in time anyways, so continuity isn’t a huge concern as long you don’t spawn in a completely different environment.

To remedy the whole undeservedly-rapid-evolution, I think a few ideas have been introduced in this conversation that can be realistically discussed right now. I’ve listed them from what I feel is least progressive to most progressive of a change (progressive in terms as completely shifting the system); in other words, items closer to the top are less fundamental shifts to the gameplay of Thrive than items on the bottom.

Purpose: We want to make the length between each trip to the editor is long enough to prove that their cell is evolutionary viable, but not long enough for Thrive to unnecessarily extend the gaming loop so that Thrive becomes a waiting game.

Direct Factors Contributing to This:

  • You spawn back where you reproduced from, so if there was a phosphate/ammonia cloud there already, you can just go right back to the editor.
  • You can spawn with whatever surplus phosphate/ammonia you entered the editor with.

Indirect Factors Contributing to This:

  • Same AI cells remain around you when you exit the editor, so if they are easy prey, you can consume them again.
  • Cell AI isn’t optimized yet, so certain species aren’t as challenging to attack as they should be, meaning free meals.
  • Current reproduction mechanism is a rather simplistic representation of asexual reproduction. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Potential Solutions

A.) Spawn with 0 ammonia and phosphate instead of whatever surplus you’ve gotten in a previous life

  • I don’t think this really presents any negatives and I assume it will eventually be implemented regardless. One thing to consider is how much glucose will be given to a fresh spawn cell (50% of full capacity?)

B.) Clear the game world with every reproduction

  • Essentially a new plate, with new compound cloud locations. Issues with continuity of world brought up, but at the same time, each editor represents a significant jump in time.

C.) Have the amount of freely accessible phosphate/ammonia reduce to lower levels as time goes on similar to glucose.

  • Similar to glucose where cells are forced to eventually be able to produce their own energy, reduce the amount of free-floating phosphate and ammonia so that cells are made to become more effective heterotrophs. Unlike glucose however, instead of almost completely disappearing, ammonia and phosphate reduce to a relatively low presence that fluctuates, simulating things like land runoffs bringing in nutrients, plate tectonics, erosion, marine snow, etc.
  • Makes player builds that are more sessile to be less effective, as there will be less freely-available resources. Can be a good thing which serves as a counter balance to heavier and slower autotrophs and incentivizes more motile heterotrophs.
  • Requires the implementation of a more dynamic compound fluctuation system.

D.) Require a minimum amount of health to reproduce

  • Require a certain amount of health (50%? 75%?) to reproduce so that players are further incentivised to create a robust cell build. Could lead to very annoying situations where a player constantly bumps into a predator/environmental threat and is prevented from reproducing despite meeting most requirements. Can be offset by a lower health requirement.

E.) Clicking the reproduction button starts the process of organelle replication instead of directly heading to the editor. After a small amount of time (10 seconds to 60 seconds or so) as your organelles reproduce, a second click on the reproduction button means a split and a trip to the editor.

  • I think this would be a pretty cool thing to see implemented. Phosphate/ammonia maintain the same role they have in the current game, but heading to the editor isn’t as much as a potential copout from a dangerous situation as you’d still have to survive for a little bit after you reach sufficient phosphate/ammonia levels.
  • Some players complain that organelle duplication as currently implemented oftentimes changes the nature of your cell, so this solution can both give the player the choice of when to start splitting and do it in a controlled manner.
  • As @blackjacksike outlines above, is rather realistic and can be further tweaked to more explicitly highlight the different challenges cells at different phases of life face if seen fit.
  • This can also easily transition into a decoupling of reproduction from a trip to the editor incase the player wants to play another life cycle in the same generation or wants to reproduce just to boost numbers.
  • Would require a decent player cell-split animation. Also, although capping the amount of time required helps, it still punishes larger builds as they would require more time to split everything. Larger builds already require larger amounts of phosphate ammonia.
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These sound familiar. I think our reproduction progress code actually used to use these in the past. This was very confusing to the players (probably as there was really no progress indicator or anything). I think maybe 3 or even 4 years ago we moved from the model of organelles and the nucleus (it had those G1 and G2 phases, if I recall right, or something) taking time and using up resources over that time to split.

I mean everything except the player and their sister cell. Similarly to how patch moving works. It would make even less sense if somehow the compounds would disappear but cells and chunks somehow stayed.

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I actually kind of like this idea, and would be willing to give it a try if it made the game easier to pick up for new players, and enjoyable for the old.

As deus stated, a big issue with the current game is there’s too much reliance on two separate resources that might not even be available to the player for a long time just because they are unlucky.

By introducing a passive rate of growth, we could overcome this issue, and allow players to progress as long as they find food to survive.

The current ammonia and phosphate clouds could of course remain, but as Deus mentioned; it could instead serve as a desirable bonus to growth rate instead of a mandatory resource.

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I like this idea, but im just wondering how the passiv ammonia production we already have will fit into this

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A bonus to reproduction rate of course, but you would still need to find phosphate for it to make a difference

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I also do think a passive growth rate would help make progression a lot more steady and predictable. Depending on how it is set up and balanced, it can really help eliminate a lifespan that is excessively short or excessively long. Progression in Thrive right now is really dependent on the placement and frequency of both ammonia and phosphate clouds in a patch, so too little and you’re drifting through a barren wasteland for 20 minutes, too much and you’re witnessing 4 trips to the editor in 2 minutes. So having a set amount of time that a player needs to survive for and focusing the player’s gameplay on ensuring that they have enough food for that amount of time to survive makes things a lot more clear and I think presents a more accurate representation of evolution.

As hh mentions however, Thrive becomes a lot more dependent on waiting in this new design philosophy. One thing about the current system that works is that because the player is actively pursuing their means to reproduction, it is entirely in the player’s hands as to how fast they enter the editor. This avoids the pitfalls of games that simulate progression through growth like The Isle, which in extreme cases can basically turn into an idle simulator after obtaining one meal. The Isle tries to combat this by involving other things to worry about in the meantime, but the length of time needed to fully grow is a turnoff for certain people who aren’t seeking the type of simulation The Isle provides. And Thrive is definitely not that type of simulator – it doesn’t focus on the lifespan of an individual animal, it focuses on evolution.

So in one extreme, having the player be entirely responsible for their progression by having phosphate and ammonia determine it prevents the lows of an idle simulator but can create very unpredictable lifespans and can extend/shorten the gameplay loop excessively if factors aren’t well controlled. In the other extreme, having growth be dependent on some sort of time-based mechanism introduces a more steady, predictable, and ensured way for progression to occur but if improperly scaled can lead to idleness. I think the latter is more easily balanced and controlled, but I am no seasoned game developer so who knows. But obviously, some sort of mix between the two can be designed, where ammonia and/or phosphate are necessary for reproduction but don’t represent trips straight to the editor.

One idea is similar to one I previously mentioned and blackjack detailed. Instead of instantly being sent to the editor, clicking the reproduction button starts the process of DNA/organelle replication. After replication is completed, another click officially counts as reproduction and sends you to the editor (perhaps in the future when you don’t have to enter the editor everytime you reproduce, left click is a trip to the editor and right click is just reproduction).

The player can click this button anytime they want, even briefly after they freshly spawn (or after a short period of time, or whatever is seen fit). However, ammonia and/or phosphate incentivizes them to collect the two compounds. This incentive can be anything seen fit, and ammonia and phosphate could provide the same or separate benefits to the process.

I can see various possible incentives:

  • Both ammonia and phosphate do the same job and simply speed up the rate of replication.
  • Ammonia speeds up the rate of replication while phosphate minimizes negative effects a cell phases during replication (slower speed, less health, inhibited metabolism, etc.)
  • Ammonia speeds up the rate of replication. Your cell replicates faster at full health, and phosphate significantly speeds up the rate at which your cell heals from damage, so phosphate remains important for make sure your cell is at optimal functioning.
  • Phosphate and ammonia can add bonus MP points.

This is a bit more complex than just having a passive growth rate that can be increased depending on how much phosphate/ammonia you have, but it could represent a blend between the two extremes mentioned and can help fix the problem some people have with replication as is implemented being unpredictable and uncontrolled. It can also provide a chance for an emergency editor trip if you tweak your organism incorrectly so that your species becomes extremely unfit for survival; just reproduce as soon as possible and to hell with all the incentives, you need to reproduce now.

One thing that needs to be held in mind is how long the microbe and early multicellular stage should take. Replication should take long enough so that the incentives actually mean something. If it takes a minute for a complex organism to reproduce without phosphate/ammonia, a 20% reduction won’t mean much and the player might just ignore phosphate/ammonia. Note: this factor isn’t as important for the beginning of the microbe stage, as it is meant to be a simple and easy introduction to the world so lifespans can and should be short regardless and incentives shouldn’t mean too much yet.

At the same time, replication should only be as long as necessary, and not a single second longer. A player cell that is just one cytoplasm and a metabolosome in the beginning of the game isn’t going to have a lot of functions and isn’t going to face a variety of threats. If that cell’s lifespan is 5 minutes, it’ll basically be 1 minute of gameplay where the player is focused on doing something and 4 minutes of screwing around (no complex threats you need react to, low metabolic cost, etc.). This doesn’t even mention the lifespan of an even more complex organism.

As such, expected time to be spent by an average player who doesn’t want to stay at a certain stage and wants to progress to the next stage should be ironed out. For a player who doesn’t want to linger around too long and wants to get straight to the point, how long should it take to get the nucleus? How long should it take to get binding agents? How long should it take to become meaningfully multicellular? How long should it take to get 10 cells together? Underwater civs when? Growth will have to be calibrated around that.

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One more thing I just realized: how are we going to explain this to the player? How are we going to tutorialize this feature?

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Good question.

In the first life a player has on the planet and after the player finds glucose, goes through movement, and etc., there can be a pop-up saying “In order to reproduce, your cell first has to replicate genetic material. When ready, click on the Reproduction Button to begin this process”. Your cell then begins replicating. In the first life, your cell will spawn with adequate amounts of phosphate and ammonia to speed up replication. After the process is done, which should take barely any time at all with the added phosphate/ammonia, a pop-up says “Click again to enter the editor”.

The next time you spawn in, the extra phosphate/ammonia isn’t there anymore. A pop-up says “You can begin replication (synthesis a better word?) at any moment. However, replication is costly and can leave you in a vulnerable state. Obtaining phosphate and ammonia lessens the amount of time it takes to completely duplicate your genetic material.” Then similar to the previous life, a line appears between your cell and the closest phosphate/ammonia cloud. Once you reach an optimal level of phosphate/ammonia, a pop-up says “You have obtained adequate amounts of phosphate/ammonia. Click the Reproduction button to begin replication”.

Of course, if some sort of growth mechanic is adopted, the tutorial should change. But I think spawning in a new player with adequate phosphate/ammonia in their first generation on a planet should help them not be overwhelmed in their first life, and taking that bonus phosphate/ammonia away in their second life can introduce the reason why a player wants to find phosphate/ammonia.

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I thought about this concept more and felt like it had no glaring fundamental issues in itself, it’s just a matter of balancing things to be optimal and figuring out the role of ammonia and phosphate. It’s also deciding how to deal with reproduction in the first place. Once again, this represents a dramatic shift in the gameplay design of Thrive, but, once again, I think it would benefit Thrive. I think it’s a worthy concept to have on standby for future consideration, so I wanted to fully flesh it out.

I think reproducing should be handled as previously described in this post, where clicking the reproduce button initiates the process of synthesis. This synthesis takes a specific amount of time and can be increased or decreased depending on certain performance factors, so players are rewarded for having a well-functioning build. You can click the reproduction button very soon after you first spawn in (maybe something like 10 or 20 seconds after?), allowing the player to decide when to undergo the process of synthesis.

This concept serves to take emphasis away from a cell’s evolutionary fitness being decided based on how well it gathers phosphate and ammonia to how well it stays alive long enough to reproduce, empowering energy and nerfing phosphate/ammonia.

As previously detailed, I feel this benefits the gameplay in two ways. First, it standardizes the length of each lifespan. Right now, because ammonia and phosphate are so imperative to succeeding in this game, the absence or surplus of either compounds can unnaturally lengthen or shorten the game experience. By having some rudimentary “growth” mechanic, the gameplay loop is much more controlled and can be more easily balanced by the developers towards what they deem is the best Thrive experience.

Second, I think this reproduction mechanic does better in making the player and other organisms behave “more realistically”. In nature, organisms don’t really seek things like “phosphate” and “ammonia”; they seek food, so that they may live long enough to reach the age of sexual fertility. Of course, nutrients are an essential component of this healthy maturation, but nutrients generally come with whatever food or resource is being consumed, and as a whole, are not the end-all-be-all they are in Thrive. Therefore, I think reflecting this in Thrive would benefit the simulation aspect of gameplay. And who knows, perhaps it might help with auto-evo (here’s hoping).

Role of Compounds and the Numbers Behind Growth

Role of Ammonia = Primary resource responsible for growth in that it increases the rate at which cellular replication is done. The more you have, the faster you will grow (up to a certain cap with optimal conditions).

Role of Phosphate = Replenishing feature, needed to replenish health and rapidly increases the rate at which resources for important functions, such as signaling and toxins, are created. Ties to growth because cells replicate material faster at higher health. Spent in healing and for replenishing functions, although at a lest significant rate for the latter.

At optimal conditions – meaning maximum health and maximum ammonia – I’d say something like a 50% reduction in reproductive costs cap would work well. So if your organism takes a minute to reproduce at max health with no ammonia, it would take them 30 seconds to reproduce at max health with maximum ammonia. The effect obviously scales with the amount of ammonia you have, so having 50% max ammonia would mean a 25% reduction in reproductive costs and a 45 second lifespan.

On the other end, I think reduced health should have the similar effect. Health can have up to a inverse 50% addition to reproductive costs, so having 0% health would mean the full 50% addition. Of course, this means health can effectively only increase reproductive costs by something like 49.999%, but you get the general idea. Having 50% of max health means 25% more time for reproduction, having 75% of max health means 12.5% more time for reproduction, having 25% of max health means 37.5% more reproduction time, etc.

Reproductive Costs of Parts

These can be played around with, but I think these serve as a good rough estimate.

Baseline = 10 seconds. So as LUCA, it would take you 10 seconds to reproduce with full health and no ammonia inputs.

Cytoplasm = 2 seconds added

Prokaryotic Parts = 5 seconds added

Nucleus = 20 seconds added

Organelles = 7 seconds added

This makes it so that phosphate and ammonia can reasonably be neglected at the beginning of the game and as a very simple prokaryote, but eventually makes it so that they become more essential as time goes on.

Prokaryote with 2 prokaryotic components = 20 second reproduction cost at spawn, with 10-30 second replication depending on performance. What I assume will be the average cell after a single trip to the editor.

Prokaryote with 10 prokaryotic components = 60 second reproduction cost at spawn, with 30-90 second reproduction cost depending on performance. What I assume will be the average prokaryote a few generations before the addition of the nucleus.

Eukaryote with a nucleus and 15 prokaryotic components = 105 second reproduction cost at spawn, with 52.5-157.5 second lifespan depending on performance. What I assume will be the average newly formed eukaryotic cell.

Eukaryote with 5 organelles and 10 prokaryotic components = 115 second reproduction cost at spawn, with 57.5 – 172.5 second lifespan depending on performance. A eukaryote beginning to take advantage of its evolutionary benefits.

Eukaryote with 10 organelles = 100 second reproduction cost at spawn, with 50-150 second lifespan depending on performance. A eukaryote that has comfortably evolved towards specialization.

What I noticed began to be introduced here was an incentive to reduce cellular bloat. Why have 2 or 3 prokaryotic components for an added penalty of 15 seconds when you can have 1 organelle which pumps out the same or more output for only 7 added seconds? This further provides a benefit for eukaryotes which is actually an incredibly realistic reflection of how evolution worked.

Prokaryotes are incentivized to remain small and rather uncomplex in comparison to eukaryotes because added complexity oftentimes means added reproductive costs. At a certain point for prokaryotes, whatever added benefit to energy acquisition/metabolism is outweighed by excessive reproductive costs – and for simple organisms who depend on reproducing fast rather than dynamic systems to deal with changing environments/competition, reproductive costs are persuasive. As such, complex processes and morphologies, whatever the benefit, are generally selected against. But since eukaryotes are able to host organelles that create an incredible amount of output, they are able to add huge leaps in energy production with minimal additions to reproductive costs through streamlining their genetic material. In Thrive, should such a mechanism be adopted, auto-evo could grow to replicate this same phenomenon.

Of course, the way reproductive costs work currently in Thrive (additional ammonia/phosphate needed for added parts), you can make the argument that this aspect is simulated. However, once again, reproductive costs aren’t adequately represented because of how imperative phosphate/ammonia are in gameplay for reproduction – being an end instead of a means to an end. Prokaryotes will frequently reproduce at the same rate as eukaryotes, as oftentimes, phosphate/ammonia is equally inaccessible to prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Making growth/reproduction a more intrinsic characteristic of each cell would help make this aspect of evolution/biology more accurately reflected within Thrive.

As such, for all the reasons listed above, I think examining the gameplay loop and how reproduction works in the game can be incredibly beneficial for all aspects of what Thrive tries to be.

One thing that needs to be looked at in the future is how multicellularity will be handled. We obviously don’t want two cells to multiply reproductive costs by two, as that can quickly result in bloated gameplay loops (I don’t think a ten-minute plus lifespan should be a mandatory part of Thrive until late in the aware stage). Perhaps we can assume that once multicellularity is achieved, an efficient way of minimizing costs had been evolved, meaning each cell can be considered a part akin to an organelle/microcomponent in terms of reproductive costs. So perhaps reaching multicellularity adds an additional +20 to your baseline reproductive cost and each cell might add something like +2 seconds. Until the point at which editing transitions to sculpting blobs. At that point, a more dynamic system would have to be utilized.

The exact numbers regarding reproduction costs might need to be played with a bit for an optimally engaging experience. But I think the general idea is demonstrated.

Thoughts?

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I wanted to add some thoughts regarding this concept.

I think the basic idea/pipeline regarding this concept is still very robust and worthwhile to consider - having the gameplay loop be based on surviving a set amount of time determined by the complexity of your organism instead of having it be dependent on finding a set amount of phosphate/ammonia, and having ammonia be capable of reducing reproduction time and phosphate be important for replenishing health and other processes like toxins. But on further thought, one aspect of the concept I think would be worth reconsidering is having the ability to reproduce immediately after spawning into the world. I’m wary of players just clicking the reproduction button as soon as they spawn, allowing them to basically skip through proving that their cell is viable in gameplay if they are simple enough organisms.

Instead, I think the player should be tasked with finding a baseline amount of ammonia before they are able to respawn, and then having the suggested reproduction mechanic, where you must wait a bit before reaching the editor, be applied. For example, you must get, say, 50 ammonia before reproducing, and then the process of cell division begins, which will take however long it takes.

Where it gets interesting is incentivizing the player to gather even more ammonia. The player can immediately begin the process of replication after they get the baseline, but if they get more ammonia, they get two benefits…

  1. As the above concept explains, reduced reproduction time, and
  2. A bonus to their auto-evo numbers.

The above will ensure that players still have to play the game if they want to succeed, but also includes a more controlled way to pace each “life” in the game. Phosphate will retain the same function as it does in the previous concept; assisting with healing your cell and generating important compounds such as toxin. Of course, reproduction times can be recalculated based on how long the added time of searching for ammonia would be with this new concept.

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I’d like to expand this topic to discuss reproduction systems more broadly. (If that’s hijacking your topic, Deus, I’m sorry and this can be moved to a new topic. I chose this topic mostly based on the title)

There’s been a lot of discussion about sessile organisms and reproduction recently, which is good to see in my opinion. I’m going to first describe the current reproduction system with its pros and cons, then talk about what goals a good reproduction system should fulfil in my opinion, and then list and evaluate some potential new reproduction systems. This’ll be focused on the microbe stage but could be useful for future stages too. I’ll use the word “sessile”, but “non-motile” could be more accurate sometimes. “Growth rate” will refer to how fast you grow, and “reproduction time” to how long it takes between birth and reproduction.

So how’s the reproduction system currently? It’s pretty simple: You collect enough ammonia and phosphates to divide your organelles and then click a button to reproduce. You get ammonia and phosphates from compound clouds or other cells. This works great for the average cell that’s of medium size and decent mobility. It usually isn’t too slow or too fast. It’s active, easy to learn, pretty fun and teaches something about real biology. Sometimes however, it’s a different story. You can get lucky with spawns or store nutrients from the previous patch and reproduce so fast that you barely see the patch, effectively skipping it and its challenges. On the other side of the spectrum, you have cells that are slow, big, or unlucky and can take dozens of times longer to reproduce. And then sessile autotrophs can’t reproduce at all. All this even though big, slow and sessile cells all exist on Earth perfectly fine. This feels unnecessarily limiting, punishing and boring. Simply put, reproduction takes too long for some organisms and too little for others.

To better understand the issue, let’s take a step deeper. What is the purpose of reproduction and the time it takes in the game? Personally, I think it’s to both show the full life cycle of the player species (or at least its most important parts) and to give the player an interesting challenge: to prove that their species really is viable. How much should it be like real life? For example, should a whale like creature take dozens of times longer to reproduce than a mouse like creature? Probably not, as that doesn’t sound very fun. Time is very abstract in games and I don’t think that this abstraction really hurts scientific realism. I think that many different kinds of reproduction systems fit under a simplified, abstracted reality, so we can pretty freely focus on what’s best from a gameplay perspective. In real life, growth requires time, energy, and nutrients, but for gameplay reasons we may choose any of them and abstract away the rest, like how the game already does. If we still want bigger organisms to take longer to reproduce for scientific reasons, that’s fine, but only so long as it doesn’t hurt gameplay. So the difference in reproduction time should probably be relatively small. With the purpose in mind, what makes a potential reproduction system good?

Goals for a good reproduction system

  1. All organisms should reproduce in a reasonable amount of time. This means that you can’t reproduce so fast that you skip on the challenge, nor so slow that it gets too boring. Reproduction time should probably be pretty consistent across different kinds of organisms too keep different strategies interesting. So big, sessile and/or autotrophic organisms should take a pretty similar amount of time to reproduce as small, motile and/or heterotrophic ones. Otherwise the game would be punishing those strategies with boredom. I think it’s much more effective and fun to “punish” bad strategies with poorer ability to get enough energy to survive.
  2. The player should have some agency in their reproduction time. Agency feels good and fun, having no control feels bad or boring. Agency lets players play in their own style. New or casual players can take the scenic route where as experienced players and speedrunners can try to go as fast as possible. Without agency the game can easily become a waiting simulator if survival isn’t challenging enough.
  3. It should aim to be scientifically realistic without sacrificing fun, like everything in Thrive. It’s fine to simplify things for the sake of gameplay or ease of learning. Straight up inaccurate things like phosphate generating organelles are a big no-no.
  4. It should be intuitive and easy to learn. New Thrive players are confused enough as is.
  5. It should be feasible to implement. Everyone wants the microbe stage to be “finished” at some point. If a new system is going to require redoing a lot of code, testing and balancing, then it’s going to require good justification as well. We don’t want to burden the developers with unnecessary work.

Concepts for possible reproduction systems (in no particular order):

Wait for currents

Change nothing about the current system and just wait until water currents are implemented. They’d make sessile cells capable of reproduction by making them hit nutrient clouds sooner or (more likely) later. It’d basically be like random, slow movement for them. Currents would also make the world more fun and visually interesting for all cells. However, many cells would still take a very long time to reproduce, especially in patches with slower currents. That’s why I don’t think that this is a sufficient solution.

Passive absorption

Do what Thim did in his fork or what the devs are discussing in Revamping Compound Clouds. Make cells passively absorb ammonia and phosphates. The absorption rate could be affected by membrane type, surface area, patch, etc. This would give all cells a consistent maximum time for reproduction while leaving motile cells the option to pursue nutrients to grow faster. This is a pretty simple change that solves a lot of problems without breaking old stuff too much. It’s also easily modifiable with just a couple of tweakable constants needed. I think that this is a great idea to test first and collect some feedback. Does it affect player behavior or fun for normal cells and if so, in what way? Does it make sessile enthusiasts happy? What kind of absorption rates are good? Is it intuitive or confusing to have both passive absorption and compound clouds? So many questions, I’m curious!

Time-based growth

This is pretty similar to the previous one but more ambitious. Each species would have a specific reproduction time based on its morphology. Ammonia and phosphates would just boost the growth rate or have other uses. You can read more from Deus’s previous posts in this topic. This would put the focus on survival instead of collecting ammonia and phosphates. This is a bigger change and would require a lot of thought and testing. It would make reproduction nicely consistent. On the other hand, it could end up as a waiting simulator if surviving is too easy or growing takes too long, but that could be diminished with balancing. Personally I think that size shouldn’t have much impact on reproduction time because it affects fun a lot.

Time-based growth could make ammonia and phosphates feel a bit useless sometimes. If that’s the case, I’d suggest making both ammonia and phosphates boost growth rate, healing, and toxin production (and maybe even more things). If you had both, the boosts would be added together. Alternatively, you could straight up get rid of ammonia and phosphates and boost growth with energy. If you find a big chunk of food, you should probably be able to reproduce pretty quickly rather than having to wait with a full storage (although defending that food pile from competitors could be interesting). Maybe a button boosts growth at the cost of ATP or excess food goes straight to growth. Overall, I think this could have potential with some tweaking, but it’s hard to tell yet.

Food-based growth

We could abstract away the nutrients and focus on energy from food. Many games make animals grow instantaneously by eating food. It’s active, simple, pretty fun and keeps focus on something that’s necessary for survival. This is more complicated in Thrive however, because not every organism is a normal animal. I guess plants could consider the glucose they make food, making them grow at a consistent rate as they produce more of it. Heterotrophs would grow whenever they eat other cells. But what about a heterotroph that has a single rusticyanin? Should it grow just as well from eating iron? Probably not.

Maybe the instant growth is calculated based on how many metabolizing organelles you have. Maybe growth could happen at the rate you metabolize the food for energy, but that could increase waiting again. Or maybe you need glucose to grow. But that would hinder iron eaters unless you can synthesize glucose with energy from inorganic compounds like CO2, in which case glucose is kind of an unnecessary middleman. I think that this is a harder system to figure out, but if it were to work out, it could make sessile organisms viable without risking a waiting simulator for motile cells.

Static ATP consumption

Constantly consume ATP to grow. You could tweak the rate of growth in the microbe editor, within some reasonable minimum and maximum values. Big cells could grow at a similar rate to small cells since they have more ATP to spend. Autotrophs could sacrifice movement to grow faster. This system is essentially passive growth, so perhaps active cells could have a button that makes them grow faster at the cost of more ATP, that way they could choose their growth rate based on how much food they find and get back some agency. Passive growth makes ammonia and phosphates unnecessary, so they could either boost growth, have some other purpose or be removed.

This system would work pretty similarly to passive absorption and time-based growth, just putting the focus more on energy rather than nutrients. It does give a nice freedom to choose your rate of growth, but it could perhaps be awkward for new players to think about how much ATP they spend on growth. I guess they could just ignore it if the default rate of ATP to growth goes up as you add organelles to your cell. This could work, it’s mostly a matter of which things the reproduction system wants to focus on.

Dynamic ATP consumption

Grow based on how fast you consume ATP during gameplay. If you move, you grow faster. If you make toxins, you grow faster. If you have a higher osmoregulation cost, you grow faster. This makes growth automatically scale with size. This also makes it so you never have a reason sit still once you have enough food to grow until reproduction, since that would just slow you down and it wouldn’t affect how much food you need to reproduce. This gives players who want to go fast the interesting challenge of maximizing how much energy they gain and consume. However, species with little energy would grow slower, which could be unfun for them. Also, it may be weird that moving speeds up your growth. This would also make ammonia and phosphates useless. I don’t know if this idea makes sense, I just found it interesting.

Remove phosphates from the game

We could just abstract phosphates away from the game by assuming that the player passively absorbs enough of them. This would actually make gameplay very similar to the Phosphate Generation mod. If you’re a normal cell, you can play the exact same, just worry about one less compound. If you need help with growing, you can add nitrogen fixing organelles to your cell. This would be a bold but simple change. It’d certainly work, but it does have its flaws. It would mean that all sessile cells would need nitrogen fixing organelles. New players would probably miss those organelles and wonder why they can’t reproduce. We wouldn’t have the chance to teach about phosphates being essential for growth. There would be less diversity in needed compounds (this is both a pro and a con). I wouldn’t personally go with this one.

TL;DR: Sessile, slow and big cells struggle to get phosphates. Surviving from birth to reproduction should be an interesting challenge. Reproduction time shouldn’t be too long or too short. We could try new systems like passive absorption. We should be wary of breaking the game loop, confusing new players or causing too much work for the devs. We can diminish the risk of a waiting simulator with challenging survival, more ambiance and player agency in their rate of growth. All things considered, I think a new system is a good idea, maybe even a necessary one.

Now that’s probably enough for a conversation starter. If you didn’t guess, I’m pretty passionate about this stuff. It’s one of the reasons I got into messing around with Thrive’s code and made the Phosphate Generation mod. I hope that one day life in Thrive will be as diverse as possible. Biodiversity makes for interesting alien environments and gives players more creative freedom and strategic options. Ideally all viable life forms would be fun to play as at least for some people. I think that with all this is mind, a new reproduction system is necessary sooner or later. I don’t know which system is best, which is why I made this post. I want to encourage people to think about this stuff and share their thoughts. I think that it’s a good idea to start trying to figure this stuff out sooner rather than later, because changing reproduction could affect the whole game. For example, if sessile cells could reproduce, then the developers would be freer to add things that encourage or require slowness or sessility, like tankier cell walls. That could change the whole balance of the game. If we leave reproduction changes until later, there may not be much time to do them before 1.0, or plenty of things could end up having to be reworked.

Of course, it could be that none of these proposed reproduction systems make the game better, and some of them could be too much work even if they did. I’m not demanding anything from the busy developers. I just think that there’s a lot of real potential and that it’s a worthwhile idea to test some simple options. When it comes to some of the wilder ideas, I may make some kind of prototypes for them myself one day if they seem promising enough, but that would be still long ways of, and it may well be that the simplest ideas turn out to be the best ones.

I think that testing out simple passive absorption in practice is a good start. If you can, please add the rate of absorption as a tweakable constant in new game settings. That way players can experiment with different values and offer lot of feedback quickly.

If anyone has any thoughts, please share them! Also if anyone has feedback on how reproduction feels with the phosphate mod or Thim’s fork, that would be great to hear as well!

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At present cell collect nutrients for only one reproduction,then go to the editor.
Whether we can control cell division and go to the editor through second or more divisions by consuming a large amount of nutrients and meeting certain conditions.
This makes it possible for the ammonia supply of cells at the time when lack of glucose, instead of immediately losing health.
It also allows cells to spend multiple nutrients on reproduction, not just ammonia and phosphates.

How should we reflect the difference between binary fission, mitosis, budding and spore formation?

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How much of this has been implemented in the game? It seems that, as of 0.6.2, we have:

  • passively belgiumned ammonia and phosphate
  • minimum time for reproduction
  • part of the cell’s lifecycle going on without reproduction (and organelle division starting at maybe 80% of the way through)

I do think that having different uses and benefits for phosphate and ammonia would be good. Also, if phosphate were not as important for reproduction, there would be more point in having the ammonia-producing parts - which I currently feel are pretty-much useless.

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At present, the reproductive consumption of ammonia and phosphate increases synchronously. Considering that ammonia corresponds to proteins and phosphate corresponds to DNA, the ammonia cost of reproduction should be affected by the composition and quantity of organelle; the cost of reproducing phosphate should be influenced by the complexity of the DNA, and some organelle containing DNA will also increase the cost of phosphate.

The complexity of the DNA mainly depends on the quantity of the types of organelle, the increase of the same organelle has little effect on it. It should be beneficial for cell specialization.

I really like cells to collect nutrients from relatively young forms, grow to maturity, and then accumulate nutrients to a certain extent before actively initiating division in a safe location, and going to the editor by second or more divisions in the same game period.

The cost of different splitting modes should have same phosphate costs, mainly different in ammonia costs.

For example, for the binary fission, cell start at 80% size, growing to 100% size , collect 160% of nutrients in size to divide and return to 80% size. (80% ammonia costs, 100% phosphate costs)
for the budding reproduction, cell start at 60% size, growing to 100% size , collect 140% of nutrients in size to divide and return to 80% size. (First division need 80% ammonia costs, 100% phosphate costs, but the next only need 60% and division period is shorter)
(The percentage here may be relatively controllable)

edit: I overlooked that phospholipids, a component of biofilms, also consume phosphates. Cell membrane area and phosphate cost of membrane organelle should also be considered.

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When glucose cloud is replaced with zoo/phytoplankton, the clouds would include phosphate and ammonia too.

Okay, so what about removing the phosphate and ammonia clouds like how oxygen is removed?

You could already do that by reproducing. And what determines how long you need to survive? Yes, the very game you said has problems. And the player wouldn’t understand why the game asks him/her to survive for that spesific length.

This has a simpler solution. Make the time it takes for reproduction shorter, and ask the player to reproduce more than once. This way, the long times and short times would average out.

Why not remove compound clouds completely, if most of the ammonia and phosphate don’t come from the consumed clouds?

What does mutation points have to do with the speed at which the compounds required to build another member of your species is obtained?

In cell stage, you can add a nitrogen fixing plastid, and a plant can have nitrogen fixing legumes. They both should lower the time it takes to reproduce.

Maybe the requirement for reproduction should only be ammonia and phosphate for autotrophs. For heterotrops, what exists in food shouldn’t be visible to them. The compounds (containing equal amounts of both of them, because they were sufficient for the primary producer) in the food filling the reproduction bar and the glucose increasing the energy/hunger bar.

But ammonia is the thing you need for reproduction. Getting it does prove that you are adapted. You are succesful if you can reproduce. It doesn’t matter how long it lasted.

The species you described is perfectly adapted to its environment.

What are you suggesting? There can’t be too many predators, becuse there aren’t enough cells to feed them.

Generalist species can exist in multiple patches. Anyway, enviromental tolerance isn’t related to reproduction.

Not having glucose kills. Not having phosphate/ammonia doesn’t cause anything.

That is called death due to old age.

Producers can’t produce minerals with fusion. Why should the phosphate/ammonia levels be anything other than constant or random? Decreasing glucose levels can symbolise abiogenic hydrocarbons being consumed and the iron can dissapear from patches that gain oxygen. Volcanism can increase some minerals but it doesn’t start to happen less frequently if the planet is like earth and its core isn’t solidifying.

Such as by filling the ammonia bar of a species that has enough phosphate?

If they are abundant everywhere, why should they boost anything?

This started to sound like dietary recommendations instead of a survival game. Is this more realistic?

That is a very random thing to do

Is that a good complexity to add?

The main focus was already that.

I don’t have an opinion on that, I think it should be done if it is more realistic.

These are good solutions

What I understand is, phosphate and ammonia were like the power ups in mario games, not necessary because they were abundent (and also not abundent?). Why did the power ups exist in the first place? To make the player get used to the game? Do they only become necessary later in the game? Did the early oceans on earth have a lot of phosphate and ammonia? Then wouldn’t it be toxic, how is it a power up? Was it right below the goldilocks amount?

I agree

Not really complicated. They are power ups.

Why? Is because a generation lasts shorter and there would be more generations for evolution? Does the game currently give us 50% mp discount if we enter the editor 50% faster?

What? I thought you wanted a more or less fixed time. The incentive is being able to enter the editor with a lower hp, etc. But if your species is unfit(such as slow), not only you can’t get the power ups before the others, you woud get hunted and extinct. This is the first time you are suggesting being able to enter the editor after a shorter jump, if thats what you are suggesting.

Every species is already incentivised to “just reproduce as soon as possible”. There are exceptions to it such as the grandmother hypothesis but I don’t think you are talking about that.

It is obvious that an experienced player woudn’t be able to finish the game faster if the lengths are more or less fixed.

I suggested having a fixed number of generations instead of a fixed time and I less strongly suggested all the clouds except the glucose to be removed, which would result in the same thing for autotrophs, but that shouldn’t be a problem if speeding up the game is also added, playing as a tree would be boring otherwise.

I’d say it is too much controlled

So, can this be solved by greatly increasing the glucose requirement for reproduction and added parts?

You are just undoing your idea

Why should auto evo care about something that doesn’t change a species’s chance of survival? Why do we end up having mismatchs*? Why should the ammonia help the player’s species in an invisible way? Why shouldn’t the player see that s/he is succesful after consuming ammonia, because of faster healing, etc, and why should there be an increse in auto evo numbers for any other reason than a decrease in deaths and an increase in births? Why try so hard to find benefits to ammonia from a gameplay perspective, instead of looking at the real benefits of ammonia?

I didn’t noticed what changed in this concept. The time it takes until you can click the reproduce button still depends on the

the previous one was

which means which organelles are placed. Or whatever. I don’t know.

A mouse can see the world in slow mo, and a whale can see it in fast mo (is that a word?). The time it takes subjectively for a the player can depend on how fast the player manages to hunt prey (when playing a carnivore) and therefore consume ammonia/phosphate and glucose.

The time it takes for an average player can be determined with tweaking the game’s parameters. The deviation from the average can be reduced with multiple generations.

For example, imagine that the expected value for the time it takes before reproduction was 10 minutes and the standard deviation was very high, 8 minutes.

And imagine that we replaced it with two 5 minute long generations. Their standard deviations are 4.

What is the standard deviation of playing two 5 minute long games?* It is √(42+42) or 5,65 minutes, instead of 8 minutes. If it was divided into 8 short generations, it would be √(8 x 18) or 2,82 minutes. If there are more generations, the total amout of time before entering the editor becomes more predictable. [1]

That would be an chemoautotroph, and need to get ammonia/phosphate with passive absorption

ATP is used to store energy for a short term. Glucose is used to build yourself and grow. Plants can turn glucose into lignin, carbohydrates and fats can be also be considered glucose. Proteins can be considered ammonia(could be called protein in aware stage). Every cell also needs to have some ATP/ADP, which have phosphate. So it is best to treat ATP as a middleman and make growth depend on ammonia/phosphate/glucose.

Using glucose is like using ATP, because you give carbon dioxide when you breathe out. The glucose used for growth is the glucose that can’t be used for energy. Glucose from the glucose bar can be removed for growth.

You can’t grow faster than you consume, so why not say that “grow as fast as you can”? Why would a player chose to grow slower? If you don’t want to enter the editor, if you have unfinished business, you can just not click the reproduction button, and stay a grown up for some time.

What? Is this a game exploit?

If there is a lack of glucose, why isn’t the cell dying? Magic? Ammonia can’t turn into glucose.

edit: a carbon fixator can use ammonia to make glucose*

  1. tell me if i the maths or the assumptions are wrong ↩︎

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I didn’t think carefully about the specific ammonia autotrophy at that time.

Now I tend to separate ammonia and amino acids. Amino acids are used for cell growth and reproduction and allowing cells to synthesize amino acids.

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For context and clarification, this was posted on these forums before the switch to the new reproduction mechanic, which was essentially what this post was arguing for. Before, you would be able to directly uptake absorbed phosphate and ammonia with no sort of cap on absorption rate. That effectively meant that even as a big eukaryotic cell, if you got lucky and stumbled on a huge cloud of phosphate and ammonia, you could go directly to the editor. That wasn’t realistic to evolution or life simulations at all - you don’t just grow instantly as nutrients are consumed. This goes more towards nailing the ideal game mechanic for the simulation Thrive is trying to become rather than the most efficient system we can implement. I am sure that the vast majority of players going into Thrive expect some aspect of “growth” to exist in gameplay since successfully growing your organism is a metric for evolutionary success.

If players are able to circumvent the need to eat a lot of food before reproducing, then so be it; it is a valid evolutionary phenomenon. But they must reach this state of rapid reproduction by making the concessions necessary to achieve that sort of reproductive strategy, by simplifying their body plans and by minimizing their metabolic needs. Not by lucking out and finding an immediately accessible ammonia/phosphate cloud that can give them a free trip to the editor. Having some sort of standardized growth mechanic also gives us a better ability to finetune the gameplay loop - it’s a lot easier to balance things knowing the average pace of a gameplay loop rather than leaving the length of a gameplay loop volatile and ambiguous depending on the compound cloud spawning system.

I will also say that it is extremely unlikely clouds will disappear from Thrive entirely. Chunks of resources might be introduced and cloud spawning frequencies might be reduced in response, but there will always be clouds. Not having clouds and only having chunks necessitates engulfment, which isn’t universally available in Thrive currently, and also makes simulating predation a bit tricky without representing intracellular material as a sort of cloudy goop.

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In my opinion, the concentration of dissolved substances in water should be relatively stable, and clouds should represent local material enrichment caused by events, and gradually dissipate. For example, cell injury or death leads to nutrient efflux, mineral dissolution. So I admire environmental compounds.

I have thought about the idea of cells completing a single reproduction:

Organelle replication

I still request to modify the mechanism of replicating Organelle with cell growth during the game. This essentially breaks the player’s expected design for cells, causing them to deform, especially because the replication of flagella and nitrogen fixation causes the ATP balance of cells to be disrupted and starve to death.

At present, every time Organelle division occurs, the actual Organelle of the cell is actually increased. The new Organelle will be generated outside the cell without being predicted by the player, which greatly affects the shape of the cell and requires the re statistics of biochemical processes in the game (does this calculation affect the game performance to some extent?).

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In my opinion, the shape and function of cells should be expected and determined in the editor as far as possible, and the division of Organelle should be just a visual effect. For cell growth, a fixed form of cell can be demonstrated by zooming in from small to large. This process can be accompanied by changes in engulf capacity, as well as proportional adjustments to material and ATP requirements based on current size.

For binary fission, Organelle can not follow the amplification, but copy themselves and overlap, which also facilitates the possible cell division animation to allocate Organelle.

Nutritional cost [Structural cost]

In my opinion, the nutrition cost represents the component of a Organelle, which is related to the nutrition that a cell needs to synthesize the Organelle and the nutrition that can be obtained by swallowing a Organelle.

Starting from a simple model, only proteins and DNA are considered, corresponding to nitrogen and phosphate (perhaps some special structures should require special compounds, as well as membrane phosphate [phospholipids]). The demand for protein is related to the type and quantity of cell structure, while the demand for DNA is related to the complexity of genes (the complexity of genes can be determined by the type of cell structure, with little impact on quantity, which may promote specialization).

Growth state and Reproductive state

The nutritional cost of designing cells within the editor is set at 100%. For a binary session, it can be divided into cell growth state and reproductive state. Cell proteins in the growth state range from 70%(start state) to 100% and do not synthesize DNA; The proliferation state of cells ranges from 100% to 140% in protein and from 100% to 200% in DNA.

NPP

This nutrient pool represents the structural material composition of cells and affects the amount of nutrients that can be provided in addition to stored nutrients when cells are engulfed. I also envisioned that cell damage would result in a loss of progress that needs to be repaired, and excessive loss to the danger line would lead to death. May this serve as a difficult mode?

Growth state, the consumption and output of various biochemical processes in cells are related to the current cell size ratio, in order to avoid a small cell requiring significant material consumption. Reproductive state, The consumption and output of various biochemical processes in cells are calculated at 100% state.

Dormancy and activity of cells

I’ve been thinking about how to reflect this: Nighttime cell dormancy, cell dormancy in the absence of food; Cells are active when food is abundant.

If the process of entering ammonia and phosphate into the progress is considered as a requirement for energy consumption, or the DNA and protein synthesis process that consumes ATP (which can directly give engulf the advantage of some proteins), and the process can be controlled in different stages:

Stage Feature
Dormancy Completely no growth and reproduction; closing the motor organs, only basic movement values; reduce osmotic regulation consumption; Close the production of mucus and toxins
Energy conservation Low growth and reproduction; using the motor organs; Close the production of mucus and toxins
Normal Standard State
Activity ATP is consumed in large quantities (except for Glycolysis), so as to grow and reproduce as high as possible (there is a certain upper limit, which is proportional to the normal ratio)

It may be necessary to classify various biochemical processes.

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I think it might be cool if there were a way to program a way to tell cells how long G2 phase would be, which would determine how much of what resources you get, as well as the AI of non-player player species cells. Still, on a level of how much resources you would get without a new system, maybe it would be related to the environmental levels of the resource? So, if there’s low phosphate levels, you’d spawn with less phosphate, which would allow for algae blooms and eutrophication to happen if the essential nutrient levels were to suddenly increase.

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Low-energy states for cells should definitely be added to the game. I think the eventual changes to the process panel (allowing switching off processes) combined with player decision-making would cover a lot of that for the player, and probably wouldn’t require a new mode to be added. Code would need adding into the AI for non-player cells, though. They would need to determine when to decrease their energy usage (such as at night), and which processes to stop.

As for unplanned changes in the cell as it grows, determining organelle reproduction order would help a lot. But what about being able choose for newly-spawned organelles to be inactive? That would reduce confusion about the cell running differently over time. The cell would still slow down as it grows, but you could even reduce the weight and osmoregulation costs of the new organelles. This would reduce a lot of the player’s frustration when the cell is struggling a bit.

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