With the development of the multicellular stage being finally the team’s focus after more than a decade of unicellular supremacy—and the goal of finishing multicellular in about a year—[1]i think it is a good time to begin detailling the near horizons, AKA macroscopic, and aware.
Of theses two the later is generally the most antecipated stage, since it the one that will bring the public status of the game from “huh? thats a game?” or “cell RP” to the “Spore’s Spiritual Succesor” promised so many years ago.
Macroscopic, in another hand, wasn’t even considered a stage until about this year, and despite being the first one where we actually get to use the 3D editor, it is often overlooked in the grand scheme of things.
Despite that, Macroscopic is a really, really important stage, due to working as an bridge in between the 2D game part of the game, and the proper 3D grandeur we long so much for.
With all of that said, i hope with this post, lay down some concerns—mainly on the scientifical aspect—i want to be aknowledged when 2027 arrives, and this becomes the teams focus.
First of all, what really is the macroscopic stage, really?
As mentioned previously, macroscopic was for a long time synonymous with late multicellular, when our cells colony becomes so great and amazing that it wins the privilege of 3D.
However, due to how abrupt such a change would be middle-stage, and how hard would be to divide the team’s attention to two things that are very distinct in all aspects, the macroscopic is considered something apart now. It even gets its own forum tag!
From what i gathered, the stage lies in between (i am writing in between wrong right?) two very important events in evolution’s history:
- The development of reproductive cells
- The development of sentience [2]
The first evolved around 2 billion years ago, and although the definition of sentience (or awareness, if we are going by the stage’s name) is still a topic of discussion[3] but, an generally accepted point to where we are certain most major creatures show sentience is the Cambrian, about 540 MYA. This means macrocellular is going to cover aprox a billion and a half years if we assume evolution always occur on a similar scale no matter the planet. After unicellular, this is probably going to be the longest range a stage have after unicellular.
And you know what is funny too? Both the origin of reproduction cells and of brains are currently unsolved problems in biology! How great for our scientifically accurate game!
Jokes aside, the multicellular stage also deals with this problem of it being so long ago that is hard to find answers due to how little material we have to work it.
But macroscopic is just such a monumental task to even begin planning it around, specially because we also don’t know yet really well how a small group of cells evolves into being so hilariously large beings with trillions of cells to be managed. We do have some theories of how tissues formed, but due to the lack of fossile records until the Tonian and Cryogenian, where we found the possibly the first proto sea sponges, which is the closest thing we got to an intermediate to our needs. The “macroscopic stage” of Earth also happened during a period we call boring billion, which is a very self explanatory name in my opinion.
Some people may know that i have a spec evo project, and one of the many reasons why i began doing it was because i wanted to “simulate” a complete “gameplay” of thrive, from the first life to interstellar exploration. One thing i would argue it was one of my worst rookie mistakes in it (which i am needing to fix right now) is that i assumed the last common animalian ascestor arised around the cambrian, which looking back now, is so wrong.
The project devolved into some sort of confused alien seed world instead of reflexing what an actual biodiversity explosion would look like, and now i am taking my time to change this by addying other phyla, cleaning some species etc.
So, to recap, Macroscopic, besides being the transition to the 3D thrive experience, being defined by two events we are still scratching our heads on, being set on one of the most boring periods of earth, which also lacks any sort of animal fossile remains, and ADDYING TO ALL OF THAT, it will need to have an auto evo good enough to populate the world already in the cambrian explosion!![4]
Yeah. Belgium is complicated.
Infortunely, it is too late on the night for me to actually think of any solutions so i will let that for the tomorrow’s me brainstorm with whonever responds to this topic.
I am not using AI to write this, despite the em-dashes might give you the impression. I finished the house of leaves recently and i stole several writing quirks from it, including unnecessary footnotes like this one. ↩︎
Do not confuse with sapience. Fishes are sentient, but not sapient, for example. ↩︎
when searching for this post, i found several articles and papers discussing the possibility of unicellular sentience, so you see where i am coming from ↩︎
when i say things like this, i am not referring to the period in player’s planet that corresponds to the cambrian, not out cambrian. Just to clear that out. ↩︎
