“Glucose as a molecule isn’t required really anywhere in cell construction. Not in any of the membranes, lipids, proteins, and organelles.”
All they need glucose. I mean, they need carbon. You can’t build a cell by mixing ammonia and phosphate. They build none of the membranes, lipids, proteins, organelles.
acetil coA is the building block of carbohydrates and lipids. if you add ammonia to acetyl coA, you can build amino acids. add phosphate on top of that, and you can build nucleic acids and atp. you make acetyl coA in the krebs cycle during the carbon fixation. what i mean by glucose is acetyl coA. they are almost synanomous. and simplifying is better than failing at everything.
cells require tiny amounts of ammonia and phosphate compared to the carbon they need. the redfield ratio is 106 carbon and 16 nitrogen for every phosphate a cell has. which is more or less the same for all species.
“What is required is lots of energy. This already exists in thrive as ATP though”
atp isn’t stored in the cells. it is tiny when compared to the carbon in the cell stored as glucose or fats.
roughly 25% of the carbon in the consumed biomass is used as glucose. its “lots of energy”. but still, the same amount, 25% is used directly for building the cell.
filling the ammonia and phosphate bars wouldn’t matter for heterotrophs. because, since they have the same percentage of ammonia and phosphate as their prey, these two would fill at the same rate.
what wouldn’t fill at the same rate, is glucose, which is needed for building the “membranes, lipids, proteins, organelles”. but since it is also used for energy, there isn’t enough of it.
if you can fill your bars as fast as you can, then, when you eat a cell, it would fill 100% of your ammonia bar, 100% of phosphate bar, and 25% of glucose bar. you would need to eat 4 cells to fill your glucose bar as well. after the first prey, every one you eat would need to release 100% of their ammonia and phosphate.
full ammonia/phosphate bars, but unable to reproduce. seems so alien to this game, isn’t it? do we even have carbon based life? do we magically convert atp into glucose?
“Heterotrophs should emit ammonia clouds after consuming cells: This is also already a feature. If you consume more ammonia than you can store the cell throws it back out.”
There is no need to store ammonia, other than in the growth bar around the reproduction button. But there is need to store glucose for energy storage in addition to for growth.
“Now the amount you get from a cell is based on digestion efficiency and game balance, so there is room elsewhere for discussion”
“game balance” is unscientific. if this goes on like this, we wouldn’t need kidneys in the multicellular, right? it is ignoring the math, that you have to get rid of the same percentage of ammonia as the amount of carbon you can’t use. “getting enough ammonia and phosphate” is never the goal for heterotrophs. there would be too many of them. putting them as the only requirement for reproduction is just wrong. and for autotrophs, they would fix their own carbon and nitrogen anyway, so it may as well be “phosphate and sunlight” bars, as the co2 and n2 in the atmosphere wouldn’t run out, diffusion is fast for gasses, so what determines how much you can get them would be how much you’ve stayed under the sun.
“Growth should require some time: This is a current feature. Growth is limited by time.”
here is another idea. why can’t we choose how fast we grow? we can add an organelle called ribosome to determine that. more ribosomes would mean faster growth, but it would also mean the cell is bigger, so it has to grow more overall. sure, energy can also determine it. but does that mean you’re not growing when you’re sprinting? if i make a cell with a bad energy balance, it can have decreasing atp any time i’m not standing still. is that balanced? and if time is the only limiter, it there is no way to complete the stage faster, no valid strategy for speedrunning.
why not add a new compound called “biomass”. it can be the building block of the cells.
106 glucose + 16 ammonia + phosphate => 1 biomass
the prices of the organelles can be shown as biomass on the editor, alongside mp. mp would determine how much organelles you can add, and biomass would determine how much more clouds you’d need to eat in order to reach full size if you add that many organelles.
1 damaged biomass => biomass
ribosome can be the organelle that fixes biomass, and makes new biomass if you’re an autotroph. and if you have zero ribosomes, your groth speed would be zero. this was another suggestion i made that had zero upvotes.
3 compound bars around the “reproduce” button may be too visually not good. so why not have just one, called biomass? if you’re a heterotroph, your only energy source would be eating cells, and you would have a lot of ammonia and phosphate, and very little glucose. so rather than having a full ammonia and phosphate bar all the time, why not just ignore those two?
when you eat a cell, it can drop biomass, and you can get that biomass directly and increase your own growth.
biomass => 106 glucose + 16 ammonia + phosphate
you would use some of the biomass for growth, and turn some of it to glucose for energy. you would then “release” the 16 ammonia and 1 phosphate, because there is no need for them.
similarly, when you are starving, you can make that same reaction, and lose growth in favor of energy.