everything keeps on dying. (':
almost every time I go to a new patch, the whole patch, just kind of goes extinct. and I know that new creatures entering an ecosystem can destabilize it, so something like this probably intended, but sheesh! this is a bit extreme. I didn’t think my tiny population of three spiked critters would become ecosystem destroyers, with nothing but a population 50 strong.
I love the update though, the added information in the editor does help a lot, though it is a bit unintuitive.
I think the other rival populations are just so low that the moment I start eating them they just die immediately. which isn’t great since I would have to jump to the next patch as soon as possible, hope my fellow members die before I do so I can eat, or starve. Sometimes only some creatures die and other times everything dies.
it hasn’t affected too badly in game, since I’m currently on a mission to become a lava and sun plant, but it did force me to leave a patch much faster than I was planning to.
You’ve managed to beat 99% of players and made a species that auto-evo actually really likes (you have like the highest population I’ve seen any player post for a big cell in the auto-evo prediction).
I mean is it really terrible? It makes the game more strategic when you cannot just infinitely hunt a certain species without them going extinct quickly.
The new auto-evo does make it more common for species to die out so it would be a bit more optimal to tweak it in the other direction a bit to make mass species extinctions less common.
((What’s that protein in the center of the organism? I don’t think I’ve seen it.))
I’ve noticed that a lot. Auto-evo extincts species really aggressively, especially with the player around. The patches I inhabit usually decay to only 1-3 other species, and one of my runs ended with my cell becoming a genocidal abomination that instakills the population of the patch.
Actually, there’s a lot of low-biodiversity patches. I think auto-evo might be a little stab-happy right now.
Well, the issue is, they all die in a single generation forcing me to jump to another patch pretty much the moment I get into the editor. And some of these species are species I never even touched or killed only a couple of, possibly because of a trophic cascade.
Being able to directly affect the population of species is a fun concept but it requires balancing to prevent a spore like situation where you kill like three creatures and the whole species is already dead.
Huh I thought my creature was quite small. I guess having adaptions that works well for hydrothermal and sunless patches helped with that.
yeah, while I was playing, I went to an earlier save, and eventually that patch with 10 other species became 3 without me even touching it. things definitely extinct way too fast currently and speciation is not happening nearly fast enough to compensate.
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AnthropocenianAge
(AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)
9
The same thing happens with me in almost every playthrough, despite the fact that I play as a non-predator.
Additionally, speciation is pretty low-quality right now. You get a lot of bad species which aren’t particularly distinct, nor much better than their predecessors. Evolution is random, chaotic, and about as clear as mud. IRL, you’d see closely related species adapting for similar niches, but in Thrive, but in Thrive, I don’t think you really see this - although you can’t view the miche tree, species aren’t super complex, and evolution and auto-evo are chaotic enough that you don’t see specialisation, complicated traits, or facets of a clade that are stable over long periods of time.
Auto-evo needs more love. It doesn’t get enough focused compared to the other aspects of gamedev, but arguably it’s the most important part of this whole thing.
I’ve seen this happen in my runs - I think it’s both? The external effect of mass murder has a significant impact, but it doesn’t account for the entire population loss, so I think the player’s cell is judged as very destructive to the ecosystem in auto-evo too. Which makes sense, given how the player cell is generally better at whatever it wants to do than the auto-evo, and also actually specialised.
Well cause for extinction is all labeled as death, but I don’t know if that’s gameplay death or auto-evo death. How big is population reduction when a species dies during gameplay?
The only place I can think of this is shown in the GUI is in the “external effects” section, which as the name implies is external to the usual report content (so it is not from auto-evo). And if the population loss due to death is so high that species are going extinct, then that extinction is not happening due to auto-evo but due to the gameplay portion.
The GUI should add up the totals per species. I think it’s something like 50 per death or so (someone can look up the exact number in the source code).
Yes, that happened a lot in my games too. Almost every time. More strangely, it also happens when my player cell don’t kill anyone. But then to a lesser extent, i must note.
Maybe the problem is autoevo’s disconnection from actual gameplay. I think that issue was mentioned up before. Autoevo thinks the cell is good, but when game starts, different mechanics kick in and cells stave to death. I do see cells starving to death a lot, especially when i move to a new patch. I think that registers as “death” in the report, correct me if i’m wrong.
Another factor is that, well, predation is also just good and fun. That’s objectively the most convenient way to advance. And even when you don’t hunt actively, a little opportunistic predation still has inappropriately destructive effect on other populations. I just do it because i can, who wouldn’t want a free meal? Do i have any reason to give up predation and engulfing, to, say, use some other kind of membranes? They’re trash, i’ll be honest. Chitin/cellulose? Why? So other cells won’t eat you? How? The only times i’m not the biggest fish is when i do intentional “minimal size” runs, or use some superhardcore custom difficulty. The other two? Why? To resist toxins? You know, here’s one issue with that. The most times (and i mean almost every time) i seen any cell use toxins is when i use them myself. Resist physical? I never seen any cell using spikes to actively hunt. And by never i mean never, AI just can’t do it. I only face spikes when i actively hunt, and hunting with spikes isn’t very efficient. Oh, and in multicellular, when some spiky little belgium is stuck between my cells, but you know this issue. Osmoregulation bonus? Not big enough to bother. Also you might want engulfing to eat phosphate and/or iron chunks, but autoevo might still think you’re a predator and calculate accordingly. So, i say it’s also a game design flaw.
The penalty is really about dying within the gameplay simulation. If the cell was killed by the player, another AI cell, or starved, doesn’t matter; the dying penalty is the same in all cases.
You’ve hit on one of the core design problems of Thrive: how do you simulate 100 Myr years of evolution in just a few minutes? The solution that is currently used is to have a simplified algorithm for determining what species are suitable to survive in a given environment with other species. Unless we added like 10x longer loading screens or super slow evolution, using the full gameplay simulation to determine what are good species is totally unfeasible.
