I wonder when will true sessile gameplay be added (it’s been speculated for quite some time now)…
True sessile gameplay requires completely new systems, because current Thrive gameplay is completely unsupportive of sessileness. You’d need to have some method of playing very inactive runs; a tree is rather helpless, after all. It can’t exactly choose to do anything. It’s a tree.
Some sessile species could work with life stages; a motile larva moves to a location where the sessile adult can survive (a good patch of iron, a safe location in the terrain, etc.). But that’s also a new system.
I feel like sessile gameplay wouldn’t be my priority as a Thrive roadmapper, although sessile auto-evo would be a major priority. Late Multicellular and Aware would both be extremely hollow and undeveloped without sessile things.
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They will need to be addressed atleast in the multicellular stage development era. Afterall that’s where corals belong in.
The Microbe stage is playable without complex terrain, although less interesting, and similarly the Multicellular would be playable without reefs or phytoplankton, but it’d be less interesting and have less niches. I don’t think sessile single-cells are very important to the Microbe stage, but they’re important to Multicellular and the system that generates them should be backported to Microbe when it’s created.
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Yeah. I heard there were suggestions that a species would need to evolve a “sticky flagellum” to be officially considered “sessile”, but perhaps there will be other methods to measure if a species is sessile…
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There’s a sessile-motile slider already in-game, but it doesn’t mechanically prohibit you from moving. I think you could implement something where if you slam it all the way towards sessile, you unlock a box that lets you become fully sessile, possibly unlocking new parts in the process to incentivise it since you can already be sessile without prohibiting movement. (Perhaps it would reduce osmoregulation cost?)
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Quite possibly, afterall no need to have a high metabolism when you don’t even move at all…
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Being sessile already makes you consume less ATP because you aren’t moving, and you can even change the editor’s ATP balance to ignore movement.
It’s tricky, actually, because it feels like sessility is most-of-the-way-implemented, like it’s not quite there, but at the same time, there’s nowhere else to go to make it feel fully implemented, other than just adding in a checkbox that’s nothing but a downgrade.
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perhaps if it also comes with certain benefits for the sessilemost species, it would not just be a downgrade…
That’s why I suggested an osmoregulation buff, because a sessile box with no buffs would be useless to tick, whether you’re a player or an auto-evo. It still feels odd, though, because there’s no logical reason for the sessile box to give less osmoregulation if it has no other effects.
I suppose the sessile box could switch your Thrive gameplay to ‘sessile mode’ whenever it’s added, but that wouldn’t solve the auto-evo problem…
Yeah I think an osmo reduction would be good.
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Now the only thing remaining is for this to be added… Which hopefully will happen during multicellular stage development…
it could make the game completely ignore your base movement cost and the movement cost for all flagellae and cilia, though pulling cilia should still be taken into account
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Maybe you just wouldn’t be allowed to increase your speed (by making cilia and flagella unavailable) after becoming sessile?
or by forcing all cilia to become pulling cilia on placement, and it could have the hard membrane types locked behind it until multicellular, where motility would be locked behind myofibrils, which would be locked behind soft tissue, as there’s not much reason to evolve them without cells that can deform, or electrogenesis, electrotrophy, wires that go out of and likely between your cells, and magnet production(which would be in Non LAWK)
Do you think developers will add magnet production and whatnot into the game?
bacteria, amoebae, and birds use it on really tiny scales by building almost perfect iron crystals to be able to feel magnetic north and magnetic south, so it could even have some gui elements that are added if you have it
Eh, probably just a “magnetic sense” of some sort, I don’t think it would have an entire separate gui from other “lesser senses”.