In real life as bacteria don’t have nuclei they can integrate genetic material from other bacteria fairly easily, and they do so in three ways: Transformation, they grab genetic material from their environment, usually from dead bacteria, Transduction, which involves viruses and as such cannot be put into the game, and Conjugation, in which two bacteria exchange plasmids, circular sequences of DNA.
Transformation would be easier to implement in Thrive, it could be made so whenever another cell without a nucleus dies or is engulfed it has a chance of “dropping” a plasmid, which the player can then absorb and it would either: A) give you extra mutation points or B) give you a free part that the cell had.
This would also make being a predator easier, which it currently isn’t.
Conjugation would be harder to implement, it could maybe be used as a form of sort of sexual riproduction, maybe a new signaling agent is implemented which when your cell is ready calls for other cells, of your species or not, who you the exchange plasmids with, maybe if your part of the same species they give you extra mutation points, if not they’ll give you a new part and you’ll give them a new part. The signaling agent could also have the downside of having the chance to atteact a predator.
Lastly maybe you can find plasmids randomly throughout the map, and once again they give you either mutation points or a new part.
Plasmids would only work for you when you don’t have a nucleus, once you unlock it they no longer give you anything.
Sorry if some parts are hard to read, english is not my first language
Plasmids have been discussed before:
Also there’s been some discussion on the dev forum, but these are all pretty old:
I think plasmids would be pretty cool to implement. They’re an excellent way of catching up if you fall behind, they shouldn’t be too hard to implement as they aren’t particularly complicated, and they would add additional behavior to the microbe stage.
Currently, most of the time, you’re suspicious of other cells. They’re either food that’ll run away, or things that might try and eat you. Adding in plasmids would make this more interesting, as it would open a peaceful interaction with other cells that benefits both.
I’d say a good way to give it more thought would be to have weaker plasmids drop from killing cells, and stronger plasmids come from conjugation. The strength differences would either be extra MP on the conjugate plasmids, or having one of the two be a specific discounted/free cell part while the other is MP. To further make it interesting, kill-plasmids could be made into an incentive to use non-engulf based kills; engulfing would destroy the plasmid, so you’d be incentivised to use weapons like pili or oxytoxy to kill cells if you want bonus MP, which widens the field of possible builds.
This seems kind of similar to the older concept of the player cell exploring and finding “gene fragments” out in the waters of Thrive which could give them either extra MP or a random discounted cell part.