How will it go? How should the “landfall” event happen, what patch would you need? How could you evolve such a being in the first place? What types if species can you evolve from?
What happens if you do it too late?
I imagine intertidal or freshwater patches would be the starting point for any organism that might adapt to dry land. Like in real life, low competition on land would probably provide a good incentive for auto-evo (or the player) to become amphibious.
If the devs know what they’re doing, they’ll probably make a system that allows for gills to be internalized and turned into lungs.
I’m not involved with the project’s inner-workings, though, so take anything I say here with an especially large grain of salt.
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mudfish
Interestingly, the fish that evolved into amphibians had lungs from the start. In fact, all bony fish ancestrally had lungs. In most lineages the lungs were repurposed into swim bladders, though this ancestral trait can be seen in a close relative of tetrapods, the lungfish.
Edit: Also, gills were not turned into lungs. They were simply lost in all tetrapods besides larval amphibians.
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True for tetrapods. However, some other animals have internalized their external gills to make lungs, so it’s a viable strategy. Spiders internalized book gills into book lungs. Snails sort of count too but their gill was already in the mantle cavity so they just lost the gill and turned the cavity into a lung upon coming to land. The labyrinth organ of some fish is another example (and isn’t homologous with the lung/swim bladder at all).
None of these lung examples are active, though, but with the right musculature it’s possible for a passive lung to become active.
In my opinion, I think that the tidal movement will have a greater effect on the transition to land than through fresh water, because relatively fewer mutations are needed (resistance to salt deficiency and hypotonic environment) and there is a lot of evidence that this is how the transition started (although not 100%).
As for the airways, I think it was a good idea to put in all the possible options: lungs, gills, book lungs, trichoids and Branchiostegal lung. But with them able to work on it, it is possible to use them as templates, and not as “organs”. For example: grasshoppers have both trichomes and air sacs that resemble lungs.
The problems that animals try to land on are mainly - fluid loss, lack of ascites in the respiratory passage (passage between fluid and air and fluid back. Some of them even bypassed this problem in diffusion forces), radiation and gravitational endurance.
Admittedly, there is no one right way for life to go ashore, it gives a number of benefits: more oxygen allows in water, a competitive escape and a safe place (if they have solved at least some of the problems).
One that I have not encountered in a long time is that already in the Cambrian there were animals that were on land (presumably it is like a temporary escape), I link the article here to those who are interested:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gto.12379
What I do feel needs to be done, is that beyond have to solve all the problems of ascending to the ground before they ‘landfall’, as it’s a huge advantage to escape to the ground from predators, but they can not stay there for long, so they have to return to the water or they Ascending to the ground very quickly, it is worthwhile to move between tidal pools, etc.
Not necessarily need airborne organs at first.
Regarding this issue, when I was thinking about going to land, for me the editor of the animal was presented as the Skeleton Editor, Organ Editor and Muscle Editor, and to go on land, one would only need to develop lungs (organ editor) in the animal and make adapted limbs ( Skeleton and Muscle editors) and it wouldn’t be as big an event as it was in Spore. In general, it seems to me that the multicellular stage of Thrive will give scope for imagination that is many times greater than the Spore, because, as I understand it, it will be something like a fabric editor and something like that, which means there will be much more freedom
Yeah but the transition mostlikely happens in the aware stage. Well if you are not sesile.
But yeah the late multicellular and aware stages are sure to be intresting with all those editors.
I would hope the ice shelf could be a viable option since that’s what I want to do, but I’m no scientist so I don’t know how feasible that would be. There are of course penguins and polar bears who DO live on ice but I don’t know if that could be a starting point so to speak. I hope we DO have options other than what happened in real life since I feel like a lot of the appeal in this game for me is seeing how things could’ve turned out different if there were different circumstances (i.e. landfall happening from caves, with creatures eventually leaving the cave and adapting to more sunlight?)
A most realistic way for a transition to be made is pretty much, you are somewhere closer to the bottom of the food chain, in a coastal area. Sometimes, your natural predator chases you, so you have to stay in a shallow area for days on end. Say, a major heatwave is happening or just your planet is currently going through ha phase of high temperatures, but water level will slowly lower as water in the equator boils, causing the water in higher levels to go down to find its (pretty much) level, forcing your fish to be only partly, if at all submerged. A mutation would be a sac filled with air that is able to diffuse the oxygen into the blood stream reliably, allowing for above-water respiration, and thus basic amphibians. As time goes on, better limbs must be evolved to move on these flat rocky surfaces, before plants arrive, to get into other areas with less predators, to continue land presence. At some point, plants will arrive, and thrive due to low predator count to eat them, incentivizing your creature to stay above water to eat these large amounts of plants, full transitioning to an amphibian.