Viruses, Evolution and more

[ilikecells]

like in real evolution, viruses are born when the first species evolves to a macroscopic state. they invade through multiple ways (breathing,drinking or eating, (in smaller form) engulfing a virus mistaking it for another cell,etc.) and when in the body, they could add debuffs like less ATP production, hindering vital bodily processes like blood sugar levels and breathing, and depending on the immune system that could be added with it, the virus can be removed and if the creature is in a higher evolution stage, then the virus will have an antibiotic developpement when voluntarily done and reduces the time of eradication by half. this may also affect evolution itself as in extinguishing species and giving a permanent or modifiable after more than one generation extra part, and the virus/bacteria can have random stats so the player can also choose to keep them as a symbiote.

another thing is evolution. the player shouldn’t be the size of a tree, they only have a few cells. so the creature should be VERY small when evolving to macrosopic and will need millions of cells to become very big.

they can also maybe set thing as limbs, presets that they made, so they can just copy that around instead of rebuilding it from scratch. they should also animate the creature by hand and tell what each limb is, for example a hand, which they identify by telling the game: THIS HAND IT POKE AND GRAB STUFF. and feet which move on the floor. and also they have to create and eye limb with it’s very own editor, because they can just make a slab and be done with it. they need to add protection, a way to moisturise, how to get the maximum light, ajusting light levels with an an iris and more.

i know this would be EXTREMELY hard for a player, so we can have game presets for limbs.

[AnthropocenianAge (AnthropocenianAge Arthropleura wants to give you a hug!)]

The developers already said they will not add viruses, since I believe they said it would create too many possible interactions and makes things too complex, and they are already have trouble adding everything on the road map. However, viruses could be modded in the future.

[domin2ktr]

I think they will put more emphasis on bacterial infections.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

@ilikecells

they only have a few cells

A few dozen to be exact, as you need 20 to get to macroscopic, and can choose to stay around for longer.

Also it appears you have created this thread twice…

[hhyyrylainen]

Viruses are only excluded as they aren’t alive. So how would you play as a virus? Just by waiting because viruses cannot make any active actions. So that would mean just the Thrive editor would be used for gameplay and other than that you’d just wait. And in terms of hazards, viruses could be added but no one has volunteered to program them. A part is probably that such a hazard would be only a slight variant of a toxin cloud (one that does damage over time).

There’s been a bunch of threads about viruses already:

Viruses?

My English teacher has oddly mentioned Ebola every day for the last 3 days of being in her class whenever a kid coughs. I was thinking about that while checking my email and re-discovering the Thrive Community Forums. This got me thinking… Will viruses ever be a threat that players will encounter in the game? I’m not sure how tricky this would be to install but I know that it seems to me to be achievable.

Virus playthrough?

I was thinking, what if you could play as a virus instead of a cell, maybe as a special game mode, or something, but how it would work is you can chose to (instead of going mobile) infect other cells and control them, causing them to self destruct after a time, and instead of mutating movement, you could mutate more syringe types for infecting cells. Let me know what you think about it.

Viruses and Bacteriophages

Would Virus’ and Bacteriophages be in the Microbe/Multicellular stage? I believe they would work well as a hazard that could be deadly to cells not specialized to deal with inside ‘invasions’. I think, if they get in, these should be ‘activated’ once the middle part of the Microbe Stage is reached (Generation 10 or 500 population) and should have a population that is scaled to the mean of the population rounded down to the closest 50th for each unique species. An example would be: Cell A has a…

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

Maybe viruses could be added in the strategy stages as a type of infection the civs have to deal with?

[hhyyrylainen]

It would be no different from any other disease simulation by that point.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I know, just saying that if not in the “evolution stages”, they could atleast have a rather honorary inclusion in the “strategy stages” under the form of a disease. Albeit I could see virus diseases having the perk of mutating quickly, meaning new strains of them would quickly develop, especially during a viral epidemic.

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

Yeah, viruses mutate faster and have access to weirder symptoms like autoimmune diseases (I think bacteria do that too) at the cost of more simplicity. They could just be a funny title given to some diseases once you research microscopes. Also, bacteriophages have been a viable alternative to antibiotics at several points in history, so I think having them included is very important, even if they’re just a technology and basically never evolve.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I guess viruses would go more towards spread and bacteria more towards lethality in general?

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

Fun fact about diseases: They don’t want you dead! Do you collapse a mine on top of you, or burn down your house? No! You exploit it as long as you can. We repair and upgrade the places we live, kinda like a stomach bacteria, because like stomach bacteria, we don’t get much out of being cruel, but some things do, like we’re doing right now to earth. We’re polluting and throwing off the natural balance of everything, but we get SO much out of it in the short term, it’s fine, and in the long term, evolutionarily, if a breeding population makes it to another planet, who cares if we all die? That’s the bucket infections are it. If they kill a person, they die with us, often enough. Some are decent at living in corpses, but usually, death is not the goal. The flu is a truly optimized disease, and it doesn’t kill normal folks. COVID was a bat disease and wasn’t evolved to live in us, anthrax doesn’t care and will kill you because it can become a spore and live on after your death, tuberculosis is usually asymptomatic, etc. Very few diseases really just straight up want you dead. I’m not entirely sure what advantage bacteria have, but i suppose their complexity will allow them to have more possibilities, even if they evolve slower. There is no viral anthrax, sitting in wait so potently it’s been used for assassinations.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I wonder if other planets could have parasitic diseases as dangerous as bacterial or viral ones. Imagine something like cordyceps infecting a sapient species…