We are talking about the microbe stage. Please don’t immediately derail this topic, thanks.
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Sorry, so back to the point.
I don’t know much about microbes in the long run, but I do know a few things.
I’ll try to think of more funky organelles.
At the moment, what are the basic functions of cells and other microbes in the game?
Maybe we could make alternatives of chemoplast, thermoplast, chloroplast, mitochondria , etc. by editing/programming (with schemes) chemical reactions. It would also depend on what you can find in the current biome/environment.
I actually have been advocating for this since the old forum!
There are actual bacteria that eat electricity and survive off of it! Having an endosymbiotic bacteria that is able to respirate on electrons alone like Geobacter Metallireducens would be such a cool feature. It’d open up possibilities for new niches the likes of which we’d never see on Earth.
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I’d love to see plastids that take advantage of ionizing radiation, like the Chernobyl Fungus!
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If we could start on a world ravaged by nuclear war, we could have ionising radiation microbes.
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Or just a planet with a thin enough atmosphere to be bombarded by solar radiation or even orbiting a black hole which gives off a buncha radiation by itself. Radiotrophs could even dig into the ground for radioactive materials.
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Those are both awesome ideas. That’s the kind of thing I wanted here. Radiotrophs and electricity eating bacteria and such would allow for much more interesting niches to appear and of course since this is thrive we can extrapolate them to both non-prokaryotes and prokaryotes. Though the real intent of this thread is to show an instance of it in real life and say how we could make it into an interesting game mechanic (the mechanic itself need not be entirely realistic). How would being an radiotrophic microbe differ from a photosynthesizing/thermosynthrsizing microbe gameplay wise is it just that by a different name? Do we want radiation spots aswell as heat and light spots? Would the radiation spots damage other microbes? How do you imagine it in game? I’m hoping we can “harvest” ideas from here.
What’s with the weird spaces. Also yeah alternatives that use different compounds are on the table. For example one thing we almost added awhile back is a sulphur mitochondrion.
It used sulphur instead of glucose to produce atp. (Sulphur, not hydrogen sulfide)
These could be areas of particularly high background radiation.
I can imagine they’d naturally survive on the background radiation they receive, but be similar to plants due to how low background radiation is.
Radiation spots would be the equivalent to a tree growing on a mountain of nutrient-filled, moist soil with its own personal sun and carbon dioxide producer.
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And how does that work in the microbe stage?
You see, that’s the hard part.
I don’t know.
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Light is just non ionizing radiation. We could have different classes of light, some of which more or less intense than others which will also allow certain organisms to see certain kinds of light and perhaps even use them for synthesis.
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Was this talk of radiation eating creature inspired by Godzilla or is that a weird coincidence?
Btw are we talking about nuclear radiation because doesn’t that kinda, destroy DNA?
We are talking about these:
Also, i have another idea i didn’t mention here:
Sulphur Mitochondria
Also, Some Organelle for respiration of Iron (yes its a thing irl)
For creatures with those they would have to swim around a pick up chunks of sulfur/Iron chunks in their environment , so they would be seeking out the chunks (thats how it works irl, you can see the big chunks in the creatures eating them) and us e those chunks to make ATP instead of , for exmaple, a cloud of glucose, this would make their gameplay fundamentally different then the usual, since they arent looking for clouds of glucose or other compounds, they are just swimming around picking up solid chunks of stuff in their environment. Of coruse they still need to gather some clouds (ammonia and phosphate for example), but it would change things up a bit.
I’m new and don’t really know what you guys have planned so far but parasitic tendencies would be fun to me but I think most parasitic or even symbiotic traits could be better served in multicellular gameplay. Reproducing in other cells as a form of protection and way to get free resources, maybe try to help the cell you infect survive just so you can survive (even symbiogenesis such as mitochondria being theorized to have been cells in their own right), sporozoites and cell bursting, all that jazz.
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If we were to add thermophiles (mostly bacteria, not necessarily microbe), I thought that cells would use sulfur instead of oxygen (2 valent electrons) or they would use sulfur and oxygenize it to produce sulfuric acid, which could be used as energy (substitute for atp; but would need a mutation to become resistant to lower pH).
I like that idea. We want different stars so it’s natural that different wavelengths of light exist.