Context-Dependent Hints

Gameplay
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Context-dependent hints are one thing in Thrive that can seriously help us manage information overload. It can be hard to understand exactly what is being asked of you in a sandbox, so some well-placed, dynamic information can really alter player expectations, let them know what to do, and inform them of some important strategies.

I have listed a few suggestions here based on some common areas of confused feedback we get. I of course am not sure of the relative difficulty of various triggers for the hint, so these can be altered.

More suggestions are welcome; as well as feedback on areas that you guys most frequently see the most confusion about with this game.

Auto-Evo

Trigger: Placing a part which causes a significant change in editor auto-evo predictions.

Text: Don’t worry yourself too much when the Auto-Evo Predictor rapidly fluctuates; your population is much more influenced by your own performance rather than auto-evo.

Organism Metabolism

Trigger: High glucose production as a plant, but weak ATP production.

Text: You need to use the glucose you are generating. Placing hydrogenosomes, metabolosomes, or mitochondria can help you produce more ATP.

Trigger: ATP demands exceeding ATP input at rest.

Text: You need more energy than you are currently producing.

Trigger: ATP demands are met at rest, but are close to net-zero or negative when moving.

Text: You produce enough ATP to sustain your organism, but not enough to support its movement mechanism for long. Consider placing more energy producing parts if you wish to be motile.

Patch Map

Trigger: Shift in atmospheric conditions of a patch.

Text: Atmospheric conditions in this patch are shifting. This may impact your organism’s metabolism, especially if the shift happened in a compound or gas you depend on.

Trigger: Player lives in a patch with a low presence of their preferred compounds.

Text: This patch is limited in the resources you need. Consider adjusting your organism’s metabolism or trying to migrate away.

Trigger: Clicking a patch outside your species’ environmental tolerances, which results in an impact on population.

Text: Your organism has a preference for conditions not present in the currently selected patch. Reviewing organism statistics and managing your population can help you maintain your existing population.

Engulfment

Trigger: Engulfing atleast two organisms with toxins that damage you.

Text: This organism’s toxin damages you when you engulf it. Consider finding other prey, or adapting immunity.

Trigger: Numerous attempts to engulf something too big for you to consume.

Text: Consider adding cytoplasm or more parts to increase your organism’s engulfing capacity.

2 Likes
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I think this is designed a bit in an obsolete way as the energy gain is now the primary display, and also for 0.8.0 there’s now an organelle suggestion shown in the editor which is what auto-evo has calculated as being the most beneficial for the player.

I think these are mostly fine but where would we show these? Because basically given this many easy to trigger hints there’d always be one or two that need to be displayed.

This will literally trigger each editor cycle starting from the first one thanks to the dynamic compounds system…

Is the HUD notice about taking damage from ingested poison not clear enough?

This needs to be careful to not trigger for unrealistic stuff like big iron chunks which is just for hardcore players or freebuild species to eat.

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I think then focusing on instances where the player’s metabolisms dramatically plummets due to shifting environmental conditions would be better.

I think it can sometimes be unclear to the player that they can actually do something about the toxin immunity. So perhaps focusing more on that aspect could be ideal.

Yeah, placement is the question here, I was trying to think of a spot in my prior playthrough. We can always use pop-ups pointing towards places of the GUI with relevant information, but having them be too frequent in the editor could result in players dismissing them.

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Something like this could be a loading screen tip? I think those haven’t been updated in years and there’s this open issue since 2020:

Now that I remembered that exists, I think quite many of the tips could actually be written for the loading screen. “Thanks” to the a bit slower new auto-evo algorithm the player actually now should see the loading screen for at least a minute or two during a microbe stage playthrough.

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I guess then it would be best to think about which tips should be more prioritized in sharing during the game, which I do think generally caters around confusion related to metabolism. Having tips which point out “hey, this is what is happening, this is a hint” can help the player more robustly understand exactly how metabolism in the game works as opposed to reading about it more broadly.

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I very much agree with this, The last time I got back into playing the game I had a moment where I was totally blanking on why my organism was suddenly nonviable and I reloaded the game thinking that it was a bug before thinking to check the conditions of the patch I was in. Perhaps that was just me having a memory lapse, but I suspect that this occurs frequently to new users as well.

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