Okay although I had initially mentally classified this as a future feature to tackle, after discussing Auto-Evo performance on discord with some of the devs I realize that Environmental Tolerance is actually a critical system to get into the game as soon as possible. Here are the reasons why:
Without it, Auto-Evo has no natural reason to diverge new species and we have to do it randomly.
In real life, the reason species diverge is because of different geography and climate, that forces organisms in one biome to adapt to their local environment and change from their ancestors in the biome they came from. However, since we don’t have environmental conditions affect your cell currently, this does not occur in the cell. Instead, the game simply randomly splits species by just rolling some dice. This leads to species divergences that don’t make sense, and too many species in harsher environmentals (which reduces performance).
It is an important feature for all future stages literally until the end of the game, and is a necessary feature to complete before we can move to developing later stages.
Considering we want to wrap up the “bones” of the Microbe Stage as soon as possible to start working on later stages, it’s important to realize what are the remaining fundamental features we have remaining before we can refocus our main focus to later stages. Again, environmental conditions affecting different species differently is so important that we can’t build realistic future stages until this is implemented.
It adds an extra element of decision-making to migrating between patches.
Currently you can spawn in as the LUCA cell and just reproduce in 30 seconds, migrate, reproduce, migrate, until you get to the biome you want to get to. But real life doesn’t work like this, and migrating to new patches should be a tradeoff. Yes there are new and unexploited resources, but you will also be less adapted to living there. This is one of the fundamental problems of the game, even translating to the Spage Stage where you may want to colonize a new alien world with rich mineral reserves but a toxic atmosphere. So adding the Environmental Tolerances feature should also make planning your migrations and mutations more fun.
For these reasons, I want to finalize the concepts around Environmental Tolerance as soon as possible, document the design decisions on the wiki, and then queue it as a feature I will work on after I finish some smaller initial ones to become familiar with the codebase.
What I want to do in this thread
- Finalize the environmental stats of each biome. This is already mostly done and just needs to be documented on the wiki.
- Finalize the concept of how intolerance to environmental conditions will affect your cell.
- Finalize a list of organelles/mutations that cells can evolve to tolerate these different
- Create a roadmap for implementing the feature. The easiest is likely to start with implementing only a single condition, such as temperature, and its associated tolerance mutations, and then incrementally add the rest.
1. Finalizing the environmental stats of each biome
The stats are listed in the wiki page here: Microbe Biomes - Thrive Developer Wiki
I’ll do a look through and see what I think, and post any suggestions here. We can discuss them, and then create a final list and put it on the wiki.
2. Environmental intolerance effects
We put the initial tolerances here: Microbe Biomes - Thrive Developer Wiki
However, I think this is actually not accurate for LUCA. According to research that both Deus and I have done, it seems that the first organisms were thermophiles (adapted to higher than normal temperatures) and perhaps extremophilic (adapted to abnormal ranges for other variables too) in other ways as well. I’ll go through my sources and post what I think ought to be the most accurate starting tolerances for LUCA.
We also put the penalties a cell will suffer for how much out of its tolerance range it is in the same link. However, I think I now disagree with these suggestions. Although I initially felt that reducing the processing speed of all organelles was the most realistic, I don’t think it actually is. As far as I know, the membrane will work proportionally harder to keep the internal environment of the cell the same even if the external conditions are even more extreme, so it’s really only the membrane that bears the brunt of a hostile environment. As such, I think that the best thing to do is to just make hazardous environmental ranges increase ONLY your Osmoregulation Cost. This accomplishes a few things:
- It is an easy penalty for the player to track. The player can easily calculate how much extra ATP cost they must sustain to move to a new patch, instead of trying to recalculate the new and reduced output of ALL of their organelles.
- It allows for organisms to colonize environments that they are only somewhat adapted to. Since the only penalty is an increase to Osmoregulation Cost, it’s very possible that a cell migrating there will still have a net positive ATP balance even with the penalty, and as such will be able to colonize and exploit the patch. The species will have a big incentive to evolve tolerance to the local environment though if he wants to remove this penalty, but this will then make him less adapted to his home patch (which could lead to the two groups of cells diverging into different species).
- It allows for two different strategies to environmental tolerance. One is to obviously evolve specific adaptations to whatever local hazard is in that patch (let’s say high temperature). This is easy to do but makes you specifically adapted for only high temperature patches. HOWEVER, another is to evolve to have a really efficient cell with a really high ATP balance. This is much harder to do, but allows your species to survive much more hazardous environments that they are not adapted to simply because they produce so much ATP that they can just constantly work their membrane to keep themselves protected from the environment. This allows for species adapted to several different biomes to emerge, but again it will be hard to do since you will need a large ATP surplus, so you will likely have to be dominant at the niche/energy source you consume.