Hydrogenase is on the 0.7.x roadmap. I tried searching but I couldn’t find a completed design for it. It seems to be some kind of hydrogen energy source organelle?
So we are now in a situation where very soon programming work will be blocked due to not-complete game design. So I’m calling all game design team members to finish the game design for what hydrogenase should be.
Update:
Task:
Simple and boring implementation would be a more inefficient mitochondrion that does not scale with oxygen and works as is.
Good news: it’s meant to be a variant upgrade to the mitochondria, requiring much less dedicated graphics. It’s described here under the “Upgrades” section for Mitochondria, though I spelled it as “Hydrogenosome”: Upgrades, Unlocks, & Endosymbiosis Master Thread
Hydrogenase is a more ubiquitous and “standard” enzyme present in most microbial life, while hydrogenosome is a membrane-enclosed structure.
Essentially, it’s an anaerobic upgrade to the mitochondria, detaching the mitochondria from an oxygen requirement at the cost of efficiency. What Buckly mentions on the Discord I think would be good, where it either has a base productivity that doesn’t scale with O2 and works in anaerobic conditions, or it becomes more performant the less O2 there is in an environment. I think the latter would be best for balancing reasons.
Okay, then the situation is that we should keep hydrogenase as the name for the prokaryotic variant and hydrogenosome can be the eukaryotic variant. I really dislike making it an upgrade because then it is actually a “downgrade”. What I mean is that very soon the game world will start off with 0 oxygen, so metabolosomes are completely useless in the early game. So working backwards the reasoning for hydrogenase being on the roadmap is that it will be the early game replacement of metabolosome once we get dynamic compound production and the world starts off with 0 oxygen.
For hydrogenase/PFOR/whatever we name the prokaryotic component, we should probably make it a starting part and make metabolosomes unlocks through the presence of a certain amount of oxygen in a patch.
For hydrogenosomes, they appear to have evolved directly from mitochondria, so making them a variant is ideal scientifically.
I’m fully onboard because otherwise the metabolosome will be a beginner trap if you accidentally add it (as it won’t do anything until you are in a patch with oxygen).
I’d be fine with just skipping the eukaryotic variant entirely. Though, I can throw it onto the end of the microbe roadmap if people think it is necessary. In my analysis above I came to the conclusion that an eukaryotic variant is not truly necessary to make starting of the game work with 0 oxygen.
I think it’s fine if hydrogenosomes are lower priority; they appear to be relatively infrequent in eukaryotes, found oftentimes in parasitic and reduced unicellular organisms.
Hi theory team here, I should point out that Hydrogenase refers (usually) to a family (or families depending on the author) of enzymes. Even though they all do the same, it depends on how specific (scientifically) you want to get that we might have to focus on a specific enzyme or just use the general idea of the enzyme family.
So the idea for the Hydrogenase organelle is to produce ATP without oxygen, right? And you don’t know how much ATP (comparing with Mitochondria) it should produce?
If so I could calculate that. Though, it could take some time so I won’t do it if it’s not needed.
It could serve as a basis, but at this point we’ve balanced the ATP production so many times that I doubt there’s any semblance to real numbers in the mitochondria or metabolosomes. So I think just picking like 10% less efficient and 20% slower for Hydrogenase will be fine starting point to start tweaking the game balance.
It seems like most of those are just clarifications (with like stuff after the name in parenthesis) so I think it really is the best option it is just called hydrogenase with no extra clarification as that just makes it harder to fit in the GUI and it doesn’t mean that cutting off the name before the extra clarification is wrong, just a less exactly accurate way to refer to the thing.
Just going to mention a few notes about hydrogenase and hydrogenosomes.
Hydrogenase and metabolosomes should probably both be accessible directly from the parts-list, but also upgradeable from each other at a somewhat reduced cost.
I believe Hydrogenase should be locked behind a minimal O2 level condition, with metabolosomes similarly being unlocked if O2 level exceeds the limit.
Something like above or below O2 15%. This would mean that players either have one or the other until they experience changing conditions that would necessitate having them.
The biggest reason for this unlock is to basically hint at players at what they’ll need through strong context clues. Basically providing the solution to the player on a silver platter with a big “NEW!” sign on it.
Hydrogenosomes shouldn’t be entirely locked behind mitochondria to evolve. Yes, I know that’s how it happened on Earth, but for sake of gameplay I believe it best to be independently evolvable once we go about implementing them.