I unfortunately am struggling to come up with a way to implement anaerobic processes with the current assortment of compounds/nutrients, and I’ve seen feedback from the community indicating that just using existing compounds broadly (like H2S and sulfur being represented as just “Sulfur”) to be wary of making certain compounds more abstract.
I understand wariness of bloating the game with a bunch of compounds, which has historically been a huge fear: if you add one, why not add 50 just to make it feel like the game has more substance to it? I think we are in a better position in the present to gauge whether or not to add a specific compound because we have a better conceptual understanding of Thrive now than ever before, so we can think of actual use cases rather than just throwing crap in.
We have a dire need to implement an anerobic process which breaks down glucose to fill that niche in a playthrough before oxygen arrives on a planet since metabolosomes/mitochondria are the only parts currently capable of that. Glucose would be almost useless pre-oxygen without such a part, as a big component of the Microbe Stage is having that early glucose boost. I’ve tried to find metabolic processes analogous to these parts with the existing compounds in game, but I haven’t had any luck with that so far. So I think it might be justified to add another compound, Sulfur, to fill that gap so we can implement sulfur reduction.
I think that since Sulfur would act as another environmental compound, it wouldn’t add too much complexity as long as we clearly explain what an environmental compound is. Players can readily ignore it if they don’t use it unlike a compound cloud, and there are other examples of environmental compounds present in game.
I was thinking of it being an upgrade to populate the upgrade menu for internal parts, since I really don’t have too much else for metabolic parts.