Organelle Unlocks

[hhyyrylainen]

A bit late to the party, but I’ll comment on some things.

@NickTheNick

I feel like some mutations are currently too easy to achieve, and we don’t have any way to make them rarer.

This sounds very much like the perfect thing to accomplish with Organelle Upgrades

@NickTheNick

So what do I propose? Adding an ability to randomly mutate (AKA unlock) new organelles. Let me explain how.

I don’t think this is a good idea, as a complementary method this would be fine, but if this is the primary method playthroughs after the first one will be too annoying as the player likely knows what kind of playthrough they want to go for next. So if the organelles you get is too random it’s going to feel terrible.

@NickTheNick

Absorb/assimilate another cell to randomly unlock a new Protein Organelle it has. Every time you absorb/assimilate a cell, you’d have a chance to unlock one of the Protein Organelles he has unlocked.

This is similar to the endosymbiosis idea where there wouldn’t really be premade organelles (or the eukaryotic organelles wouldn’t exist), instead the player goes around engulfing bacteria to unlock placing them in their cell.

Endosymbiotic Theory

Endosymbiotic Theory, part of Symbiogenesis, is a widely accepted theory (according to second link at bottom; “This explanation of how eukaryotic cells evolved from prokaryotic cells is the currently accepted theory in science.” Wikipedia does not comment on acceptance of the theory), and so far I haven’t heard any discussion about it. It states that things like mitochondria and chloroplasts evolved from prokaryotes. Currently mitochondria and chloroplasts are static organelles, while if this wa…

@NickTheNick

Once unlocked, a player now permanently has access to that Protein Organelle. This represents that the genes for that protein now exist in that species’ DNA. A player can place it in their cell in the same editor session, or in the next editor session if unlocked via method 2 or 3.

If we set the MP cost at 60, it would mean the player could at maximum unlock one new Protein Organelle per generation, assuming no others are found via method 2 or 3. We could lower this cost if we want to increase the rate. Also we could make all Protein Organelles cost 40MP or less so that you could at least place one in the same generation you unlocked it (or perhaps we make the first one free?). We could make some proteins more likely to unlock than others if we wanted to balance how rare they are.

Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just use an idea some community member suggested: make placing the first organelle of its type cost way more, and subsequent copies much cheaper.

@NickTheNick

There are some mutations in nature that have very few downsides. A good way to balance these would be to make them randomly unlockable, and perhaps a lower chance to unlock than the other mutations. For example, Archaea use membranes made with Isoprene instead of Fatty Acids. This has no known downsides and simply allows Archaea to survive much harsher environmental conditions. The only reason Bacteria and Eukaryotes don’t have them is by pure chance.

@tjwhale’s philosophy is (was) to balance the game so that if you add useless organelles, you’ll die due to lack of energy.

@NickTheNick

Randomness adds a level of variability and replayability. In civilization, you start on a randomized spawn. If you always spawned in the exact same spot on the exact same map, it would get boring and predictable. This random variability adds replayability, since in new games you will spawn on new and interesting maps. In the Microbe Stage, you might unlock different Protein Organelles in each playthrough (unless you grind and try to unlock them all before advancing to Multicellular).

Some randomness is good for replayability, but I think that randomness that really messes with the player are not good. For example if someone wants to do a “plant run” next, but doesn’t end up unlocking the random organelles they need, they are screwed.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints and let’s plays on 0.5.0 and 0.5.1 where the player simply doesn’t find any needed compounds for 5 minutes, that’s not fun. But that doesn’t really like happen to me. So the randomness in the spawn system makes it so that some players randomly have a terrible experience with Thrive and might drop playing the game before getting through it.

@NickTheNick

It allows the game to be gradually introduced to the player. Instead of them opening up the editor the first time and seeing 100 mutations, they gradually accumulate more available mutations.

@NickTheNick

Finally, it just feels wrong to have so many organelles (particularly with unique abilities) unlocked to the player in the very first generation. If you look at the design documents, we have a lot of planned “Protein Organelles”. Do we really want all of them to be immediately available to the player from generation 1?

I’m all for adding unlock conditions for most of the organelles, so that the first few generations the player would only have like 4 choices of organelles.

@NickTheNick

Anyways, this is just a concept, I’m interested to hear what you guys think about the unlocking system overall?

It would be so easy to turn this system into lootboxes

@NickTheNick

Whenever you introduce randomness, there’s always the chance that you don’t unlock the proteins you want. For example, I might want to get Metabolosomes, but by chance I roll three times across three generations and I never unlock it. A way we could counter this would be to allow more unlocks per generation. I also feel like it is okay to have this randomness, since some aspects of the game will by necessity need to be random. For example in the Industrial Stage I can’t simply choose for Coal to spawn in my country, it’s out of my control. Instead my agency is in handling the resources I do spawn with, and finding means to acquire the ones I didn’t via diplomacy, trade, or warfare. Except in this case it’s proteins like Metabolosomes or Antifreeze Proteins instead of resources like Gold or Coal. But that’s just my thought on it.

I don’t think this example really is fully the same. With the coal example and other kind of industry resource, you can work towards it. In the microbe protein case it’s literally just rolling dice and praying to RNG Jesus. No way for the player to have agency.

@NickTheNick

EDIT: Also, I know you asked about downsides, but I was just thinking that perhaps such a system could be combined with evolving agents? When you think about it the “Protein Organelles” are like internal agents that perform unique abilities inside your cell, whereas Agents proper are ejected out of the cell to perform unique abilities externally. Scientifically speaking, both are typically just proteins. It’s an interesting thought.

Based on the latest agent discussions I would like to go the route that you first get a basic agent, and then you can improve it gradually by spending MP in the direction you want. So that wouldn’t be random either.

@Buckly

In particular evolution in reality lacks intelligent design,

A big part of Thrive is that the player is like an intelligent designer trying to beat evolution…

@NickTheNick

it would be the best way to add organelle progression, and create that balance that you described.

Have you read that organelle upgrades discussion I linked. It seems to be a pretty popular idea. One that I’d much prefer to added randomness.

@NickTheNick

Then, on the 4th playthrough, he rolls and unlocks Rusticyanin.

Except if the player already has a specific run in mind.

From reading things posted in the Thrive community it already seems to be a thing that players recommend specific “runs” to each other, like “have you tried an iron run yet?” encouraging each other to experiment.
Randomness would make that a problem if you already have the general build in mind when starting a new game.

@Naggorath

An idea which I also thought about when it comes to organelle unlocking. I was thinking that a organelle upgrade/specialization could be used to unlock organelles. Say a vacuole could be upgraded to either be larger or contain a specific compound.

Good example of how organelle upgrades is a popular feature with a lot of suggested upgrade paths already.

@NickTheNick

On your point about organelle upgrades and specialization, that was actually exactly what I was thinking, and is also partially planned. As you mentioned, I think it’s best that Protein organelles have the random unlock system in the OP. However, other organelles would also have their forms of progression. Mitochondria and plastids (chloroplasts, chemoplasts, etc.) would be locked behind assimilation, unless the cell already had the proteins when they were a prokaryote. Many internal membrane based organelles (vacuoles, lysosomes, peroxisomes, etc.) would be locked behind the nucleus. We could have the external organelles (flagella, pilus, cilia) be locked behind a “cytoskeleton” organelle.

You seem to be saying here that by having organelle upgrades and endosymbiosis, we wouldn’t need the randomness suggested in this thread after all?