Photosynthesis Gameplay

[Buckly]

I’m glad to see that everyone has some good ideas regarding photosynthesis. Nobody has objected to the idea so I assume we all agree that something needs to be done to help it more engaging. In particular I would like to see what the theorists such as @Phrenotopian have to say about the idea, as people on the community discord were quick to inform me that my and others ideas were not necessarily realistic. I don’t expect to be entirely realistic but I would like to get as close to reality as possible while still keeping Thrive entertaining as a game.

@Nokk

One idea is that maybe you benefit from lux could be non linear, so it “falls off” past a certain level, basically a soft-cap on how helpful lux % is.

That makes alot of sense to me, as 100% efficiency in life is pretty much unheard of, everything has diminishing returns. Something like this is also probably an easier thing to implement compared to totally new systems.

@DonGororo

Another danger could be solar radiation, so while heat would be a danger that builds up, radiation would be immediate. We already have a concept of how it would work for radiotrophs: Radiotrophy
In this case radiation wouldn’t make any glucose, it would just harm you if your threshold is too low, if we combine that with dark and bright spots then the player can choose which spots are the best for them while avoiding those that are too bright. This mechanic would matter to non photosynthesizers too, since radiation also harms them.

I would love to see radiation and radiotrophs implemented, it’s such a unique feature but still needs quite a bit of discussion about it’s full extent as it will be a danger to more than just photosynthesizers. We’ll have to resume that discussion sometime!

@hhyyrylainen

I personally would like the downside of photosynthesis to be weight. This is basically @tjwhale’s idea.
Pardon me for not finding a link to the original idea, but basically in real life the downside of photosynthesis (and why animals don’t do it and why plants aren’t sentient beings running around) is that you need a lot of chloroplasts to get any sensible amount of energy. So in terms of cell stage this would be that the chloroplasts would have their mass increased like 30 times making moving basically impossible.

Weight makes a lot of sense, but I am rather hesitant about preventing a player from properly moving in a stage where there’s not really much else to do but swim about in search of nutrients yet. If there were systems to manage and things to do while your cell drifted about it could be fun in it’s own way. Making them a little heavier could present the same problem, but atleast players could still move a little?

@hhyyrylainen

Edit: one more idea that is also probably from tjwhale: make photosynthesis so ineffective that you need more than 70% of your organelles to do photosynthesis. To also force a player to be a plant if they want to be a plant.

I could give that a try, though it’ll be pretty tough to avoid having to make photosynthesis great again, again.

Everyone’s got some good ideas that can probably each work fine. A few will probably be implemented as their own features and functions sometime in the future regardless, but we aught to decide on what would be the most preferred method of enhancing phototrophic gameplay at the moment. Any preferences? We can always make a poll for the community or the likes if we have trouble.