After Nunz brought up a comparison between Thrive and factory management games while we were speaking in our chatroom, I became inspired to elaborate on the longstanding plan to enable toggling processes on and off in the process panel
By enabling control over the process in a cell, players will be able to manage their resources in clever and engaging ways such as only tapping into iron reserves when desperate, reducing mitochondria output while resting, or even completely turning off or slowing toxin production as needed.
While this feature may be potentially complex to understand or master, it is entirely additive and optional to the player’s experience. Players who do not understand the process panel can simply ignore it with no impact to their gameplay.
Pictured above is a mockup of how I envision the process panel, each process will have a slider that enables players to control how many of each contributing part is currently active. For ease of function, duplicated organelles should probably count as 1 in the process panel.
On it’s own, turning off your organelles might not be very appealing, especially as they would still passively consume ATP; thus when organelles are disabled, their passive osmoregulation cost will be halved in order to grant the feature additional strategic value.
I feel that we should implement this to provide players with more strategic diversity, and more tools with which to master Thrive in their own way. In the future I believe this feature could be further expanded upon to allow for automated systems such as leaving a portion of mitochondria inactive until the player is threatened (akin to adrenaline or stress). But for now, this should do.
Edit: After some live discussion, we have decided that the upgraded process panel should be unlocked by the evolution of a nucleus. When implemented, we should probably communicate that in the tooltip in some way.