Upgrades, Unlocks, & Endosymbiosis Master Thread

Gameplay
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Working through upgrades, I have found external parts to be the easiest to navigate through. Internal parts are a bit difficult to work with because they represent processes, but more scientific research about variations in metabolic strategy can offer interesting alternatives. I think ultimately, editing metabolic processes would represent different niches, while external part upgrades will largely represent different abilities and powers for the player to use. I think we should consider a larger discussion about the controls players will have over metabolism before we dive very deeply into various parts.

Here are some external part upgrade proposals. Note that I didnā€™t come up with the majority of these, I just compiled previous discussions and added a few bits of commentary or a few new proposals.

Also note: (V) indicates a variant, while (M) indicates a modification.

Oxy-Toxy

Structural

  • Increased Production (M) ā€“ Increases the rate of oxy-toxy generation, but increases the ATP costs attached.
  • Potency v. Rate of Fire (M) ā€“ Choose between a slow-firing and expensive but destructive burst of toxicity or a rapid-firing and cheap but less damaging toxin projectile.

Toxicity

This will be a drop-down menu with choices.

  • Damage ā€“ The default toxin, inflicts max damage.
  • Damage Per Second ā€“ Inflicts less damage over a large amount of time.
  • Disable Movement Parts ā€“ Disables Cilia and Flagella for a duration of time.
  • Obscure Vision ā€“ Darkens the vision of cells. For AI cells, slows them down slightly and reduces the propensity to flee or attack.

Flagella

Structural

  • Fast-Twitch (M) ā€“ Increases max speed, but increases ATP consumption.
  • Thickness as Max-Speed v. Current Resistance (M) ā€“ Less thick flagella are more quick, but are weaker against currents. Thicker flagella are less quick, but are resilient to currents.
  • Length as Short, Rapid Sprint v. Long, Paced Sprint (M) ā€“ Longer flagella makes sprint speed faster, but lasts much shorter. Shorter flagella makes sprint speed slower, but stamina much longer.

Pilus

Structural

  • Length as Damage Range v. Damage (M) ā€“ Shorter pilus inflict more damage but at a shorter range. Longer pilus inflict less damage but at a longer range.
  • Thickness as Damage v . Mass (M) ā€“ Thinner pilus inflict less damage but slow down cells much less, while thicker pilus inflicts more damage but slow down the cell more.
  • Straw Pilus (V) ā€“ Less damage, but hostile resource transfer occurs. Goes through most armor.
  • Toxic Pilus (V) ā€“ Less damage, but toxin transfer occurs. Goes through most armor.

Slime

Structural

  • Increased Production (M) ā€“ Increases the rate of slime generation, but increases the cost on glucose.
  • Force v. Amount Expelled (M) ā€“ Increases the speed gain from expelling slime, but requires much more slimeto be expelled at a time.
  • Mucocyst (V) ā€“ A shield ability. When toggled, instead of expelling gel, the cell casts a hardened casing which completely negates engulfment and damage. However. Players are immobilized, and processes are paused. Has a minute cooldown.

Chemoreceptor

Structural

  • Cell-Tracing (V) ā€“ Can trace cells, but not compounds.
  • Max Range v. Minimum Amount (M) ā€“ A greater detection range allows players to trace compounds across greater distances, but requires a greater concentration of compounds to be detected. A smaller detection range doesnā€™t give players the same vision over distance, but allows the detection of more minimal amounts of compounds.
2 Likes
62

This is a good summary of the various ideas we have come up with, and the new ideas youā€™ve thrown in are pretty nice, lotā€™s of fun things to work with here.

Could we not justā€¦ provide cells as a tracking option and be done? Chemoreceptors can only track one thing at a time afterall. I suppose tracking cells directly could be seen as an upgrade compared to tracking potential signs of their presenceā€¦

I will admit Iā€™m still pretty undecided about the idea of direct upgrades. Iā€™d personally say the philosophy has not changed and largely remains the same, but there can perhaps be exceptions.

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63

Yeah, this is pretty much the plan. Thereā€™s even an open PR, though the author doesnā€™t seem to have time often to work on it:

Pretty good talk happening on the community forums regarding this. If we have a bunch of just flat upgrades, people will want to upgrade all of their organelles of that type, which brought up again the concept of editable organelles. Which I still absolutely do not want as that is the entirety of the hard part of the full endosymbiosis concept.

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64

Yeah I donā€™t want upgrades to be any more complicated than they already are. I agree with you, thus I feel our philosophy has not really changed.

That being said, it would be nice to have some method of quickly placing the same upgrade on multiple partsā€¦ Upgrades like the pulling cilia benefit a lot from having multiples of the same upgraded part so thereā€™s a good reason to have such a feature eventually.

65

Something like selecting multiple organelles at once and then opening the upgrade popup menu could work. Thatā€™s also super complicated if we were to allow differently upgraded organelles to be selected at once. For example imagine 5 organelles where 3 have the same upgrades and 2 have unique upgrade options selected, trying to display that in a smart way would be a pretty complicated thing to try to add.

And also controller support would be hard to add as it this would probably need to be skipped as-is due to controller input being more limited.

But this could be doable, still a relatively difficult feature to implement.

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66

I was thinking perhaps we could do something very similar to part placement, where you selected an upgrade from a drop down and could place it on applicable parts much like if you were placing the parts themselves in the grid. Perhaps that would be more clunky than your own suggestion though.

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67

I mean that would need a pretty huge amount of GUI workā€¦ like where to pick which organelle type organelles you want to upgrade, then another place to show those upgrades (which can be an entire sub-view by themselves, for example the chemoreceptor configuration). And also I think such a feature would also need a colour highlight on the organelles of that type to guide the player where they can place the selected upgrade, otherwise they might happily click any old organelle and not manage to place the upgrade on anything.

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68

Once you get an upgrade for the first time, is it free to change the rest of your organelles to it, or cheaper, or is it full price every time?

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Full price because thatā€™s how it fits in the MP calculation design. It would take a new functionality in MP calculation to let upgrades detect when thereā€™s another upgrade earlier in history that makes the current one free (or in the general species data). Thatā€™s the kind of complexity I would not be confident in being able to make without a ton of bugs. The current MP calculation system is basically at breaking point in terms of how complex it is.

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I would think we would need some sort of accommodation for placing down a variant/modification. Especially once we factor in environmental tolerances or if we include variants for metabolic parts which use slightly different metabolisms from the base part, it could easily lead to placing down a part and having to do some more modifications right away to make the part useful which will end up costing a lot of MP. I guess we could factor that in when we consider the costs of upgrades.

Thereā€™s atleast a copy/duplicate function, right?

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There is no such feature.

Thatā€™s kind of also why I donā€™t want this to be handled with the upgrades system.

The system is really only right now designed to handle fun alternative ways organelles can function. For example the chemoreceptor where you pick a unique compound for each chemoreceptor is the prime example of what kind of upgrade the system is designed for.

Doing a repetitive organelle upgrade applying is not designed into this system. And I think that shows how many times Iā€™ve said in this thread on how badly the code would flex to accommodate many of the ideas. It can be changed to support some of the ideas, but it will take a bunch of work to do so. And for the more extreme cases I wouldnā€™t really attempt it (things that require major redesigns of the MP calculation system is not something I would consider unless absolutely necessary).

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So would variants to external parts, like the suction cilia and toxic pilus, also warp the existing code? Or is the difficulty more about ideas to change the metabolic processes associated with parts?

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The difficulty doesnā€™t exist there, as you would just have like 5 pili, and maybe you update 2 or 3 of them to be toxic. Thatā€™s vastly different use case than assumingthe player has to modify each of their organelles of a certain type to do a basic thing.

No, this is easy. The hard part is how the editor works, it has a bunch of complex systems related to editing, with the most difficult being the dynamic MP remaining calculation. And it not supporting the concept at all of duplicating organelles or making a preset / applying a preset upgrades to an organelle.

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74

Okay, I see. I think an immediate solution that doesnā€™t need a big rework of the editor (if we still want to maintain variants as being an upgrade rather than an individual part) is just to make certain variants cheap. I think for the metabolic parts especially, we donā€™t really need to make whatever variant or modifications very expensive. Most of them would be environmental or metabolic changes regardless; we wouldnā€™t want to make environmental tolerances very expensive to offer some flexibility, and changing your metabolism definitely comes with risks beyond just the costs which we would want to give the player an option of undoing. We could maintain expensive variants for external parts since they really arenā€™t as essential.

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75

Yeah, Iā€™ve always had the idea in my mind that upgrades should be cheap, because the player needs to first get the part and then the upgrade so the cost would add up fast. I think the cilia pull upgrade which costs 30 MP and unlocks completely new gameplay options is an excellent example. Though, now that Iā€™m thinking about it the upgrade is as expensive as the organelle. I think that should be rare so that most upgrades would be cheaper than the organelles.

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76

Here are some more upgrade proposals, this time focused on prokaryotic parts. Again, most of these arenā€™t my ā€œnew ideasā€; theyā€™re just a more finalized list of upgrades with a few newer ideas.

Metabolosomes

Environmental

Increased Cold Tolerance ā€“ Metabolosomes generate excess heat at the cost of total energy produced and heat tolerance.

Toxicity

Increased Toxin Resistance ā€“ Metabolosomes will assist in breaking down toxins at a cost of energy production.

Rusticyanin

Structural

Anaerobic Photolithotrophy (V) ā€“ The breakdown of iron is now based on sunlight instead of oxygen, resulting in more ATP generation. However, your species becomes much less tolerant to oxygen. Releases oxygen as a byproduct, so can require oxygen tolerance if your species has a significant impact on the environment.

Thermosynthase

Environmental

Hyperthermophilic Enzymes (M) - Insulation from heat, but less tolerance towards cold and normal conditions.

Chemosynthesizing Proteins

Structural

Photolithotrophy (V) ā€“ Your cell will breakdown hydrogen sulfide with the availability of sunlight instead of just carbon dioxide, producing more glucose. However, your species becomes less tolerant to oxygen and will become dependent on sunlight.

Environmental

Hyperthermophilic Enzymes (M) ā€“ Insulation from heat, but less tolerance towards cold and normal conditions.

Thylakoids

Structural

Red-Pigmented Thylakoids (V) ā€“ Increases photosynthetic efficiency in lower-lit environments, but decreases photosynthetic efficiency in higher-lit environments.

Environmental

Brown Pigments (M) ā€“ Greater protection from the cold, but less tolerance towards heat.

Cytoplasm

Structural

Storage Capacity v. Glycolysis (M) ā€“ Choose between either better storage capacity or better glycolysis.

Nitrogenase

Unsure. Perhaps something reflective of the nitrogen cycle.

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These sound very interesting! Iā€™m not qualified to comment on which ones are problematic in light of hhs earlier comments and which ones are okay, but Iā€™ll add my thoughts regardless.

Iā€™d like to open up some questions about the graphical depiction of these upgrades. The two upgraded organelles which we have in the game right now (chemoreceptor and pulling cilia) look the same as their base versions. I think this is fine for now as I wouldnā€™t know how to visually communicate which chemoreceptor searches for which object.
Some of the upgrades you suggest clearly indicate that the upgraded organelles would look different from the base version, such as the red and brown thylakoids. This makes a lot of sense, as their coloring impacts their functionality and it would be strange to upgrade a thylakoid to be brown without it changing its color.

Firstly, Iā€™d like to ask the programmers: We already have a system which changes the organelle colors based on the color you choose for your cell in the appearance tab. How feasible would it be to modify this system to recolor some organelles depending on their upgrade? If this is possible at all, we could then talk about wether the red thylakoid would always have the same shade of red or wether it would just be pushed towards red in its rgb value from where it was when it had the base color of the cellā€¦ Anyways Iā€™m curious to hear programmers views on the feasibility of this:)

Secondly, if we suppose that this recoloring of individual organelles is feasible, Iā€™d like to propose to reuse this system to visually differentiate other upgrades which you have mentioned. Here are the examples which make sense in my mind:

  • Metabolosome with Increased Cold Tolerance - These metabolosomes could either look more reddish than the base metabolosome in order to show that they produce heat. Alternatively, it could have a turqouise/blueish tint to give the feeling that the microbe belongs in the cold environment. In this case, the metabolosome might look reminiscent of a sort of anti-cooling agent (which for some reason looks blueish in my mind)

  • Metabolosome with Increased Toxin Resistance - These metabolosomes would have a pink tint, as toxins seem to always be pink in Thrive.

  • Hyperthermophilic Thermosynthase and Hyperthermophilic Chemosynthesizing Proteins - These feel like they should have a reddish tint as the microbe should look like it fits hot environment and the red is a natural intensification of the yellow of the base organelles in terms of the warmth of the color. When taking this into account, we should probably give preference to the blueish tint for the Metabolosome with Increased Cold Tolerance which I discussed earlier as it would be strange for a reddish tint to represent both a preference for heat and a preference for the cold.

  • Storage Capacity v. Glycolysis Ideally, we would represent this as the cytoplasm being more transparent for the increased storage capacity and more opaque/whiteish for the increased glycolysis. This would make sense as this would clearly communicate that the standard cytoplasm being an intermediate between the two extremes. Increased transparency would represent the needed emptiness and increased opacity/whiteness would communicate a stronger connection to glucose, which is white. However, this sounds like a nightmare to implement, as it would surely be hard to render each hex with a different opacity. So this upgrade probably shouldnā€™t be represented graphcially at all!

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78

Itā€™s totally feasible. Every individual organelles has a tint property, and as you said this property is just set to the color of the cell for every organelle. Of course we can change the color (granularly) but it would be in the same shade of red when done just like that, it probably would require extra small calculation to blend it with the color of the cell.

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79

Thatā€™s great to hear!

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This is right, though it would break the cell colour selection system. So relying on colour variants for upgraded organelles is not a good idea in my opinion. To not break the overall cell theme the colour change would need to be very slight so in the end I donā€™t see it as doing anything good.