Viable Achievements

Gameplay
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I created an Achievements thread on the community forum about a year ago, and it’s seen quite a lot of activity even to this day, with hundreds of replies and achievement ideas. Unfortunately… only a handful are viable, with a pretty big amount of submissions being, basically, obscure references unrelated to Thrive, often with criteria that would be impossible for the game to recognize. (for instance, creating a hexagon-shaped organism or resisting the urge to make a phallic-shaped creation). It’s starting to almost seem more like a forum game than an actual place to suggest things. hhyyrylainen even posted in there, asking for more viable achievements, and everyone ignored him.

So, I’ve decided to create a similar thread, but on here, where we can perhaps come up with more viable achievements without the clutter of unviable ones, whilst occasionally picking ones from the community thread we think might also work. I’m aware there’s already an achievement thread on here, but it’s old and was only about icons, which were also old, because I’ve adopted a more minimal, TF2-inspired style which I prefer over the old one - please share your thoughts about these. I’m mainly uncertain about the color palette.

Here are some examples of what I’d consider ‘viable:’

To start, here are some of my favorite suggestions posted by Oliver on the community thread.

Micro-Borg: Assimilate a bacterium.

Stayin’ Alive: Kill five microbes when the disco mode cheat is activated.

Mmm, Sunlight: Develop photosynthesis.

Amazingly Well Adapted: Reach the next stage with hardcore settings.

Dodo: Go extinct.

Dodon’t: Bring your species back from the brink of extinction.

Hyperspace Bypass: Destroy a planet

Artistic Licence: Complete the game with the LAWK toggle off.

Sluuuuurp: Engulf another microbe.

Sluuuuur-oh: Die while engulfing another microbe.

Living in Harmony: Listen to every piece of music in the game for at least 10 seconds in one play session.

Flagellant: Have 10 flagella on your microbe.

Plus, some by me.

Disco Fever: Complete an entire game in Disco Mode, from Microbe to Ascension.

Now what?: Get stuck in the stone age, likely due to being an aquatic organism with the inability to discover fire.

Tardigrade/Tardigreat: Create an extremophilic species in multicellular.

And some made by mitobox:

Humble Origins: Advance from Microbe to Multicellular.

Growing Pains: Advance from Multicellular to Aware.

Wake Up: Advance from Aware to Awakening.

Big Plans: Advance from Awakening to Society.

Growing Up Fast: Advance from Society to Industrial.

Left the Cradle: Advance from Industrial to Space.

To The Top: During the Space Stage, Ascend.

Pantheon: Reach Ascension as 5 different species.

Doesn’t afraid of anything: Name an organism “Thrive.”

Staring Death in the eyes: While hiding, be in close proximity to a predator without getting found for at least 30 seconds.

Now I am become death: Unlock the “nuclear warhead” function part.

(Destroyer of Worlds: Drop a nuclear weapon, causing an immense number of casualties.) - not posted by mitobox, but I thought it would fit with the one above.

Out Of Gas: During the Society Stage or above, deplete your home planet’s supply of fossil fuels.

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Here’s a few more from my list:

  • Punctuated Equilibrium :: Enter and exit the editor without making any changes, then use up all 100 Mutation Points in your next editor session.
  • Huh, we didn’t think the game was this stable yet :: Play for 15 minutes without crashing.
  • It costs 200 thoundsund atp to swim for 12 seconds :: have over 40 flagellium
  • Micro-Murder :: Kill another microbe
  • Micro-Slaughter :: Kill ten microbes
  • Micro-Massacre :: Kill one hundred microbes
  • Live, Damn You! :: Recover from a near death exprience
  • I-I’m Alive? :: Survive for over an hour without dying.
  • Shish-Kebab :: Kill another microbe with a Predatory Pilus.
  • Panic! :: Go Extinct while Disco Mode is active

Some of these are pretty joke-y and the crashing hopefully doesn’t apply with ue4

But I think the survive things, kill things and tons of flagella would provide something very excited people could try to accomplish. This would give the most enthusiastic fans almost content to play.

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There are some nice suggestions here.

Personally I think it’s interesting to think about what the purpose of achievements is. They can be used to mark progress, and that is fine. I think one powerful use for them is to encourage people to explore areas of the game they might not otherwise see.

For example having an achievement for being immobile (no flagella or cillia) might get some people to realise that it is possible to play the game that way (we need to do some work on making that fun of course). That way it’s leading people to play the game in a counter intuitive and different way.

Another example might be an achievement for completing the society stage without going to war, it encourages people that there are other ways to get what you want and to really use the diplomacy system.

So for the microbe stage maybe it’s worth thinking about what the extreme forms of gameplay are and encouraging people towards them with achievements.

5 Likes
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Reviving this discussion to better center conversations about achievements we’ve been having on the Discord. Apologies for the timing, as this probably would have been better to have with more time before the release - better late than never I guess.

Here are some achievements Hh had recently suggested:

The Editor - Edit your microbe for the first time
Colony Builder - Form a cell colony
Going Nuclear - Place and survive with the nucleus for a generation
Beyond the Cell - Reach the multicellular stage
Taste the Sun - Generate more glucose than you use through photosynthesis
Cannot Improve on Perfection - Make no changes to your microbe in the editor
Yum! - Engulf another cell
Tasty Radiation - Make a cell that gains energy from radioactivity and gain energy
Vents are my Home - Make a cell that only uses chemosynthesis for energy

There were more achievements spread out through discussion on the Discord, but this was the most immediately accessible list I could grab. If anyone has one they really like, do feel free to post them here.

I’ve been trying to go through the community forums to find achievements. There obviously is a ton of stuff on there that is not relevant to the Microbe Stage or extremely hard to track. But as I said on the Discord, I do think it would be nice to have a choice few achievements from the community - that’s been one of the most active threads across two different community forums and has the voice of many notable users from our community.

I’ll suggest a few here:

  • Micro-Borg - Successfully perform endosymbiosis. As far as I could tell, the first ever achievement ever suggested, by Oliveriver nonetheless on the old forums.
  • Better Together - Form a cell colony, name suggested by Nein99 several years ago when they was a community member. Hh already suggested this, but this could be another name we choose for it. Otherwise, it can be the achievement for progressing to the Multicellular Stage.
  • Winning - Successfully reach 15 generations with the same species. Suggested by blackjacksike, a consistent presence on the community forums for many years and a Patreon contributor. Could be a meta-easter egg referencing our old winning condition once multiple stages are in.

Some rename suggestions if they are more desirable, depending on how easter-eggy or quippy we want the names to be:

  • Instead of Tasty Radiation, “G-Cell” - a reference to Godzilla. I think this is an achievement that can have a better name, but I don’t know the legal ramifications of an easter egg name referencing another piece of media.
  • Instead of Taste the Sun, “The Sun is a Deadly Lazer” - a reference to the famous bill wurtz video. Though I realize after rewatching that bit that “Taste the Sun” is a reference to that video as well, which I guess means that the Thrive Development Team are a bunch of geeks. “Taste the Sun” can make more sense since you’re actually eating the sun, whereas the deadly lazer part can be more relevant to environmental tolerances.
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I think this is a fine enough name change, my name suggestion for the achievement was kind of bland.

I think this would be a pretty weird achievement once we have more stages. But if it was like renamed as Thrivin' with the same condition, I think it could be good.

Yeah, I kind of don’t really like this name suggestion. It seems too obscure to me.

Exactly. If we had an achievement for surviving on the surface without any UV protection, I’d name that achievement “The Sun is a Deadly Lazer”. But my plan for tasting the sun achievement is exactly requiring the player to actually be making positive glucose from sunlight.

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There could also be a version of Thrivin’ for each stage and/or for playing through 15 generations in each stage with a single species.

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If before the big 1.0 we have a pretty solid implementation of the transition requirement to the next stage and we’ve taken another look at balancing hard(er) difficulty, it would be nice to have a “reach multicellular” (hard mode) achievement.

It would be an incentive for people that have finished the game once to go back and engage with the mechanics on a deeper level. I know some games with very difficult achievements that have an entire ecosystem of people discussing strategies to beat them. There’s potential for a lot of community engagement there.

If the ultimate stage transition is not settled enough for us to want to give away that “badge” yet, we can also make a hard mode version of Thrivin’.

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I think such an achievement would still be less difficulty than the endosymbiosis achievement.

I also don’t really want to have a hard variant for reaching each of the stages. Though, I’d be open to an achievement about completing hte game on hard mode, but that obviously needs to wait some time before we can add that.

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Well hopefully that will no longer be the case by the time 1.0 rolls around.

I am curious for the why? Is it for not forcing people to use hard mode to get all the achievements? Or to avoid cluttering the list with too many achievements?

Pretty much my reasoning is that I want a “reason” for people to try harder difficulty and engage more deeply with all the mechanics to finish the game. But “the game” is… what we have at 1.0.

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It just pollutes the achievement list unnecessarily with a bunch of “duplicates”. Like I’ve played a game where there’s been easy, normal, and hard variants of reaching each milestone in the game. So playing on hard you got a ton of achievement bombardment constantly. I just don’t really like that as a concept. But I do agree that at least for completing the game on hard mode that should warrant a special achievement.

Which is kind of exactly why we need to very carefully consider the achievements to be added, because anything added shouldn’t be removed because then future players couldn’t get all achievements. Or if we update the meaning of the achievements, then that kind of also is a messy thing.

I quite clearly remember playing a colony builder game that had just come out of early access, and the first few hours in the first stages of the game I steadily got a couple of achievements per hour, but after getting past the midway point I stopped getting achievements. I wasn’t sure if I was just playing badly or what. But I finally decided to check and realized the game devs had basically completely forgotten achievements so there were just a couple for the rest of the game with most of the achievements being at the start. That felt me to like the developers did a really, really half-baked job, and that lowered my estimation of the entire game’s quality.

So I want us to avoid the same problem and make sure all of our stages (as they are mostly complete) will have roughly the same number of achievements as the microbe stage.

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I definitely agree with not having a bunch of duplicates in the game. But, if the current pattern of achievements-per-stage is to hold than what I had in mind would be (ignoring Ascension for convenience) 7,7% or 7/104 Achievements being a hard mode duplicate. Which if you played the game the first time on hard mode (and I think whatever mode this is, it should be difficult enough that this is not recommended), you would get a double achievement pop up 7 times across the whole game, or every however many hours.

To me, that seems like a worthy cost if we want to encourage people to try hard mode.

I agree in principle, I would be perfectly happy with just the one, but I do want to achieve the objective of adding this achievement before we finish the Space Stage.

Right, I saw the same problems. Which is why even though it really only needs the 1 achievement for the final version of the game, I arrived at the compromise solution “1 per stage”.

I do strongly agree with this. I would say unless we end up with future stages that have more achievements than previous ones, we should not continue adding achievements beyond the current number (other than this one I have a personal bias for of course).

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Well personally I don’t really want to…

Another way to look at it is that If each stage has 11 achievements (like microbe does currently). Then 1 is already the achievement for reaching the stage, so having a second stage reaching achievement already means that 18% of our achievements are progress achievements.

But still that will cause a permanent problem of eating up achievement slots, even when (I won’t say if) we reach space stage in over a decade. If we add such hard variants of progress achievements now, we’ll be forever stuck with them.