Wrapping Up The Microbe Stage

Gameplay
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I think it’s appropriate to start discussing this, considering how sparse the roadmap is starting to look.

0.9 is approaching, and with it, the crazy idea that development on the Microbe Stage is rounding out. Volunteer contributions expanding on existing work are always accepted, and there are - as is so with any game - areas that could be improved. But within a couple of months, we will finish implementing an assortment of mechanics that we think will result in an adequately fleshed-out Microbe Stage.

With that, I think it’s important to start having a discussion amongst ourselves and with the community as a whole, asking: what do we think of the Microbe Stage? And what finishing touches should we put on our first stage? As we actually get in 0.9 and approach 1.0, we can start discussing sentimentalities and romance - perhaps contacting some old developers to show them how far their baby has come - but for now, I want to focus on evaluating the game itself.

How Should we Evaluate Thrive?

The first thing I want to bring up is how we evaluate the Microbe Stage: what’s good, what’s missing, what’s rough around the edges, and what’s fluff.

Thrive is a sandbox game meant to simulate evolution, so we must think about good sandbox principles. I personally think there are three principles of a great sandbox game. I won’t make this too long, but let’s try to keep them in mind as we reflect on our Microbe Stage so far:

Free Control, Clear Problems

You give the player an extensive toolbox, and they can create wonderful, varied things with it; with basic tools, they can shoot for whatever objective they have. But there are constraints, challenges, and obstacles that you must think through. Using those tools, players can figure things out, making them feel good; wow, that was tough, but boy am I smart for figuring something out!

In Minecraft, it’s the crafting, and the steps you must take to get better resources. In KSP, it’s the editor, and the engineering challenges you must face to make something fly. In Civilization, it’s your city screen, and the race against other Civs to unlock, discover, and conquer.

Something’s Out There!

It’s a big world with lots of cool things to see in it, and so many possibilities. You don’t know what’s out there, and you probably won’t see everything there is to see, but we won’t stop you from exploring. By using your tools, you can explore every nook, crannie, and crevice there is out there.

In Minecraft, that’s the sheer size of the world, as well as the multiple procedural structures. In KSP, it’s the size of the world, and the challenges in the way of reaching those far away places. In Civilization, it’s the discovery of your surroundings, your neighbors, your continent, and then, your planet as you set out and explore.

A Hundred Ways To Get It Wrong

You’re going to mess up at some point; the challenges you face will make that certain. But that’s okay - you get beat up, you receive information on what is and isn’t working, you respawn, then you try again. If you have a thousand options in a sandbox game, but you’re player only takes three of them because the game is too difficult, then the sandbox game isn’t very deep.

In Minecraft, it’s the immediate respawn in your base, where you have all your stored items. In KSP, it’s the next trip to the editor after you murdered three of your astronauts. In Civilization, it’s the pivot to another yield.

Evaluating the Stage - Pacing

Let’s start evaluating. We have the building blocks, we just want to make sure it all fits together well in a way that satisfyingly progresses throughout the entire game: in other words, we want to make sure pacing works well.

To keep pacing in mind, I am breaking down the Microbe Stage into multiple segments. And I believe the best way to think of Thrive’s pacing is by thinking of three “phases” of the stage…

  • The Beginning - The beginning of every Thrive playthrough starts pretty uniformly - you, LUCA, inherit an empty world, place your first few parts, and generally orient yourself towards your new world. You discover the patches near you, discover what resources are available, and make decisions off that.

  • Finding Your Niche - After a couple of the early generations pass, you start to further specialize around an energy source and develop a strategy. Instead of shifting through metabolisms as you move through patches or remaining simple and unevolved as LUCA, you start to place down more of your metabolic parts, resulting in specialization and strategy.

  • The Oxygen Transition - Once oxygen becomes a significant enough environmental compound, metabolosomes - and oxidized metabolism - becomes a powerful leg up. Along with that, snowball events become much more likely once oxygenation is present. At a moment’s notice, your environment can rapidly shift.

  • Adding the Nucleus - Getting ready to place the metabolism represents one of Thrive’s more challenging and difficult transitions, due to the amount of maintenance you have to do before and after placement.

  • Unlocking Organelles - After you develop a eukaryote that isn’t as slow as molasses or starving to death, you start focusing on unlocks and upgrades. Players often have two or three organelles they’re after, and will pursue unlock conditions via endosymbiosis or more traditional methods.

  • Optimization and Arms Race - Towards the end of the stage in an ideal playthrough, you start seeing other eukaryotes emerge, inspiring competition. Poison starts flying, predators start roaming, mobility increases, and overall, abilities proliferate.

Note that I think there will eventually be another phase indicating preparations for multicellularity, but that’s a discussion for, well, when we actually start developing multicellularity.

For now, I will break down each stage, bringing up the good, the issues, and possible refinements. I will list the goods and the issues, will explain potential refinements more in depth, and will put a bullet point list of refinements to make this post as legible/actionable as possible.

The Beginning

The Good

  • Dipping Your Toe In - It gives you room to see what your planet looks like, and gives you room to understand what your fist moves are. For new players, it’s a needed slow entry.
  • Wonder & Awe - It’s a generally unique experience since this is the emptiest you will ever see your planet’s oceans. There should be a pretty distinct emotional note for the very beginning of a playthrough, as you’re seeing the infancy of your planet. If it doesn’t overextend its welcome, it can create a nice little mood of wonder.

The Issue

  • Balancing Newbies & Oldies - the beginning of Thrive is in an awkward spot right now due to the need to balance new players and accommodate more experienced players. We need to ensure new players have a peaceful enough world to not get overwhelmed, but this peace means that returning players often have a few generations drifting around, waiting for things to get interesting.
  • Same Old Script - We often said that even for more experienced players, this time on your planet is meant for you to acclimate to new conditions. But the beginning of the game is pretty constant, so what is there to acclimate to? If you know you’ll probably end up doing the same thing, why do you need the room to decide on next steps?
  • Crawling Pace - For many experienced players, the beginning of the game can crawl on for a while, meaning the real meat of Thrive starts after 10 or so generations. That’s something we should avoid in order to retain players after their first few playthroughs.

Refinement

Tutorials in Planet Generator Menu - Once the planet generator menu is implemented, we have a great little hub to provide players customization over their experience. Instead of things being tucked in a hodge-podged “advanced options” menu, they get all the direct information needed, organized well.

Volatile Beginnings - I think we should revisit introducing volatility in the beginning phases of the Microbe Stage, representing a biogeochemically young, immature planet. Previous concern was focused on new players, but that’s where the planet editor menu comes in.

If tutorials are on, we assume the player is new/inexperienced, and thus, we grey out the “Volatile Beginnings” option. If tutorials are off, the “Volatile Beginnings” option is enabled by default, providing greater diversity in the beginning of the game. By enabling “Volatile Beginnings”, compounds and resources vary - besides oxygen, and the natural behavior of glucose - making players not stick to the same script on their first steps, and making them mix things up depending on what is available to them nearby. Within a couple of generations, iron, sulfur, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia and phosphate, etc. can go from abundant to gone in a patch. Environmental events, such as volcanic eruptions and meteor impacts, can also be much more abundant in those first few turns.

After a while, that volatility disappears, and natural processes and cellular respiration will take over. This is when the planet starts drifting towards a standard - hydrothermal vents produce more sulfur which leaks out, oxygen takes over from photosynthesis, iron starts disappearing in the open ocean due to oxygen, etc.

Along with greater replayability, this also adds some worldbuilding and uniqueness to each playthrough. Perhaps one planet has an abundance of ammonia in the depths of the ocean once the volatility is over, while another has a bunch of sulfur but almost no iron.

Establishing Your Niche

The Good

  • Establishing Your Tools - You start to further specialize around an energy source and develop a strategy. Instead of shifting through metabolisms as you move through patches or remaining simple and unevolved as LUCA, you start to place down more of your metabolic parts, resulting in specialization and strategy. This makes this phase one of the more fun ones in Thrive due to the direct “test-to-tweak” loop, and the slightly bigger margin of error.
  • Building Up Your Population - You start building up your population, giving you more or less margin for error in the later stage. In any game, it’s just a good feeling to know that you are being rewarded for your efforts, and to know what exactly seems to be working best.

The Issue

  • Sulfur is Neglected - Compared to the extremely lucrative iron respiration, the reliable hydrogenase, and the ever-present photosynthesis, sulfur is largely neglected by a decent amount of our community.
  • No Visual Feedback on Success - Players just might not be sure on how well they are doing. It’s hard to track population numbers and extrapolate that to success; something more visual might be needed.

The Refinement

Visual “Lives”

If we can find a way to visually show the player, “hey, you have x number of attempts in this patch before you die out in it”, that would be great. That way, players know their margin of error, and can get a very direct serotonin boost seeing that number go up as their population increases.

Balancing Metabolism, Sticking up for Sulfur

Balancing metabolism is a whole conversation. A good part of it is just tweaks to the .json files - I think iron could be due for a slight nerf considering it is absolutely unaffected by environmental compounds, and photosynthesis is always a conversation. Those simple tweaks can probably get us to a satisfactory level.

Beyond that, if there’s something easy to implement which can make sulfur more engaging, that could be very worthwhile for a volunteer to pursue. Photosynthesis is unique because it has a schedule, iron is unique because it is intertwined by chunks, and glucose will always be prioritized because it’s the most important resource in Thrive; what’s so special about hydrogen sulfide? It doesn’t have to be purely a unique mechanic as well - we can make it behave uniquely as a dynamic compound for example.

I will also bring up siderophores - it just needs work on AI, and we need to make sure it’s balanced so that players have to compete for shares of an iron chunk. But if that works out, iron becomes a lot more engaging.

And I will also quickly note that increasing environmental event frequency and volatility in the early game will inherently make photosynthesis more challenging - before fully committing to it, are you willing to risk the fact that the amount of sun in your atmosphere can weaken at any moment?

To summarize:

  • Visually Represent Lives/Margin of Error Beyond Population Number
  • .json Tweaks to Metabolisms
  • Strengthen Sulfur Somehow
  • Evaluate Differences of Compound Behavior in Dynamic Compound System
  • Siderophores
  • Volatile Beginnings Increase Photosynthesis Challenge

The Oxygen Transition

The Good

Oxygenation is one of the most underrated parts of the Microbe Stage in my opinion, with genuine developments necessitating pivots.

  • Upgrading Your Body Plan - Replacing your hydrogenase with metabolosomes is a cool process - particularly, experimenting with when exactly you go ahead with it, looking at your organism statistic panels to guide you. You’re retrofitting your organism to utilize a new resource.
  • Rise of Cellular Threats - Some other cells start to become threats here, potentially inching close to becoming eukaryotic or exhibiting engulfment/toxin/slimes/whatever other tools are available.
  • Snowball Earth & A Changing World - Oxygen sets off a lot, forcing tolerance adaptations and changing up your metabolic structure. It leads to more energetic organisms, changes the arrangement of resources like iron, and potentially seeds a global glaciation event.

The Issue

  • Ease of Access to Oxygen Tolerance - The replacement process is fun, but the depth of this challenge is flattened by how easy it is to get oxygen tolerance. The way the oxygen slider currently is, you have practically no drama in dealing with the oxygenation of your planet - you can just crank your slider all the way to the right and be done with it all. Ease of access is extremely important, don’t get me wrong; shifting environmental tolerances is already a solid MP drain, and there’s some maintenance required every time you move patches. But oxygen is meant to be a genuine change, and shouldn’t just be cruised through.
  • Your Own Cell’s Impact on the Environment - It can seem like it is your cell driving the change in the environment sometimes, overwhelming whatever prior organisms inhabited the patch. Early in the game, that is understandable since patches are less open; we need to make sure it is less pronounced later however.

Refinement

Snip The Oxygen Slider

This might seem to be a big statement at first, but hear me out: what if we just get rid of the oxygen slider, and base oxygen tolerance fully on their parts?

I know this seems to be harsh, but oxygen has a good amount of widely used parts conferring tolerance (thylakoids/chloroplasts, metabolosomes/mitochondria, bioluminescent parts), and has clear sources of a weaker tolerance (hydrogenase/somes and nitrogen-fixing plastids).

Again, ease of access when it comes to something like environmental tolerances is important. But that ease of access is in regards to the wild swings in between multiple incredibly distinct environments (vents to ocean floor, ocean floor to open ocean, etc.). Changes in oxygen are slow changes within the patch itself - not in moves across regions - and thus, is a dynamic and emergent gameplay constraint that can enable deeper strategy. If we provide the player solutions, constraints are not issues - they create problem-solving, engagement, and immersion, giving the player an obstacle to overcome.

So that is something that I think we should atleast playtest. Instead of there being an oxygen slider, just display your oxygen tolerance value, based on your part selection, and make players tweak their organism that way.

Make Sure Snowball Earth Rocks

I’m not saying this because I think that Snowball Earth isn’t good right now (I haven’t played through them enough yet) and I haven’t seen feedback saying it’s a pushover, but we need to absolutely make sure that Snowball Earth is a big freaking deal.

It shouldn’t be something that players can just cruise through unbothered. If you’re an autotroph, it should get really difficult to get enough sun. If you’re carnivorous, you should be seriously concerned about your food source dying out. If you’re using oxygen, you should be worried about the possibility of oxygen dipping a bit, making your body plan not as efficient. And you should either stick through it and make the necessary changes, or evacuate to the deeper ocean.

Gauge Player’s Impact on Environment

We want to make sure the player doesn’t always have such a dramatic effect on the patch.

Adding the Nucleus

In my opinion, this is probably the worst part of the Microbe Stage. Not that it isn’t fun, but it’s a pretty rough pacing experience overall.

The Good

  • The Grand Plan - The nucleus is the big editor shift in the Microbe Stage - there’s an inherent before and after to this part. There’s an immense energy sink that you must be mindful of, building your organism around a challenge you know is coming up.
  • Discretion - That in itself is a solid element of strategy to implement. Having an overarching goal that requires discretion puts in some nice decisionmaking; do you beeline this upgrade, or do you build up your organism more attentively, putting the nucleus on it in a later generation?

The Issue

  • EXTREME Balancing Swing - It’s very easy to turn your organism from a very successful organism, to an incredibly slow and inefficient cell doomed to a death spiral of choking to death. Before that, you have to bloat your cell’s structure in order to accommodate such a heavy sink of energy, resulting in decisions which don’t approximate evolution, taking away MP from adaptations which immediately benefit your cell. This harms depth to a certain extent, as experimenting with other features is minimized to accommodate the nucleus. It also inherently makes the nucleus a burden for auto-evo to develop, limiting later-stage interaction with the AI.

Refinement

Attach an Unlock Condition

I think we do need to take a good look at the nucleus in 0.9.0, finding ways to limit its progression besides making it obscenely expensive to maintain. We can attach a size requirement for the nucleus unlock condition and reduce the energy costs of the nucleus. Making the transition into a eukaryotic an even experience doesn’t mean we take away all of said transition’s difficulty - it just means standardizing the pacing of both when it gets unlocked and the sheer amount of editor work it takes to get a nucleus in.

Size-Related Costs

This is probably the one completely new mechanic on here that I strongly argue we should implement. There’s a reason later down this post, but for the nucleus, we can tie some sort of benefit to size-related costs, thus making it an interesting decision to make; after a certain size as a prokaryote, adding the nucleus just makes sense in minimizing the marginal energy loss on size.

Unlocking Organelles

The Good

  • Tinkering and Progression - I think this is the most interesting part of Thrive currently. You are seriously reflecting on the structure of your organism, trading in parts for new ones and observing its effect on your reproduction time, metabolism, mobility, and more.
  • Facing Constraints - Unlock conditions were a great add, as it makes players have to deal with some sort of constraint requiring ingenuity.
  • Mix of Microbe, Environment Threats - Other microbes start to show established characteristics, and the environment, while more reliable, is still in a pretty twitchy setting. Oxygenation and a potentially late glaciation event are still setting in.
  • Unique Unlock Mechanic - Endosymbiosis is a pretty unique mechanic. We transformed a “collect/slay X number of this item/enemy” into a scientifically appropriate format, and players have given feedback mentioning that the mechanic is really interesting when it works well.

The Issue

  • Endosymbiosis is Wonky - From community feedback, endosymbiosis just isn’t a very reliable tool. Your endosymbiont goes extinct very frequently, you don’t even know when your endosymbiont has gone extinct oftentimes, and by the time you find a reliable population of endosymbionts, you might as well just gain parts via traditional unlock conditions.
  • CPU External Part/Membrane Evolution Can Be Inconsistent - Auto-Evo can be very conservative on external parts. Usually, it takes the player placing down a specific ability on their own species to see the patch inhabit it.

Refinement

Empower Endosymbiosis

Endosymbiosis doesn’t have to be forced down our player’s throats - by making it a process, there’s an interesting dynamic at play where players might choose to unlock certain organelles traditionally, and specifically pursue other abilities that are outside of their evolutionary path. BUT, if a player does decide to go through endosymbiosis, the challenge they face should be primarily locating, catching, and surviving with their endosymbiont, not making sure the population doesn’t go extinct.

Information Accessibility for Endosymbiosis

We need to make sure players know whether or not their endosymbiont has died. Unless this was patched, I remember multiple instances where I had to manually stop the endosymbiosis process a few generations after my endosymbiont went extinct, unaware that the process just wouldn’t work ours

Population Bonus for Endosymbiont

Making endosymbiosis easier to complete - giving some population bonus to the organism you’re targeting - should be a priority for making this system polished.

Auto-Evo Variety for Abilities and Membranes

Making it more likely for auto-evo to evolve different membranes and abilities would do great things for interactions with AI.

Optimization & Arms Race

The Good

  • Crescendo of Abilities, Predation - In ideal playthroughs, organisms demonstrate a variety of abilities and strategies that have strengths and counters. Players are constantly wary of other large cells, and must establish a pecking order.
  • Stable Environments - Environments have stabilized minus occasional environmental events, so emphasis is much more focused on cell-to-cell interactions and internal processes.

The Issue

  • Auto-Evo Variety - The big issue is that you don’t really see a consistent variety of eukaryotes to necessitate different adaptations. You don’t see too many different membranes, external parts, or strategies from eukaryotes that aren’t closely related to your own organism.
  • Lack of Constraint to Optimize Against - There also isn’t much of another layer of decisionmaking when it comes to optimization besides just adding more stats. You can just add parts until you produce an excess of whatever it is that you want, and boom, you got it.
  • Player Consistently Causes Patch Collapse - We have consistently received feedback that players entering a patch causes most populations to crash. Players tend to also remain extremely dominant, sometimes seemingly snuffing out competition.

Refinement

Auto-Evo External Part/Membrane Buff

Similar to the previous phase, auto-evo should be turned up a bit. Spiking up the rate of evolution has resulted in more engaging late-game scenarios in my personal experience, so increasing the default AI mutation rate could be a good step. In the future however, introducing more variety in membranes and the such, as well as making toxins more likely to independently evolve, would be beneficial.

Size-Related Costs

I think this is where my mind jumps to the idea that we need just one more little mechanic to make optimization more dynamic. I think something as simple as size-related costs - which I was told is a relatively easy feature to implement - would be good enough. It introduces an element of scarcity - there is only so much you can put on your organism before running into processing issues - that creates a unique decisionmaking process for the player to deal with.

Size related costs obviously also have further benefits to the Microbe Stage as a whole: potentially making the nucleus more useful, making scaling up as a prokaryote interesting if we attach a size unlock condition to the nucleus, making the replacement of prokaryotic parts as a eukaryote even more interesting due to the fact that you literally need to make sure your cell isn’t a giant, etc.

Population Impact Adjustments

Hopefully recent changes to auto-evo impact on populations helps, but we want to buffer against the crashes which seem to follow the player. If we can ensure that new cells get churned out quickly after prior ones go extinct, that would be great.

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Glad to see this conversation happening, and very excited to see that we can actually have it! It’s kind of motivating to think it might be “too LATE” to make a change to microbe stage one day.

I guess I’ll start with responses to stuff you posted (where I think I have useful responses) then go on to things I’m worried about.

The Beginning

I think there’s a fundamental problem with trying to balance between new and experienced players (I’m not sure “newbies vs oldies” is a super important distinction when talking about a game’s final state) in the early game. If the early game is a tutorial, then it will nessicarily take longer than is interesting for players who don’t need to learn. If it’s supposed to be a game about actively resisting the elements, then it’s going to be a rough ride for a first-timer. I suppose that your suggestion for a “volitile beginnings” option kinda covers that by having two game starts, although I might suggest putting that behind difficulty instead of tutorial state, since we kind of intentionally obfuscate turning tutorials off (and they turn themselves off gradually over time)
I also wonder about the scientific accuracy of the gameplay we are encouraging here. Is the idea that an early game on hardest difficulty would be a lot of “add a bunch of rusticyanin, then delete them all and add something else” as the environment changes? I assume that what early life really did was more a bunch of patch changes and sliding the environment sliders around.

Establishing your Niche

I’ve already mentioned my support for showing something like “deaths until extinction” instead of population in gameplay before, but I still like it.
I think we have some issues with balance between metabolism types, but sulfer has an extra problem that it is kind of a dead end: if you eat sulfer in Thrive, you’re deciding not to continue to the later stages, and frankly that’s realistic. (it would probably be realistic for a lot of the other metabolisms to be that way too, but that’s a different topic)

The Oxygen Transition

I think we should ask the players how noticable oxygenation is to them. I mostly observed it in my latest playtests BECAUSE it made me shift my tolerance slider. I’m afraid that if oxygen is the only environmental factor that is effected by organelles instead of a slider you’re going to confuse people, without warning them in an obvious way.

Adding the Nucleus + Unlocking Organelles

By this point in the game, I usually see players having a completely doomed species, or a “checkmate” microbe that will win eventually no matter what. Better auto-evo would be nice, but I think that this fundamentally is a game balance issue: late game autotrophy is very good (most streamers pick an iron-eater after a while), and it’s very hard for anything else to kill a eukaryote with that 50% damage reduction and high regen, and instant kill protection, unless evolution produces a kamakazee cell that only exists to kill the player before starving to death.
The population crashes (and the subsequent departure of all prokaryotes from the) is almost certainly an auto-evo issue; I have a local branch that seems to rectify it.

my extra thoughts
I think we have a lot of things happening in the environment screen that you need to dig into to learn much about, rather than something you can experience and learn from in gameplay. I’m not sure too much can be done about it in this stage of development, but I think we should keep that in mind before throwing lots of deep mechanics in a menu-based part of the game.
We have several parts that are more-or-less useless, in my opinion. Who remembers the nitrogen-fixing organelles are a thing? I don’t think we need to balance everything in a single player game (particularly if more balance would mean less variety), but I think some of the more important organelles aren’t really useful.
I almost made a list with no justification just to pick a fight, but I think the big two are actually the pilus and toxins. spikes make interesting gameplay since you can “block” with them, and toxin is a ton of fun in the late game as an autotroph that makes poision as a “side hustle”, but actually killing things by something other than engulfment is very hard, even for a dev like me that’s been playing this game for years. Just as bad, it’s very hard to die, even in late game, even on higher difficulties, to anything other than starvation or getting engulfed by a bigger cell. And once you learn about indigestible membranes, you can also avoid that problem. Did you remember that we have floating toxin chunks? Don’t worry, you didn’t need to; if you made a speed-focused species with min health, you would have a very hard time swimming between all the toxin fast enough to die before regeneration saved you. Now maybe that’s just a dev complaint, and the players don’t notice, but I’ve found the balance pretty hollow these days, just because we don’t let enough bad things happen to keep me on my toes.

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Great points brought up:

I am a bit wary of making experiences too different across difficulties - in terms of mechanics toggled on and off - just because it can be messy; I can easily imagine a scenario where something on Easy Mode gets neglected because it’s not what people play the most.

Tying back to the “Hundred Ways to Get It Wrong” principle, most sandbox games tend to give you more attempts/make failure less harsh, but keep things consistent otherwise: KSP keeps the same difficult aerodynamics system but gives you more resources to throw at it, Civilization gives you better yields compared to other civs but keeps all the mechanics in tact, Minecraft drops damage but keeps things consistent, etc. I do think the rate at which the environment changes can be tempered by difficulty, but we should try to make sure that the change is present regardless to ensure consistency.

The tutorial is a more distinct gameplay state compared to difficulties - something being “Easy” implies something being more manageable, while “Tutorials Enabled” is a very clear indication of an experience meant to guide and hold your hand. In the future with more stages added, tutorials would also imply more material covered since we’d need them for the Multicellular, Macroscopic, Aware, etc.

I think this is something we can benefit from keeping in mind when it comes to the distinction between tutorials and difficulties, especially when it comes to making the game more replayable. Tutorials are the training wheels, while your difficulty is your margin of error.

Good question, and there’s probably multiple answers from what I’m aware of.

Because of lateral genetic transfer, early prokaryotes - and an overwhelming number of prokaryotes today - can dramatically alter their metabolic strategies by, no exaggeration, taking up some new genetic material and integrating it. That’s part of the reason why bacteria are extremely varied compared to eukaryotes - within very close clades/groups of bacteria, wild swings in metabolisms can exist (here’s a small quote of reading on that: The metabolic network of the last bacterial common ancestor | Communications Biology)

So, especially since a huge jump in time occurs between Thrivian generations, it actually might be pretty realistic to how early lifeforms did evolve - rapidly shifting metabolisms in response to new strategies. A nice little gamble could be present - do you specialize now, risking your adapted organism’s food source disappearing for some extra population, or do you play it safe, and potentially let go of that early population bonus by remaining uncommitted?

That is actually a very fair point that passed over my head. I wonder if, with this in mind, we make it so that sulfur is really powerful early on, but disappears pretty quickly via the dynamic environment. That way, we sort of reflect the point of sulfur - it was very important to early lifeforms - while also encouraging players to let it go just as many eukaryotes did.

Something a bit simple I’m spitting out: making sulfur harmful on touch if you don’t have a chemosynthesizing or nitrogen-fixing part could be pretty interesting. It gives you a reason to put on the parts, and when you put it on, you might as well put more on to produce glucose/ammonia more efficiently. We make sulfur widely present across the ocean before oxygen shows up, and have it disappear similar to iron (hydrogen sulfide reacting with oxygen dramatically transformed the sulfur cycle early on), though perhaps a bit more rapidly.

This makes it a pretty cool proxy for the early nasty crap on the planet which would kill a lot of modern life, gives you another thing to look out for in live gameplay, makes events like eruptions more impactful on actual gameplay as a proxy of volcanic fumes, and is a pretty realistic proxy of real conditions. We’ve had prior concerns on H2S being difficult to see in a mixed cloud, but having it disappear naturally until it is only in patches where you’d expect it to naturally show up - in the vents because of volcanic activity and on the ocean floor because of rotting marine snow - makes it more manageable in my opinion.

Fair point. There should definitely still be a section of the tolerance tab focused on oxygen regardless on whether or not there’s a slider, showing the cumulative effects of your parts, but we would need to put some thought into how we display that.

If nothing else, we can just make it so that oxygen tolerance slider only gives, I don’t know, 5% resistance at most, and task the rest on the player manipulating their body plan. That way, the slider is still there and there’s atleast some very quick adjustment you can make, but you can’t rely on the slider at all if you want to fully get used to oxygen.

Good points. I have given some thought on significantly nerfing health so that each hit is much more threatening while working on my membranes, so that’s something good to keep in mind. We can also look at metabolism balancing.

Along with generally reducing health, something we can look at is making the toxin projectiles move much faster. It can be really painful to shoot toxins at something, and really easy to avoid toxins.

I would like to see that fight-starting list of yours on useless organelles if you have the time.

I also experience that, so I’m with you there. Besides, like you mention, engulfment or starvation, you’re pretty secure, and other cells generally can be pretty monotone in their level of threat to you. There really isn’t much of an impetus to experiment with different abilities since you know what’s coming.

I do think we can look at making the Microbe Stage a bit more threatening. We’ve had prior concerns on player accessibility, but now that we have a tutorial, and now that we’ve established that we want players to figure most things out by themselves except the metabolism system - and also, most of our mechanics are implemented, so we don’t have to worry about sudden spikes of difficulty coming in - we can be a bit more harsh with balancing.

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Some things I wanted to point out with recent playthroughs:

  • There are some pretty gamey and abstract mechanics we have that we might want to consider nipping for presentation. For example, the free glucose cloud spawning right after you spawn is somewhat unfitting (and pretty unreliable anyways if you spawn near a current; we can default to restoring to initial amounts if balancing is a concern). Also would benefit looking into resetting the game scene after exiting the editor, as it’s odd to imply that after millions of years, things look the same (keeping ingested organisms, exact same scene around you, etc.)
  • Not sure if this is related to the game scene not resetting, but I have seen multiple instances of the editor saying it was only me and another species, only to see multiple species upon exiting the editor.
  • Immunology beyond just the membranes is sorely needed. Attaching some sort of specific toxin-buffering to the lysosome is a good way to deal with this.
  • In balancing the mucocyst, we want the “initiate shield” ability to take a big chunk of mucilage and then start draining instead of just having the drain-rate only. This prevents spam, and makes it a more high-cost thing to do.

On the last one, I don’t want to turn this thread into too much of an item-by-item balancing thread, since I can tweak many things myself. But that’s something I can’t do myself, so I wanted to bring it up for attention.

NOTES

5

REVIEWING OUR PART SELECTION

There’s always room to improve, but we can’t stress about everything. This post seeks to identify the most valuable changes we can make.

If we decide to change things up a bit in terms of how the parts work, I think we get the most ROI on improving the game as a whole if we work on these parts:

  • Chemosynthesizing Parts - Making H2S slightly damaging to organisms which don’t have H2S, and not damaging to organisms which don’t. Makes the compound very unique and introduces cool reflections of life, which I mentioned in my previous posts here.
  • Iron-Respiring Parts - Siderophore implementation, where iron respiration gameplay focuses on extracting iron from chunks instead of clouds emitted from chunks. Should be balanced to make it so that you must compete over a limited amount of extractions with other cells. Larger chunks give more extractions, smaller chunks less.
  • Nucleus - Discussions all over the development forums, but essentially, making the nucleus less of an energy drain, giving it an unlock condition of size, and making it relate to size-related costs allows us to have less of a disruptive and unyielding effect in the middle of the Microbe Stage.

And then maybe, if easy enough of a tweak:

  • Nitrogen-Fixing Parts - I’m not so sure about this now, but one potential solution can involve having the bonus growth apply only when not moving, but buffing that growth bonus. Though simple, this at the very least alters behavior and strengthens the part.
  • Bioluminiscent Vacuoles - Concept here (Bioluminescence - #7 by Deus), which essentially makes it so that bioluminescent vacuoles give effects which can stack in proximity to other of your own kind.

As the list at the end of this post points out, there are tweaks I point out which could improve the functionality of other parts; but those tweaks are more specific to improving niche functions or parts of the Microbe Stage. The first three parts play big roles to the game as a whole, meaning changes to these compounds would be very consequential, and tweaking nitrogen-fixing parts and bioluminescent vacuoles makes it so that there isn’t really a “useless” part in the catalogue.

Three Most Important Miscellaneous Tweaks

Beyond those main areas of the game, I will mention the three tweaks which I think will be the most rewarding for gameplay quality to implement. There are more changes which we can consider, and I have a list of these tweaks breaking down each part in the game at the end of the post for those truly interested, but it’s hard to rank things listed one after the other in terms of importance.

If a volunteer wants to improve things but doesn’t know where to start, here are the three things that I think would be most valuable in tweaking part function, upgrades, etc.

  • Flagella Length Modification Change - Current implementation has a simple ATP v. Speed trade, which is pretty bland and means little else other than just adding more flagella. Ideal implementation involves changing sprint behavior - longer flagella develop strain more quickly but gives a greater boost to speed, while shorter flagella develop strain less quickly but gives less bonus sprint speed. Introduces an endurance vs. explosiveness dynamic that would be interesting on gameplay effects.
  • Injectisome Pilus Toxin Change - Currently, this modification simply switches the damage dealt from being sensitive to toxin or physical resistance. This means that if you inject an organism with a membrane that nullifies toxin, the injectisome will do almost no damage, which doesn’t make sense and makes the part pretty useless compared to normal toxin projectiles. Injectisomes should completely bypass membrane effects, serving as a counter to resistant membranes, differentiating it from external toxin projectiles, and giving it use.
  • Pilus Lengthening Mechanic - Longer pilus slow down rotation and general speed and lower damage, but increase how far away damage is applied. Shorter pilus have less of an effect on rotation speed, general speed, and shorter range, but increases damage applied. Nice little defensive v. offensive capability, as well as a general arms race mechanic (a fun part of pilus gameplay is sparing with other piluses, trying to get to the flesh of your prey before it can get to your flesh). A similar effect can be present for injectisomes, but instead of damage being changed, its how much venom you can inject at once (longer proboscis means less venom, and vice versa).

Catalogue

Here is a breakdown of the entire rest of the catalogue.

Internal Parts (Prokaryotes)

  • Cytoplasm - Boosts size, which can be important for engulfment resistance and capability, and is a cheap way to get more storage. My patch increasing engulfment size disparity requirement for engulfment should help to make it more important.
  • Hydrogenase - I think hydrogenase is solid right now due to its impact on tolerances. Flat rate of conversion is a bit of an issue, but balanced otherwise by tolerance impact.
  • Metabolosome - Pretty solid as of now. If anything, the window of time between using the metabolosome and unlocking mitochondria could be pretty small, but that’s a general pacing issue.
  • Thylakoids - Constantly the source of balancing scrutiny. I’d prefer to balance other aspects of the game first and then see how photosynthesis feels.
  • Thermosynthase - Pretty niche, but generally one of the cooler mechanics in the game. Solid part.
  • Oxytoxisome - Solid part, just needs some agent balancing, which I am dealing with currently.

External Parts

  • Pilus - Pilus need to be buffed, as it otherwise is pretty difficult to use it offensively or be harmed. It serves more as a deterrence to engulfment right now than a weapon, which is fine, but pretty passive in terms of gameplay effects.
  • Chemoreceptor - I’ll once again mention the “range v. strength” modification tweak I bring up in developer meetings, where instead of both of these being changed independently, you exchange one for the other (so short range but very sensitive, long range but requires a greater amount to detect, etc.)
  • Slime Jet - One of the better parts in the game in my opinion. Slow-down effect could be a bit buffed and mucocyst storage use needs to be changed, but both have been corrected in pending pull requests.
  • Cilia - Pretty solid part overall, not much to complain about.

Internal Parts (Eukaryotes)

  • Mitochondria - Pretty solid overall in my opinion.
  • Chloroplast - Like thylakoids, constant source of balancing scrutiny, and one I’d prefer to consult when we’re more confident on general stage polish.
  • Thermoplast - Same as thermosynthase.
  • Lysosome - This is more than just a basic tweak, but we desperately need immunology functions related to toxins.
  • Vacuole - Pretty solid part.
  • Toxin Vacuole - General agent concerns I alluded to above, currently working on it on GitHub.
  • Signalling Agent - Fine, just generally not very useful. Useful as the player becomes multicellular, allowing easy colonial behavior, so will become more relevant once the multicellular stage starts development.
  • Melanosome - I think it’s as unique and useful as it could be considering the nature of radioactive material in Thrive.
6

Migration

Another post while the issue is fresh on my mind - didn’t want to combine it with the prior post since the topic is different:

Constant migration at the beginning of the game can be a pretty dry experience which the player can unintentionally fall into. By zooming to the surface uninhibited, players can unintentionally avoid other cells, running away from competition and minimizing exposure to competition early on. It also generally encourages the rush straight to photosynthesis.

We thought environmental tolerances would be more impactful here, but if a player really wanted to, they could just dash and quickly adjust their sliders. Right now, environmental constraints generally act to require more initial investment to a patch and increase MP spending rather than constraining movement.

The solution can be pretty easy to manage: have a minimum amount of generations in a patch you migrated to before you move. It doesn’t have to be very high, just high enough to make sure you need to survive, I don’t know, atleast two or three generations in the patch you’re in? This can hypothetically be a population minimum, but smaller organisms naturally have larger populations, so that doesn’t really balance anything.

This will nerf the “run-straight-to-surface” meta, encourage adaptations to more patches, makes players interact with other lifeforms more, and generally improves the pacing of the Microbe Stage; movement to the surface in a normal start is more of a journey than a dash.

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7

Writing to note that, as of now, I think there is enough in this discussion so far to warrant that no further expansive concepts are probably needed for rounding out the Microbe Stage. This is for two reasons:

  • The topics discussed here are extensive in their nature. Anything beyond these topics already brought up, in my opinion, wouldn’t be necessary.
  • Implementing some of these changes and tweaks would really change up the experience, so evaluation after some tweaks would be necessary for any other judgements.

This is in combination to some balancing tweaks already pull requested on GitHub based off these discussions. Again, just like the road map, I’m not saying further expansion of systems is absolutely barred; just that topics discussed here are extensive enough, in my opinion, to put a really nice bow on the Microbe Stage.

I will also note that this doesn’t equate to a finalization of balance discussion; that’s a continuous process.

8

It sounds like it may be a little late to be proposing new gameplay mechanics for the Microbe Stage, but one idea that strikes me as being potentially fun/interesting to implement (if not now, then maybe at some later point) could be horizontal gene transfer (i.e. microbes of different species swapping genetic information in order to acquire new traits); this is a very common phenomenon observed in IRL Earth prokaryotes, and it can often play an important role in their evolution.

In terms of gameplay, I could see this working something like the following:

  1. If a cell evolves a Perforator Pilus, it can later be upgraded into a Conjugation Pilus, which enables non-harmful exchange of genetic material between cells.

  2. The cell can then expend resources to enter Conjugation Mode; while in Conjugation Mode, if it bumps into another cell with its Conjugation Pilus, then each cell will receive a Plasmid carrying a random trait (e.g. an organelle, a modification to environmental tolerances, etc.) found in the other cell.

  3. Traits obtained via Plasmids do not cost any evolution points, and thus may be seen as a kind of “bonus trait”; however, the random nature of the traits means that they may or may not be helpful, and may even potentially be detrimental.

  4. Additionally, engaging in this behavior may provide a competitive advantage to other cells, rendering them better able to survive and compete for resources and/or give them abilities that enable them to directly harm the player’s cell.

  5. There should also probably be some limit on how often a cell can do this, either a hard cap (e.g. once per generation), or a “soft cap” in the form of just making Conjugation Mode extremely expensive to enter; otherwise, one could imagine just repeatedly doing conjugation to evolve a bunch of new traits in between generations. Alternatively, maybe the new traits won’t become available until entering the Microbe Editor.

Anyway- this seems like it might be too big/disruptive a feature to add at this stage of development, but I thought I’d bring it up just in case you guys find the idea interesting : )

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