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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.