The time has finally come for Thrive 1.6, the third major update to the Multicellular Stage! So how come it's called 1.6? Three months have passed since the last major update, and a lot has been added in that time. So much, in fact, that everything in our roadmap planned up to version 1.6 was completed.
Included in this update are two new reproduction modes, Sexual Reproduction and Mass budding, both in different way playing with the mechanics for having different cell types in one species. We also have the new Actomyosin Organelle that lets you create "muscle cells" which allow for large, yet fast and nimble Multicellular organisms. Stretching the membranes of individual cells makes Multicellular creations look much more cohesive, and auto-evo is now creating new AI Multicellular species! All in all, the Multicellular Stage is now much closer to what we expect its final form to be.
We would also like to remind people that our second community art contest is ongoing. Art from this contest is to be used as Thrive loading screens and/or Juuzo Lenz's Thrive-inspired speculative evolution series. The winner of the first contest was added to the game in this update. Art of all levels and diversity of quality is welcome!
Thrive 1.6.0
Reproduction Updates
The namesake of this blogpost is one of the updates to our reproduction system: the addition of Sexual reproduction. When you choose this option, you will no longer be able to go directly to the editor when fully grown. Instead, you will have to launch a gamete cell and have it merge with the gamete cell of another member of your species in order to open the editor. As a reward for your efforts, you will receive a 20% discount on all MP costs in the editor. Initially, you can select any one of your cell types to be used as a gamete, but you also have the option to switch to anisogamy, where you can design two different gamete cell types. At that point you can also decide which of the two "sexes" you want to play as yourself.
As finding a mate can be challenging, we included some functions to make it easier. If you also have Signalling Agent available, you can use a command to call a mate towards you. With the right difficulty settings (enabled on Normal), this will spawn one in and point them out to you if none exists yet.
But that's not the only new option in this menu. Another addition is Mass Budding, which simply allows you to start the next generation with multiple cells instead of only one. A slider allows you to control exactly how many cells you want to start with, following the same order as the growth order you can set in the editor. This way, you no longer need to make sure your first cell can survive on its own. Of course, there is a cost to this. The larger the bud you want to start of with is, the more resources you will have to gather before you can reproduce.
Finally, the already existing reproduction mode Sporulation received an update to how its selected cell type works. Instead of using one of your normal celltypes, upon first selecting the sporulation reproduction mode you are now prompted to select one of your existing cell types to have it's design copied to a new and exclusive spore cell type. This cell type can then only be edited from the reproduction tab and cannot be placed in your normal body design. It is likely we will want to apply this same system to sexual reproduction later on.
Actomyosin
A new Multicellular Stage organelle, Actomyosin allows you to create a type of "muscle cells". In exchange for their significant size and an ATP cost, these greatly improve both the movement speed and turning speed of your species. As you can only place one Actomyosin per cell, the only ways to improve the speed you get per cell are to improve their specialization, and/or place them adjacent to other cells of the same type. The tuning on this new feature is quite strong right now, so it is an ideal way to keep your large multicellular species mobile!
The design of the organelle represents an arrangement of actin and myosin proteins found in "simpler" types of muscle cells, similar to what we still see in smooth muscle tissue (used for example to make your blood vessels and digestive system constrict). These actin and myosin fibres actively slide past each other using energy from ATP, causing cells, and on a larger scale whole tissues, to contract. We represented this sliding method of contraction in the organelle's model and animations as well.
Actomyosin is also the first organelle that comes with membrane type restrictions: As constricting while pulling on things outside the cell is rather difficult when the cell has a rigid cell wall, Actomyosin can only be placed in cells with Normal or Double membranes. This is the first of what we hope will be a larger array of differences between membrane types, creating both clearly different groups of life and offering more meaningful choices to players.
Multicellular membrane stretching
A quite consistent complaint about the Multicellular Stage has been that creatures often end up look like a disconnected swarm of cells than a real cohesive body made of cells. There have been a lot of different ideas on how to solve this in the past, but one of them is bearing fruit: membranes of cells that are close enough together will now stretch out towards each other. This makes things look a lot more cohesive. The effect is particularly noticeable when you have cell types of different sizes and/or shapes, because these can usually not be placed close together.
This is also not just a cosmetic change. The stretched membranes have collision as usual, so things will bounce off of them. In particular this should reduce occurrences of another common complaint: small cells slipping through the gaps in between cells and getting stuck inside you.
We're quite happy with how this has improved the body of multicellular species, but it's likely we'll continue experimenting with the exactly shape of the membranes generated.
Multicellular auto-evo
Finally, our evolution systems are now working on Multicellular species. This means that other multicellular species will now be mutating, migrating and diverging right along with you. Your own multicellular species' population will now also depend on auto-evo's evaluation of its performance. The mutations added so far cover: adjustment of environmental tolerances, changing of behaviour, creation and placement of new cell types to add new organelles to, and removing organelles from existing cell types. There are still some obvious things missing from this list.
For example, the system will not yet be adding organelles to existing cell types. Another missing feature is for AI species to become multicellular on their own, so for now the player will always be the first, and all AI multicellular species will be descended from that species. There are also some limitations on how auto-evo decides what is effective. For example, it will decide a pilus you place on the front of a cell is useful, even if that cell is at the back of our species. These and many other areas will be added to and improved upon in future updates.
Additional Features
- More enhancements to auto-evo, such as more behaviours changed and more advanced predation calculations
- Updated the in-game art-gallery with new and old models, in a better categorisation
- Re-divided loading screen art between the Stages
- Added the winner of the first loading screen art contest, "Motherly Love" by Trappist-1e, as a Macroscopic Stage loading screen
- Added environmental tolerance effects and a few other things to Organelle tooltips
- Membrane type is now the same for all cell types in one species
- AI microbes now use Signalling Agents
- Specialization and Cell adjacency bonuses were made stronger
- Endosymbiosis now also works for Multicellular species
- Reproducing now has a hotkey
- You can now change in settings how fast the "speed up" button goes
- Visuals for membranes were updated, especially Carbonate
- Updated our secret easter egg biome with new terrain
- Made the search bar in the Thriveopedia also search page content and tags
- Updated to Godot 4.7.2
A full list of changes is available at the end of this post.
What’s Next
With this update the Multicellular Stage has taken a big leap towards being a complete experience. As the 1.6 designation indicates (in the way we number our releases), with this we're over half way in our implementation of what we consider the "core required features" for the Multicellular Stage. With that in mind, we are still confident as well in the completion of the Multicellular Stage around the end of this year.
Considering the size of this update and some earlier reports, we anticipate having to spend some time after release fixing up bugs. Looking at our Release Roadmap, after that we will likely likely work on features such as mechanics for nerve cells and then adding size-related costs to Multicellular species (which is meant to make using specialization and adjacency more important). We will also have to evaluate whether there is enough time for optional mechanics like "non-cell parts" (things like shells).
Join us a bit later today for our developer Thrivestream where we'll celebrate the release on the stream, but also answer the usual question of what's coming in the next releases. You can visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this release.
Watch the stream:
Patch notes
- Added sexual reproduction option for multicellular microbes
- Using sexual reproduction gives a 20% MP discount when it is used to enter the editor
- Added mass budding reproduction mode for the multicellular stage
- Added auto-evo for multicellular species: they can mutate and split. They don't appear naturally yet so they can only split from the player.
- Implemented membranes stretching towards other colony members to make gaps between colony cells smaller
- Fixed colony rotation math giving a buff from colony member count
- Added actomyosin organelle as a key buff to multicellular movement and rotation speed
- Updated to Godot 4.7.2 (this causes issues with Vulkan on some computers)
- Changing membrane in multicellular now costs 100 MP and makes all cell types switch to the new membrane type at once
- Changing membrane types is now prevented in macroscopic
- The microbe AI now uses signalling agents to send commands in certain situations
- Buffed specialization and adjacency bonuses
- Time per generation is now 50 myr instead of 100. Only the display changed, game speed is the same as before.
- Added stored compound conservation when using mass budding to make it more viable to spawn with big colonies
- Reworked the GUI for spore cell type picking and customizing
- Enabled endosymbiosis for multicellular
- Added a hotkey for the editor button and a button prompt that appears the first time the button becomes available
- Reworked the microbe colony compound sharing logic to fix one more corner case
- Added an option to change the alternative speed mode in the game to go up to 5x speed if the CPU is fast enough
- Updated membranes with new textures and shader changes
- Added tolerance and a few other stats to the organelle tooltips
- Added an extra explanation in the oxygen tolerance slider tooltip that organelles are needed to get higher level of adaptation
- Changed tolerance warning text to give the minimum needed change to become tolerant rather than the change the preferred value would need
- Made digestion finish immediately if there is only toxin left to digest which is not useful as it only causes damage
- Detached colony members now try to re-parent to a nearby still existing member rather than always totally exiting the colony when their connecting cell was removed
- Updated germination action icon
- Doubled lifetime of radioactive chunks
- Implemented fossilisation for multicellular species
- Tweaked predator and behaviour handling in auto-evo
- Added more random rotation to terrain chunks and tweaked their spawning
- Added a new chunk model to the banana biome and a new terrain shape
- Reduced minimum selectable GUI scale to 60%
- Made the MP bar show one more decimal to avoid confusing rounding scenarios
- Made save list items only load their data when about to become visible rather than all loading immediately
- Fixed slime jet movement speed being framerate dependent. And slightly altered the intended thrust amount.
- Fixed specialization not applying to gameplay flagella
- Fixed MP multiplier from difficulty not applying to reproduction modes
- Fixed major problem with migrations using the same miche tree as mutation generation concurrently which likely was able to cause random errors and slight weirdness in auto-evo
- Fixed external organelle positions not updating to match their physical positions when a cell grew
- Fixed physics collision ignoring stopping working if an entity tried to ignore multiple other objects
- Fixed cell layout reset not reapplying all species properties on divide. This should fix AI cells with a nucleus but small scale.
- Fixed the reproduction options not fully restoring after loading a save
- Fixed a bug with loading a multicellular stage save where a chemoreceptor was pointing to its own species and was part of a world history record with changes
- Fixed loading saves where microbe chemoreceptor references form a cycle between species
- Fixed loading saves where auto-evo had failed and it now shows a special error message
- Fixed stage-based guidance lines not coming from the player cell
- Fixed NaN compound chunks spawning on invalid species member dying
- Fixed moving a cell in multicellular not updating the specialization display
- Fixed growth progress not being correctly displayed when using sporulation
- Fixed scroll bar backgrounds not being rounded
- Remade myofibril texture
- Implemented a cheat to slow or speed up time
- Adjusted intercellular matrix generation
- Added a bunch of missing models to the art gallery
- Added the winning artwork from the first art contest as a loading screen
- If loading a save fails the integrity of the save file is checked and if it is detected as corrupted, then a special message is shown
- Made the search bar in the Thriveopedia also search page content and tags
- Added multicellular body plan corruption checks on exiting the editor
- Added pagination to patch notes views
- Added actual used renderer detection and showing new possible values
- Made guidance lines (tutorial, chemoreceptor) smoothly update their target positions
- Added a hotkey for fast-forwarding the credits
- Removed Windows-style new lines from our error dialog to avoid double line changes from appearing
- Implemented a new console command "edit" to go directly to the editor at any time
- Replaced the previous graph processing library with onet hat still implements the Sugiyama algorithm but is licensed in a better way
- Added a safety check against invalid data in colonies when building intercellular matrix graphics
- Entity debug labels now display active signalling command
- Added support for multicast debug console commands
- Added a prototype sky renderer into the game files
- Added preregistration of all of our ECS components to make entity creation thread-safe
- Added extra physics data safeguards in our code
- Improved auto-evo general failure message in the editor by pointing out the game logs
- The game news feed now uses HTTPS to load more securely
- Reimplemented our 2D spinners as shaders rather than rotating nodes as those were hard to make in Godot 4
- Added a popup warning window when achievements couldn't be loaded
- Made achievements writing use a temporary file to make data corruption less likely
- Added a code safety check before resetting intercellular matrix data on colony disband
- Removed protoplasm definition and Thriveopedia page
- Updated some code to use a new collection initializer syntax
- Fixed the slightly confusing way the fossilisation dialog was internally constructed
- Slightly tweaked when world queued actions are triggered for future safety
- Added code tests for all reproduction types to verify progress calculation is correct with them
- Added caching for simple collision shapes
- Fixed a unit test that was intermittently failing in CI
- Updated our code style instructions
- Fixed our component access safety checking mode and fixed some missing access markings in game systems
- Fixed a bunch of code warnings found by new static analysis tools
- Configured some new code check warnings and fixed some older code for them
- Added a code comment explaining ModifiableEditorCells
- Added a CI check to ensure no missing ".cs.uid" files
- Improved generation of the license text and unified between the game and our helper scripts
- Steam: added a top level license file on export
- Switched to a custom-patched physics engine version that fixes an entity disappearing bug as a temporary measure
- Updated System.IO.Hashing 10.0.8 to 10.0.11
- Updated AngleSharp from 1.5.2 to 1.7.2
- Updated code checking tools
- Updated test SDK
- Updated translations