Some time has passed once again and it is time for a new Thrive release seen. As usual we have a public test build available today and the release is in one week so that we can fix all the problems everyone is sure to find with the test build. You will find a lot of major changes if you play this new version as is visible from the version number jump. We have new multicellular reproduction modes and improvements to previous ones, colony membranes now stretch towards colony members making gaps smaller, and we have initial auto-evo implementation for the multicellular stage! Besides the highlight features there are of course again a very long list of smaller changes and bugfixes, but we won't spoil those yet, they will be covered by the devblog coming out at the same time as the release.
Before anyone plays the new build, a word of warning to users of slightly older GPUs: due to a Godot Engine update, some cards that previously worked fine with Vulkan are now detected as unsupported. So if you have such a GPU you'll need to force the OpenGL safety mode on (can be done in the Thrive Launcher). We are hoping that Godot 4.8 resolves this situation, but it is not out yet so we cannot update this Thrive release to use that.
To access the beta build, right click Thrive in the Steam client and in the properties select "beta" as the beta version to play.
Please provide any feedback you have on this test build. We are especially interested in any auto-evo run failures and in general how the performance of auto-evo is in multicellular. We are aware of some minor bugs in the membrane stretch system already and will try to fix them next week. Also loading an older save with mass budding size of 1 can give an error upon entering the editor.
You can comment below or post your feedback in our forum thread