Have you ever wanted to customize an alien planet? Do you yearn for the glory of making a microbial lifeform unlock an achievement? Does reading about balancing force you to the edge of your seat? If you answered yes to any of the above, then look no further: Thrive 0.8.3 is here!
Read on for more details, or play the new version now.
Achievements
Achievement hunters beware: 12 achievements have now been implemented in Thrive, allowing players to measure their progress, strive for unique goals, and overall, hunt for the glory of 100% achievement progression. Massacre cells, pursue exotic metabolic strategies, and compare your progress to other Thrive players!
The achievement system will be expanded upon as Thrive itself expands. The upcoming Multicellular Stage represents a completely new challenge for players to sink their teeth into, and additional playstyles can be covered in the Microbe Stage. Until then, we hope you enjoy the current selection of achievements.
Planet Customization
One of the longstanding ambitions for Thrive has been the implementation of planet customization. Thrive is about evolution on alien worlds after all, and alien worlds can be, well, very alien.
For the first time in Thrive's history, players now have various customization options to alter their home planet. Players can tweak various parameters which can dramatically change their playthrough's procedural map, altering the depth of oceans, dropping temperature to increase the frequency of frozen patches, and altering the behavior and availability of compounds to accentuate certain metabolic strategies. As is so for various other of our grandiose concepts, this is an initial implementation of planet customization features. Further customization options will be available at some point in the future, especially as the world map becomes more complex during the Macroscopic Stages.
We would appreciate any input on the current customization features. Furthermore, we'd love to see some of the whacky planets you create. Share them in our Community Discord, or create an account on our community forums and post there.
Balancing Refinements, Multicellular Expansion
Various balancing changes have been implemented this update. With sped up projectiles and increased damage, players should hopefully find that agent gameplay is more fun, responsive, and threatening when faced with other microbes. The mucocyst has also been refined, requiring more tactical use of the shielding ability to ward off threats. More exotic metabolism strategies, such as radiotrophy and thermosynthesis, have been slightly buffed to increase build diversity. Auto-evo should also be more diverse and robust, allowing players to compete in more resilient ecosystems.
Along with this main game polish, the Multicellular Stage prototype has received some love from wonderful volunteer contributions. Colonial organisms now are visibly linked together via an intercellular matrix, a highly requested feature. The multicellular menu has also been enhanced for information accessibility, with a new tooltip setting and an enhanced preview allowing you to see what your multicellular organism will look like in game. And, much to the joy of hardcore colonialists, cell placement in the prototype is now much more reliable - cells won't dramatically shift from their intended placement. Other balancing changes, such as increasing max zoom out in the Multicellular Stage, will hopefully provide fans of the prototype with more hours of fun in our prototype.
We would really appreciate any input about balancing; game balance constantly shifts across practically every game as features expand and players adopt various strategies, and Thrive is by no means different. We also want to point out that any current features in the Multicellular Prototype are subject to change and refinement.
Additional Features
- Added new hydrogenosome organelle
- Added a microbe movement ripple effect
- Improved auto-evo generation diversity
- Made hydrogen sulfide diffuse between patches and buffed events that generate it
- Made water currents affect bigger cells more strongly to be able to push them around
- Microbe colonies now have passive reproduction enabled for them in the form of gaining free compounds needed for reproduction while part of a colony
- There is now a new look to our options menu with checkboxes replaced by toggle buttons and various other tweaks were also made like moving options around
- Fixed digestion being stuck at 0 / 0 when the engulfed cell produces resources
A full list of patch notes is at the end of this post.
What’s Next
This Thrive release also coincides with the Thrive Soundtrack being released on Steam. We've decided to put the soundtrack on Steam as a way for fans to support Thrive further. Hopefully many people will enjoy the soundtrack and help future Thrive development that way. Thrive Soundtrack on Steam.
The end of the Microbe Stage roadmap is rapidly approaching. Some features may be dependent on available manpower - terrain generation as an example, currently requiring some much needed art assets and coordination between programmers and artists - and might require some reconsidering on timeline. As a whole, there are less and less entries on the official Thrive roadmap waiting on implementation, and our target of “finishing” the Microbe Stage by the end of 2025.
There are discussions being held by the development team on possible final refinements to the Microbe Stage, some of which are visible in the forums - in these next few months, these discussions will likely ramp up, and any resulting actions from them will take place. In the meantime, we would really appreciate any feedback from the community on the Microbe Stage. How do you feel about it? Where would you like to see some work? What parts of the game do you really like? Are you satisfied with the current state of Microbe Stage?
We would like to reinforce that reaching the end of the Microbe Stage doesn't mean no more work will be done on the Microbe Stage - it just means that our team will officially start focusing on development for the Multicellular Stage. Volunteers, both on the team and external contributors, are free to propose new ideas and submit new pull requests to the Microbe Stage until the end of time.
As always remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream later today, where we’ll cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. We'll also answer the usual question of what's coming in the next releases. You can visit our feedback thread or comment below to give your thoughts on this update.
Watch the stream:
Patch Notes
The full patch notes:
- Implemented a set of 12 microbe achievements
- Added simple planet customization options to the new game screen
- Added new hydrogenosome organelle
- Added a microbe movement ripple effect
- Improved auto-evo generation diversity
- Made hydrogen sulfide diffuse between patches and buffed events that generate it
- Increased max zoom out distance when playing as a large cell colony
- Intercellular matrix is now represented in the multicellular stage with visual links
- Implemented preview images of multicellular species
- The multicellular editor now remembers the exact hex layout between sessions and no longer does a conversion process that sometimes shifted cells around
- Implemented tooltips for multicellular cell selection buttons
- Added a graphical setting that slightly tilts the camera towards the cursor, which can be enabled in the game settings
- Made water currents affect bigger cells more strongly to be able to push them around
- Updated the icon for hydrogenase
- Tweaked balancing of the easy difficulty preset
- Tweaked balancing of toxins
- Mucocyst activation now requires 50% stored mucocyst to activate it
- Buffed thermosynthesis and radiosynthesis by 20%
- Microbe colonies now have passive reproduction enabled for them in the form of gaining free compounds needed for reproduction while part of a colony
- Added an in-game list of achievements
- There is now a new look to our options menu with checkboxes replaced by toggle buttons and various other tweaks were also made like moving options around
- Metabolic stability pressure in auto-evo no longer penalizes sessile species as harshly
- Fixed digestion being stuck at 0 / 0 when engulfed cell produces resources
- Fixed tolerance tooltips sometimes always showing debuffs when the theoretically perfect tolerances calculation failed due to not taking organelle effects into account
- Fixed the glaciation event ending leaving light levels in some cases to be incorrect
- Fixed the move to patch button staying active when the patch extinction popup was triggered multiple times in a row
- Fixed engulfing in cell colonies using capacity information from the wrong cell
- Fixed key rebinding when there were conflicts not working
- Fixed queued chunk spawns being able to spawn too close to the player's position
- Fixed errors when glaciation ended related to re-applying original patch conditions
- Fixed the 2x game speed mode not speeding up the day/night cycle
- Fixed a problem with cell type colours not updating by making the colour part of the visual hash for them
- Fixed ATP warning staying active in the multicellular editor
- Fixed iron meteor event not being able to add iron to a patch that didn't have any iron
- Fixed the hydrogenase tooltip claiming that the organelle used hydrogen as an input when in reality the fermentation process results in hydrogen being released
- Fixed species preview images not updating when the species mutated
- Fixed freebuild species missing tooltips showing what they look like. Note that species that go immediately extinct still don't have tooltips.
- Fixed the process panel list being empty if opened initially when the game is paused
- Fixed auto-evo being able to place macroscopic organelles in the microbe species
- Fixed the timeline tab showing nonsensical glucose reductions if playing a single Thrive playthrough for a very large number of generations
- Compound bars in compact mode now use a font with shadow for better visibility of numbers against the bar backgrounds
- Improved the handling of scrollbars in the timeline tab with too tall scrollbars being now less likely to appear, but they still do sometimes
- Fixed jittery creature movement in the ascension ceremony screen
- Fixed editor cancel button focused mode visuals
- Fixed organelle names in tooltips not updating when changing the game language
- Fixed chemical equation titles not updating on language change
- Made signalling agents from colony members available for use even if the primary cell doesn't have them
- Save list now has a tag for saves that cheats have been used in
- Added a popup message the first time cheats are used in a game
- Removed accidentally leftover text in the new game setup screen about passive reproduction
- Cell type editor now validates the new type name immediately on entering the name
- Made sure species bacteria status is always up to date in the species class
- Made the editor tabs disallow swapping between them if there is an in-progress action that needs to be completed first
- Improved the direct stage start cell for multicellular
- Converted all NodePaths in our code to direct node references that were added with Godot 4. Hopefully this makes long Thrive play sessions a bit more stable.
- Updated an outdated command in our setup documentation
- Made our game export script to delete the test runner before starting as that caused failures
- Tweaked our code checking tools to not report false positives on some Godot scene files
- Tweaked our code checking tool ignore list
- Updated unit testing framework, including updating gdUnit4
- Updated xunit version
- Updated Thriveopedia content
- Updated translations