Today we are proud to announce the release of Thrive 0.5.10, which among a large host of bug and performance fixes, provides players with brand new tools to play with and study their world. Deter predators by impeding them with the sticky mucus left in your wake! Live your life to the fullest as a proper vegetative plant, without having to search for compounds! Create entire timelines to your exact specifications with the new autoevo tool! All of this and more, awaits you in the latest in Thrive.
Our developers have tirelessly labored to bring you an expanded Thrive experience. We’ve outlined the major changes in this devblog, but you can see the patch notes at the bottom for a full list of features and bug fixes.
Mucilage Jet
0.5.10 presents a new highly versatile part to the evolutionist’s arsenal; The Mucilage Jet! This unassuming structure grants cells the ability to process glucose into a brand new agent known as mucilage over time. The cell is able to expel this mucilage to grant themselves a quick burst of speed to escape the grasp of predators, or perhaps catch their prey in turn. The mucilage left behind in the cell’s wake will drastically slow down any other cells caught in the sticky goo, granting craft creatures a chance to escape!
We cannot wait to see the interesting strategies players devise as they experiment with this new feature!
Time-Based Reproduction
No longer is the rate of reproduction tied directly to the player’s ability to gather compounds. Now in 0.5.10, all cells will passively acquire the necessary compounds over a period of time without needing to seek out concentrated clouds! No matter how large and slow you become, you will always be able to reproduce in reasonable time as the rate scales proportionally with the size of your organism.
Cells will on longer be able to reproduce instantly the moment they acquire sufficient resources however, as it now takes time to put the compounds to use. Gathering ammonia and phosphates via concentrated clouds will double the rate of reproductive progress, instead of directly filling it.
Auto-Evo Exploration Tool
For those of us with a love of clades and history; The Auto-Evo Exploration Tool is now available for your viewing pleasure! This invaluable tool allows you to directly run auto-evo several generations at a time within various defined metrics. Not only does it simulate the natural evolution of AI species, it also generates an entire clade diagram of each species and it’s predecessors!
Interested players will be able to peer into the very essence of any species by viewing it’s details, which reveal behavior values, precise color hex, population, auto-evo score, and more!
And what if you wanted to dive into this generated world that you have studied so well and experience it directly? You certainly can! Simply press “Play With Current Setting” to jump straight into the world you have generated.
Other Changes
- Auto-evo calculations have been updated to encourage sessility in AI species, and now runs 60% faster as well.
- LAWK (Life as We Know) is now toggled on by default when starting a new game. If you want to play with thermosynthesis, make sure to turn this setting off before starting!
- Glycolysis and respiration processes now consume less glucose, making life a little easier. Small
- Iron chunks now hold significantly less iron compound, preventing lithotrophs from fueling themselves indefinitely.
- Entity limit is now weighted by size, so larger cells are less likely to spawn.
- Outdated” species should no longer show up in gameplay, this includes species meant to be extinct and the player’s own species being left behind as microbes after advancing to multicellular.
- The generation seed of your planet will now be displayed in the editor so it can be easily saved or shared.
- The compounds and environment panels have become separate, and can be toggled separately as well.
- The multicellular stage now has it’s own gameplay and editor themes.
- Thrive is now available in the Norwegian, Vietnamese, and Croatian languages.
Looking Ahead
In the near future, we will move on to 0.6.x where much of our work will involve the implementation of the Thriveopedia, upgrades system, unlocking system, combat reworks, and more!
There are of course also some various features that unfortunately did not make it in time for release, such as the day/night cycle that you can look forward to.
And finally, we are hosting a Thrivestream RIGHT NOW so please join us in our developer livestream to celebrate the new release!
Patch notes
- Switched reproduction to be more time based, cells now generate free compounds towards reproduction, and have a maximum use rate for growth compounds
- Added new slime jet organelle
- The player can now move to any patch their species is in or next to such a patch
- Unhandled C# exceptions are now logged in game logs. If you get any of these please send the logs to us.
- Added auto-evo exploring tool which allows running auto-evo and inspecting the results
- Balancing changes
- Auto-evo is now 60% faster by having more data caching
- Replaced the ambiance tracks with completely new ones
- Made some progress on the macroscopic stage prototype
- Fixed auto-evo population number difference between text report and graphs
- Reworked auto-evo predation calculations
- MP text on organelle selection buttons is now replaced by an MP icon
- LAWK is now on by default
- Entity limit is now a weighted so that fewer big cells spawn
- Potentially fixed a bug that allowed things to spawn over the entity limit
- Fixed entity limit constraining compound cloud spawns
- Fixed a major bug in the spawn system which caused a lot of outdated species spawners to exist. This should stop extinct species spawning and the player's old species spawning when moving to multicellular.
- Fixed a save load problem related to engulfing with clearing objects
- Fixed some situations where the dynamic MP calculation ended up at the wrong resulting MP, please let us know if you still see incorrect MP calculations
- Rigidity slider is no longer ever disabled, bugs were fixed related to its MP use
- Updated to Godot 3.5
- Added new multicellular music tracks
- Added one more piece of multicellular concept art
- Patch name overlay is now on top of the movement tutorial
- Added a welcome tutorial for early multicellular
- Added a tutorial about exiting a colony to continue growing in microbe stage
- Implemented radio button functionality for our checkboxes
- Increased species split and migration rate to fill the larger maps faster
- Tweaked procedural patch map connection logic
- Fixed patches with duplicate names in regions
- Fixed tidepool patches being able to directly connect to oceans
- Fixed classic map patch connections not saving correctly
- Added some controller input handling options in preparation for proper controller support
- Planet seed is now shown in the editor
- There's now separate button to hide/show the environment panel
- Fixed auto-evo having a chance to read gameplay adjusted population numbers, which may have caused problems
- Thrive now asks for window close confirmation if there are probably unsaved changes
- Fixed low performance in the report tab coming from our custom rich text labels way too often re-parsing their content
- Report tab now again reacts to selecting a different patch on the patch map tab. Also improved performance when selecting patches.
- New game options now mentions and links to the performance options
- Created a new system to save customized versions of game configuration objects, used for difficulty and auto-evo configuration. These allow old saves (in the future) to benefit from difficulty tweaks we do to the game
- Added a few new cheats
- Added the start of a resource loading manager system that should make the one linux crash we get reports about not happen by making the save screenshot loading happen differently
- Opening the art gallery lag is now reduced by loading images gradually
- The loading screen art now changes every 10 seconds
- Prevented broken translations from crashing the game
- Fixed an internal error with pause locks clearing with an unsuccessful save load
- Tooltips now pick their direction better
- Made a slight tweak to excess save deletion
- Fixed some text in the GUI not reacting to language change
- Fixed patch animations not playing in the patch extinction screen
- Species name entry box now check the length of the input text visually and rejects too long names
- Added GPU, current renderer and used GPU memory display to the options menu
- The game now Waits for the loading screen to fade in before starting save load
- Reduced the processing time used by axis type inputs
- Disposed properties now have their paths logged when saving
- Auto-evo now doesn't start while the stage is still fading out to prevent the game locking up for a while if only one background thread is used and auto-evo was set to not run during gameplay
- Auto-evo run is now canceled if the game is exited to not leave multiple runs in the background if saves are loaded in quick succession
- Tweaked the visibility of compound clouds a bit
- Improved the height of the difficulty setup GUI
- Updated compounds panel toggle button icon
- Mod loader now gives a better error if a mod's .pck file is missing
- Added a debugging tool to write current Godot SceneTree to a file
- Our draggable scroll containers now hide the scroll bars by default
- Fixed loading saves with engulfed objects in certain weird states
- Fixed and improved engulfment related text and values in tooltips
- Fixed warnings regarding GlobalTranslation when loading saves
- Fixed a crash when closing the game with a game pausing popup window open
- Fixed clipping not being enabled for the input configuration menu
- Added a button to open our feature suggestions site
- The exact commit and time Thrive was built is now shown in options
- Exact build info is now shown for DevBuilds in the main menu
- Save counting should no longer break if there are saves with bad numbers in the names
- Graphs now use a cache for their data points to allow their re-use
- Graph tooltips are now destroyed properly
- Converted scripts in our repository from ruby to C#
- Updated our code checking tool version
- Fixed being unable to start the microbe stage scene directly from the Godot editor
- Fixed a few code naming inconsistencies related to dB
- Fixed the code for cell visual hashes using one field twice
- Updated our setup instructions to recommend dotnet 6 SDK
- Small git config change should collapse translation update diffs now by default
- New languages: Norwegian, Vietnamese, Croatian
- Updated translations