Take your species further than ever before with the newly optimized cellular stages that will smoothly take you sailing into our latest advancements in the prototype stages! No longer are the creatures of Thrive strictly confined to the underwater realm, as now they can move onto the frontiers of land, where civilization will soon be born.
Bear in mind of course, that these later stages are raw prototypes and are not indicative of the final rendition.
Our developers have worked hard 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 end of this post for a full list of features and bug fixes.
Prototypes going further than ever before.
We previously developed a bare bones macroscopic prototype, but now we have gone further still with the development of the awakening, societal, and industrial stages.
In the awakening stage, the player has developed a central nervous system, or brain, that allows them to think and ponder. At this point they will be able to begin making tools and structures.
Once a societal center is built, the player will be able to form a proper society, and enter the stage in question! In the society stage, the player will no longer be in firm control of any individual; Instead guiding the civilization as a whole to eventually reach the stars. The player will need to construct buildings and manage their technological progress to develop industrial applications to broaden their influence.
Once rocketry is discovered, the civilization will be in the space era, and begin to reach ever further into the great void beyond. For now though, this will remain unfeasible.
Rich Backgrounds
Booting up Thrive, you’ll be greeted with a fresh coat of paint in the main menu! Backgrounds have been expanded to greet you with a lively depiction of different environments that promise a bright future. What do you envision when you see these environments? Who will come to inhabit them?
Other Notable Changes
- The membrane generation algorithm is now massively faster, and only results in slightly visually different membranes.
- The editor compound balance now shows the situation at ATP equilibrium, instead of assuming all processes always run at maximum speed.
- Compound cloud visuals have been slightly improved with a higher resolution noise layer.
- Microbes now spawn with initial compounds that are proportional to their compound usage rather than fixed values.
- Added HUD messages that notify the player about current events. (Such as when the editor can be entered)
- Added a proper icon for the cilia pull upgrade to replace the placeholder one.
- Added 2 new multicellular prototype organelles; Axon and myofibril, for future use.
You can read the entire list of changes at the end of this post.
Looking Ahead
This update cycle was mostly focused on the further development of our prototype stages. With only the space stage remaining to be prototyped, we are sure to have a complete skeleton for the game soon enough! With the prototypes out of the way, we will be able to recenter our attention to the game proper.
Want to hear more? Come join us in our upcoming developer Thrivestream to ask us whatever you like, and celebrate the new release:
Patch Notes
- New further prototypes: going on land is now implemented, becoming aware and awakened has been added, added basic crafting, inventory and resource gathering, placing buildings and founding a settlement is now possible, accumulating resources and placing buildings is now possible in the society stage, and finally researching a new technology and placing a factory allows moving to the industrial stage. The industrial stage prototype is where the current prototype work ended up at. That stage has just a placeholder graphic for a city.
- Added entirely new 3D scenes to be backgrounds for the main menu, some of these are a bit performance intensive and can be disabled in the options
- The membrane generation algorithm is now massively faster, and only results in slightly visually different membranes
- Tweaked membrane generation to be tighter around organelles to more closely match the physics, and made multihex organelles send all of their positions to the membrane to fix large organelles in certain cases poking outside the membrane
- The editor compound balance now shows the situation at ATP equilibrium, instead of assuming all processes run at maximum speed always
- Compound cloud visuals have been slightly improved with a higher resolution noise layer
- Separation between divided cells and colonies is now much better
- Tweaked the visuals of button focus highlights, along with a few other element types
- Microbes now spawn with initial compounds that are proportional to their compound usage (instead of fixed values)
- Added late multicellular stage underwater panoramic background
- When the player now reproduces the game will try to keep the entity count under control by despawning existing entities if there are too many (player daughter cells are prioritized if they make up a large fraction of the total entity limit)
- Cells in colonies are now counted in entity limit (except the player colony as the player is not part of the entity limit)
- Added HUD messages that show to report various things to the player, for example if the player can't engulf something the reason is now shown with this kind of message
- Colony members that can engulf can now enter engulf mode even if the player cell cannot engulf
- All chemoreceptors in a cell colony now function instead of only the lead cell's chemoreceptors working
- The spawn algorithm for filling the area around the player now only spawns up to 80% of the entity limit to allow the sector spawning logic more chances to work
- There's now a warning icon on the editor finish button if ATP is negative or there's an inprogress action that needs to be finished before exiting the editor
- Chunks and projectiles are now shown in the mouse hover panel (inspector)
- Added music tracks for the existing prototypes and upcoming ones, they can already be listened to in the art gallery
- The day/night cycle light level in the editor now defaults to current value to match the gameplay time of day
- Light levels now smoothly change in the editor when switching the time of day
- Organelle upgrade GUI now shows adjusted MP costs correctly, instead of just always showing the absolute costs
- Added a proper icon for the cilia pull upgrade to replace the placeholder one
- Iron is now shown in the patch compounds graphs
- Added 2 new multicellular prototype organelles: axon and myofibril (for future use)
- Auto-evo prediction being calculated now shows a waiting icon
- Entering the prototypes is now prevented with a controller as the prototypes don't have any focus on controller usability
- Preview cells in the editor now don't create collision shapes which makes game performance better in the editor
- Patch map display now starts off centered on the current patch instead of always panning to it when opening
- Patch map tooltip, for how to move it, now takes a few more seconds to appear in order to be less annoying
- New game setup menu is now more clear what the buttons do (back is no longer visible while in advanced view)
- Improved the process speed indicator icon in the process panel
- Microbe movement tutorial now has extra smoothing in how the movement direction prompts rotate
- Added a new debug panel showing player current coordinates and mouse cursor world position
- More elements in the Thriveopedia now react to language change
- Fixed seafloor patch background image artifact (this had been a problem for years)
- Fixed a visible seam in cell wall textures that was caused by the membrane generation code
- Fixed a bug introduced in previous release where organelle tooltip process numbers did not react to patch change (photosynthetic organelles were the visible place where the issue was visible)
- Fixed new game menu not wrapping text which could cause long translations to push settings sliders offscreen
- Fixed the current resolution display in the options menu not always updating when toggling fullscreen mode
- Fixed popup window close buttons not having a visual style for the focused state, which caused it to appear like no GUI element was focused in a popup when the close button was focused
- Fixed the membrane disappearing for really thin and long cells
- Fixed engulfed tutorial appearing even when the player could not be ingested
- Fixed crashing when changing language after having visited the art gallery screen
- Fixed editor tab buttons being too wide and overlapping the light level bar
- Fixed temperature "compound" being incorrectly shown in the patch compound statistics graph
- Fixed uneven main menu buttons with long translation texts, all buttons now stretch to the same width when one translation doesn't fit
- Switched world settings text to use safe string format to ensure it can't crash the game due to translation mistakes
- Removed classic patch map option as it had bugs specific to it and it was not going to get anyone to maintain that code to be compatible with new features
- Reworked our custom popup window handling, organelle popup menu now has animations for opening and closing
- Microbe digestion code now only runs 30 times per second to use a bit less performance
- Removed saving of usefulCompounds in a compound bag as that data can be regenerated very easily and it increased save sizes unnecessarily
- Our input system now throws an exception when registering a duplicate listener object, this will help in developing the game by catching that mistake much sooner
- Improved the features of our GUI focus grab system
- Improved the usage and internal features of our custom tooltip system
- Refactored the species details panel and fossilization dialog internally to be more reusable
- Simplified our game entering code to call the same function from more places
- Improved our code settings class to prevent some potential mistakes
- Added a safety check against an unimplemented feature in our save data loader
- Wrote a document describing our saving system
- Removed some old files and fixed a broken link in the repo docs
- Updated our used compression library SharpZipLib to 1.4.2, this required switching our GZip handling to use the C# standard version to avoid a bug that broke saves with the new library version. Warning: there's still an intermittent save loading and creation bug (see: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues/4156)
- Updated Netanalyzers library version to 7.0.1
- Updated our used JSON library to version 13.0.3
- Updated YamlDotNet to 13.1.0
- Updated some check tool package dependencies
- Updated our code checking tools version
- Updated translations