Thrive is an open source evolution sim built with Godot Engine, it’s getting more impressive with every new release and there’s another update out now for you to try out.
Version 0.8.0 brings with it some more graphics improvements to make all the little organisms look more impressive with new textures, new 3D models plus new and improved icons.
There’s a lot more to this release like the introduction of a Organelle Suggestion System that suggests what organelles to add to your organism in order to guide you towards optimizing its evolution. You can ignore it if you wish, but sounds like a useful feature for you to keep jumping to the top of the food chain. The devs also added in sulfur chunks, an underwater vent eruption event that creates extra hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide in the patch, nitrogen is now dynamic and there’s two new multicellular loading screen artworks.
Check out their release highlights trailer:
Thrive has Native Linux support and is rated Steam Deck Playable. See more about the update in the blog post. It’s free from their launcher or you can buy it from stores to support development.
Added an organelle suggestion that is shown in the editor which gives info on what auto-evo would like the player to add
Added a new tab in the editor to control organelle split order for more fine tuned control over ATP during reproduction
Reintroduced Mac builds of Thrive. Thrive is again playable on macOS but this is not official full support yet.
Balancing changes to microbe storage: most organelles now give much less storage to make storage an actual gameplay mechanic that needs planning
Created new membrane textures that help make the 3D membranes of different types more easily distinguishable (as the change to 3D membranes made all the membranes look very similar)
Reworked all organelle 3D models
Added sulfur chunks
Added a bloom strength slider and enabled it by default
Added an underwater vent eruption event that creates extra hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide in the patch
Added a miche viewer to the patch map tab
Improved gas update logic to make sure gases don’t add up to over 100%
Made compounds move much more freely between patches
Made nitrogen dynamic
Added hydrogen sulfide compound consumption by species
Added iron chunks being oxidised by oxygen making them less common once oxygen starts spreading through the world
Removed experimental compound production mode as it was too unbalanced and didn’t get any work done on it since the last release
Improved the microbe AI in terms of when it uses sprinting
Mucocyst can now be used by the AI to defend itself
Added difficulty options for what to do with stored compounds after reproducing
Added disk caching for generated species images. This makes displaying species images a lot faster after restarting the game and loading a save. By default the cache aims to use at most 1 GB of disk space.
Reduced unlock requirements of gas-dependent organelles
Reduced base endosymbiosis time costs by one
Lowered hydrogenase ATP output by 10%
Made slight balancing tweaks to photosynthesis glucose production and glucose use of a few ATP-generating organelles
Renamed Nitrogen-Fixing Plastid to Nitroplast
Made glucose reduction text only apply to discovered patches to make the percentages higher to make it look like a more important message
Added a warning tooltip for the speed stat in the editor about how it is not fully accurate
Added an icon for the mucocyst upgrade
Reworked the experimental siderophore feature action icon
Made engulfing info be last in the membrane tooltips like it was previously (before tooltip refactoring broke it)
Added a new and more visible cell membrane animation
Increased visibility of engulf wave effect slightly
Added bigger warning when enabling experimental features mode
Added tooltips for chemoreceptor upgrade GUI amount and distance sliders
Updated nitrogen icon to not have glow anymore to be more consistent with other compound icons
Tweaked some GUI element alignments to be more similar to what they were before we upgraded to Godot 4
Added a tip in the unlock tooltip that endosymbiosis is an alternative unlock method
Fixed process toggle buttons not always matching the underlying process states and fixed processes re-enabling by themselves when organelles reproduced
Fixed hex popup menu being able to operate on deleted hexes which could be exploited for infinite MP. Also fix a related bug in the prototype editors.
Fixed not all patches showing up in the editor report patch selector dropdown
Fixed a bug in the volcanism effect that caused it to add way more CO2 than originally intended
Fixed non-LAWK unlocks showing after loading a save
Fixed aspect ratio of sunlight icon in daytime selection bar
Fixed chemical equation arrow to be vertically centered
Fixed a bug where compound diffusion between patches could move too much compound
Fixed auto-evo migration usefulness calculations using the wrong miche tree
Fixed organelle scale-affecting upgrades not applying while moving that organelle to a new location
Fixed bug with osmoregulation cost being shown on upgrade tooltips
Fixed osmoregulation showing in rigidity slider tooltip
Fixed lag when zooming out a draggable container while it is still displaying its initial animation
Fixed the timeline incorrectly claiming some species to be extinct
Fixed moved cell in body plan editor being invisible if no cell type to place was selected
Fixed a missing wordwrap on a label in the mod manager
Fixed multiple bugs in our species visual hashing algorithm that made memory caching also less efficient
Fixed extinct species not having previews in auto-evo exploring tool
Made auto-evo exploring tool show patch events, note that historical view for events doesn’t work yet
Disabled temperature miche being generated when in LAWK mode (no species could occupy it but for clarity it is entirely disabled now)
Added two new multicellular loading screen artworks
Tweaked PhotoStudio image capture distance math
Made organelle tooltips not constantly try to refresh their displayed chemical equations
Added an energy icon for the later stage prototypes
Linked late multicellular prototype jump force to mass to make jumping speed more consistent
Added proper content for the Thriveopedia page of ferroplast
Added code for UV unwrapping of macroscopic creatures, but there’s no textures yet so the code isn’t enabled
Native lib install tool now prints full paths to try to reduce potential confusion
Started backend work on allowing more kinds of unit tests for Thrive using gdUnit4
Added workaround in the C# interop code to work with newer native library compiles
Added a few explicit garbage collector calls when the game is loading to hopefully reduce chance that it runs during gameplay
Updated to .NET 9
Updated YamlDotNet from 16.1.3 to 16.2.1
Updated System.Numerics.Vectors from 4.5.0 to 4.6.0
Updated automatic code checking tools
Improved a few aspects of our CMake files
Steam: Fixed workshop upload dialog not showing all error conditions
Updated translations
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
