Devblog #49: Microbe Terrain
Welcome all to Thrive 0.9.0! Characterized by improvements to visuals, the environment, and gameplay polish, Thrive has begun its rapid race towards the completion of the Microbe Stage with some significant headway. Read more about these changes in the text below, including details about terrain, current visual overhauls, metabolism changes, save-system polishing, and more!
As always the update is available for free with our launcher, or you can support development by purchasing on Steam or Itch.io. If you already own a copy of Thrive, you can also get the soundtrack. We really need your support in order to continue development at the current pace after the microbe stage is complete. We are just a few small releases away from completing our microbe stage plans by the end of the year.
Read on for more details, or visit the download page linked below to get the new version.
Thrive 0.9.0
See our patch notes for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
Shiny Rocks - Microbial Terrain
A long-awaited feature, procedural terrain is now present in Thrive! With in-game material now expanded beyond compound-emitting chunks, players will now be present with more dynamic and filled environments.
Terrain serves as a way to increase the visual richness of Thrive, as well as a way to break up the monotony of vast microscopic spaces. Players will now have to navigate through immense, unmovable minerals. A variety of minerals and terrain is present dependent on the patch you inhabit; terrain characteristics also vary between patches, with certain patches being more expansive, and other patches being more cagey.
A greater variety of minerals will be included in future updates, as well as greater diversity in the shape of procedural terrain. Terrain will be tweaked to be more clustered instead of isolated. Even now however, we hope that the playerbase will enjoy the much needed diversity in their environments and movement.
Graphics Improvements
Long-time fans might know that graphics programming is a frequent bottleneck for the development team. Long-time fans might also be very happy to know that some rather significant graphical improvements to the Microbe Stage are heading their way!
To start: currents. Currents have received some significant love this update: particle effects associated with currents vary in depth, and a new stream visual has been implemented, creating a much more solid visual effect. Current paths are also now much less jagged and more natural, creating more meandering and smoothed trails instead of the occasionally erratic currents from the prior release cycle. Some smaller tweaks have also been implemented.
Ambient reflection has been strengthened and is dynamic to each patch, creating a subtle color effect on all items within a patch. Chunks, cells, and terrain all look to be within the same environment, as opposed to having a color effect which might not gel well with the patch you inhabit.
It can be difficult to explain the effects of graphics tweaks, but we hope that fans will enjoy the improved visual presentation in 0.9. Overall, Thrive’s environment feels much more like a drop of water in a ginormous ocean as opposed to just being an extremely flat environment.
Even if the more subtle effects might be missed by some, we hope you don’t miss the gigantic rocks!
Metabolism, Balancing, and Gameplay Polish Tweaks
Major overhauls to various metabolisms are included in this update in an effort to better differentiate strategy and playstyles for different parts. The most significant and immediately noticeable change revolves around hydrogen sulfide, which will now damage a cell without a chemosynthesizing part.
Other tweaks also have significant effects. Iron remains a powerful source of ATP, but is burned much more quickly, encouraging proximity to iron chunks and careful planning of trips between stones. Photosynthesizing parts are now denser and slow players down more, reducing the effectiveness of predator-plant builds. Oxygen now builds up more slowly, and aerobic respiration is slightly less powerful, making the transition towards metabolosomes and mitochondria require more planning. And radiotrophy is now much more efficient, allowing it to be a more rewarding metabolic strategy.
Auto-Evo also got some much needed love this update. Notable changes include some special handling of endosymbiont species to ensure they don’t go extinct in the middle of a conversion, and the proper implementation of both chemoreceptors and enzymes into Auto-Evo. As with other parts of the simulation, Auto-Evo will continue to be refined and expanded upon in future updates.
More tweaks have also been made this release cycle. Balancing is a continuous process, so more changes will likely be coming soon. In the meantime however, we would really appreciate feedback on current changes. Players might experience a more difficult Thrive, but hopefully, a more replayable and in-depth experience.
New Saving System
Over the past month, a large amount of manpower went into a saving overhaul. Saving needed to be built up from scratch again this release cycle, which caused our two-week delay and drew some attention away from more visually-distinct features. Thankfully, progress here went well, and our system is in a much more cohesive and polished state.
Saving might not be the most exciting topic, but work here still significantly strengthens the base of Thrive for future releases. Expect an overall better system, at least once we work out the initial bugs, which there might be some left. Besides the saving being much faster, there isn't much visible change, but rest assured that the new system was primarily aimed at making future Thrive development easier. The old saving system was an extremely complex beast due to the way we had to extend the JSON system with customizations and weird overrides everywhere that were extremely hard to tweak if something went wrong. With this new system our programmers should have a much easier time to maintain save compatibility and adding new features that require saving.
As an added bonus: saving now also works in the Multicellular Editor! And autosaving has been enabled for the prototypes that support saving. We hope this makes up for the fact that prior saves won’t work.
Also as part of this change the fossil format was updated to use the new data format.
Additional Features
- Planet Statistics Panel has now been implemented during planet customization, as well as greater customization options related to compounds.
- Switched to Arch ECS library, which did not improve maximum game performance like hoped, but did improve the game simulation efficiency.
- Switched the species fossilisation system over to the new binary save format. This also means that old fossil files are no longer loadable.
- Updated to Godot 4.5
- Updated the Jolt Physics engine
- Made hydrogen sulfide decay speed up with the presence of oxygen
- Added a popup asking the player if they want to load a previous auto save if they die too many times in a row
- Changed the whole underlying remaining MP calculations system to make sure tolerance sliders no longer get stuck when at 0 MP
- Switched the game to default to only showing new tutorials rather than all. The option to replay all tutorials still exists but must be selected now when starting a new game.
A full list of changes is available in our release notes on GitHub.
What’s Next
As hard as it is to wrap our heads around, the Microbe Stage is nearing feature completion. Though future updates may - and likely, will - include tweaks to the Microbe Stage. Reaching the big version 1.0 means that from that point onwards, the main focus of the team (and our full-time programmer) will be on the Multicellular Stage. It is hard to overstate how monumental reaching this milestone is for Thrive.
Earlier this year, we said that we anticipate 1.0 by the end of this year. Currently, we still feel pretty confident in this goal, and are actively targeting the completion of the Microbe Stage in the last few weeks of 2025. There are still a decent number of items on the roadmap remaining which represent big step ups in different facets of Thrive; however, the majority of work for the rest of Microbe Stage development will be focused on polishing items, as well as tweaks to ensure that our first stage is a really solid base to build the rest of our game on.
The development team has some ideas about potential outreach and community engagement opportunities in the next two months as we approach 1.0 (though manpower is limited, so we won’t promise anything now). Although we have our own efforts, we would still really appreciate it if community members had any suggestions on potential activities. We would also really appreciate any sort of promotion as we finish the Microbe Stage - tell your friends about Thrive, as well as anyone else who might be interested!
Until then: 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 to give your thoughts on this update.
Watch the stream:
