Progress Update 1/31/2026
A somewhat quieter week this time, as more technical work is taking place. The game was updated to Godot 4.6, as fortunately this version this did not cause unacceptable problems (4.5.1 was skipped). And perhaps most noticeably, an ancient bug was fixed that caused compound clouds to form ugly straight lines, particularly when pushed by currents. This required fixing some very old and poorly understood code through methods best described as “black magic”.
For the Multicellular Stage…
Read More →Progress Update 1/24/2026
Quite a few changes went into the game this week, as can be seen from the substantial list of patch notes. Some of those are still holdovers from the holiday, but the extra good news is that this list is now finished, which means our lead developer can get started on new Multicellular features from next week.
Besides a variety of fixes (particularly to the Multicellular Stage), a rebalance and expansion to auto-evo was made, the details of which can be found below. This unfortun…
Read More →Progress Update 1/17/2026
Welcome everyone, to an uncommonly varied Progress Update. We've got everything from Multicellular fixes and design discussion to a community art contest and a very exciting video project from our community. So make sure to read to the end!
This week our main programmer has still mainly been catching up on bug reports from over the holidays, and volunteer contributions during that period. That is obviously delaying forward development, but does also mean that some of those things di…
Read More →Progress Update 1/10/2026
Welcome everyone to the first non-holiday Progress Update of the year! Our lead Programmer returned from vacation during the week, which means development will be heating up again. Having said that, a lot of time this week went into catching up on things that happened over the holiday: bug reports, messages, checking and approving volunteer contributions, etc.
Some of those volunteer contributions did make it into the game this week.On the Multicellular front, you can now determine …
Read More →Progress Update 1/03/2026
Welcome everyone to the first Progress Update of 2026! Speaking of which, Thrive is currently still on the Steam winter sale. Our lead programmer has not yet returned from vacation, so just like last week there has not been as much progress.
Volunteers have also been less active on our Github this week. Work is still going on for some of the pull requests mentioned last week. In new material, bigger snowflakes are being added to ice patches. Meanwhile, on the developer f…
Read More →Progress Update 12/27/2025
We hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season! Speaking of which, Thrive is currently still on sale. With our main programmer on vacation, there have been no large programming tasks completed, and no volunteer work has been actually added into the game's code.
However, volunteers have still been working on new changes to be added to the game later on, as can be seen on our Github. This week that included both technical improvements and gameplay changes. On the techni…
Read More →Progress Update 12/20/2025
In case anyone missed it, this week we released Thrive 1.0! The Microbe Stage is now feature complete, and development has shifted to the Multicellular Stage. The release this time happened on Wednesday to catch the start of the (currently ongoing) Steam Winter Sale.
With all the activity around the launch, subsequent progress is modest this week. Several bugs were fixed, in localisation, UI and an issue with mucocysts in the multicellular stage. Our lead programmer will als…
Read More →Devblog #50: Microbe Stage Complete!
Welcome all to this very special devblog celebrating the release of Thrive version 1.0! This release marks the completion of the Microbe Stage, the first stage of the 9 planned. The Microbe stage will continue to be supported with balancing and bug fix updates, and volunteers are welcome to continue to make contributions to it. But our main development efforts will now focus on our second stage, Multicellular.
In the time since version 0.9.0, we've mainly been focused on…
Read More →Progress Update 12/13/2025
Today is our last Progress Update before the release of Thrive 1.0 on the 17th of December, and with it the functional completion of the Microbe Stage.
Of course, there will still be updates on the Microbe Stage, especially when it comes to fixing issues and balancing. But our main development efforts really will be focusing on the Multicellular Stage. A major milestone that I think not everyone believed we would actually reach. But it is here regardless.
Development this week w…
Read More →Progress Update 12/06/2025
The biggest news this week is Thrive version 0.9.2! We're hopeful that this version is a lot more stable on release than 0.9.1 was, but we still did not have a beta period, unlike our typical updates. Please report any issues you find!
First of all, it fixes the remaining know bugs from 0.9.1 that were not fixed in 0.9.1.1. Beyond this we have improvements and additions to auto-evo. The calculations now take cilia, binding agents and signalling agents into account, and some perf…
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