Progress Update 6/06/2026

Hello everyone, and welcome to another weekly Thrive update! With our lead programmer going taking a well deserved vacation for about 5 weeks, this will be the last one for a while with significant changes actually being added into the game. We are however, still planning to provide you with reports on in-progress volunteer contributions during the break. And while the main objective this week was to get the game into a stable state without things left hanging, there are still some …

Progress Update 5/30/2026

Last week we released Thrive 1.1.0 in an apparently fairly stable state, as the number of bug reports was relatively low. We are still very interested in hearing all of your feedback!

Besides a few bug fixes and code-cleanups, the theme of this week appears to be UI and visual updates. First of all, the cell membrane graphics have received a significant visual upgrade. In particular, they should look much more distinct from each other. Secondly, the cell part tooltips in…

Devblog #52: More Specialized

It's already time for the second major update of the Multicellular Stage! In the last update, we first introduced the Cell Specialization system. This has now been greatly improved upon by refinement of its calculation, expansion of its effects, and the addition of an adjacency bonus for cells of the same type. We also have an entirely new feature exclusive to the Multicellular Stage in Sporulation, our first new reproduction mode. The Multicellular Stage has also benefited from smaller…

Progress Update 5/16/2026

As announced last week, we are now in feature freeze for the release of 1.1.0 next week! Which means there is also a release candidate build available right now for testing. If you're interested, please help us discover any bugs or other issues to be ironed out before the official release.

As also hinted at last time, we still have two rather significant new features added to the game this week. First, we have our first new Multicellular reproduction mode: Spore. This lets you s…

Progress Update 5/09/2026

Last week we told you that this week would be the last one to add new features before the next release. However, due to a scheduling conflict with when we would then have our release stream (can you guess what the conflict was with?), we decided to delay it by one week. Which happened to be quite convenient since two large features being worked on were not quite ready yet this week.

Of course, other things were ready this week. First, we added a “very easy” difficulty mode that …

Progress Update 5/02/2026

Despite this work week once again only having 4 days, there is still a significant number of patch notes. In new mechanics, we have the visualization side of the cell adjacency system (the back-end was already included last week). Whenever you have a cell type selected to place somewhere, or are hovering over a cell with the cursor, any adjacency effects are displayed with green arrows, and numbers that show the strength of the bonus.

Another new mechanic is that we now have the abi…

Progress Update 4/25/2026

This week was a lot more busy with things changing in the game itself compared to last week. These changes include some very old issues in the game that were finally fixed. Additional changes include the ability to set more fine-grained compound cloud behaviour (at the cost of performance, or alternatively reducing quality to increase performance) and using a controller to turn cells/colonies. On the visual side, there's been an overhaul separating the process panel into “blocks” for ea…

Progress Update 4/18/2026

There's been a few, but significant, changes to the game this week. There's been a balancing round that was mainly aimed at making photosynthesis a bit less easy to use, and making non-engulfing membranes a bit more useful. The amount of glucose per second produced by thylakoids/chloroplasts has been reduced by quite a bit. But to compensate, the osmoregulation cost reductions of most non-engulfing membrane types have been improved, so those are now a better combination with photosynthe…

Progress Update 4/11/2026

With Easter still eating into the workdays, and about half the work time still going into our development infrastructure in the background, progress is once again limited on the visible side this week. Several volunteer contributions are also close to completion, but not yet merged this week. However, we do have a significant amount of development discussion.

One relatively significant change that did make it in is that the difficulty setting “osmoregulation cost” (which is for exam…

Progress Update 4/04/2026

We have exciting news this week as we have finally assembled our Multicellular Stage Release Roadmap! As we are still hoping to finish the stage this year, this is the list of things we are planning to implement by 2027. You may note that this looks like a lot of releases in one year, and a limited number of features in each release. It is quite likely that some of these will be merged into fewer, larger updates.

It's been another slow week in new feature terms, as work on our d…