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…
Read More →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 …
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →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…
Read More →Progress Update 3/28/2026
This week's update looks a lot more quiet, as much of the work has gone into our back-end systems that allow us to continue developing Thrive. Another factor is that while several volunteer contributions are in progress, there are less that were actually finished this week. There were still a few smaller bugfixes tweaks however. For example, the editor no longer warns about you not filling your storage before nightfall if that process does not actually rely on the sun, and the cell …
Read More →Progress Update 3/21/2026
It's been another busy week in Thrive development. Release 1.0.1.1 went out on Monday as a (mostly) bugfix update. Included in that was a fix for Multicellular design conversion sometimes failing (leaving you stuck at a black screen). But there were also other recent improvements included, like a reduction in auto-evo memory usage, and a new cell growth animation for Multicellular species.
In this week's improvements, we finally had the inclusion of a significant change to auto-…
Read More →Progress Update 3/14/2026
The theme of this week is “fixes and auto-evo”. Last week was the release of 1.0.1, and as always that produced some issues that had to be fixed. In particular, some people were experiencing an issue where the screen was stuck on black when trying to exit the Multicellular editor. This turned out to be a problem with some specific layouts not being able to find a good solution. So some extra safeguards were introduced to fix this. In other Multicellular news, we now have an animation fo…
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