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 …

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-…

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…

Devblog #51: Onward to Multicellular

It's finally time for the first major update of the Multicellular Stage development process! We have a new cell specialisation feature allowing you to really take advantage of the multiple cell types you can make for your Multicellular species. Additionally, you can now control the growth order of cells, giving you far greater control over the course of life as a Multicellular organism. There are also several smaller additions and improvements to the stage, making it overall mor…

Progress Update 2/28/2026

As said last week, we delayed 1.0.1 to try to fit in a few more things, in which we succeeded. So today we are in feature freeze, and we have a release candidate build for all those interested to test before the full release next week. Of course, we want that release to be as bug-free as possible, so we appreciate any and all help!

Those particular features 1.0.1 was delayed for are environmental tolerances for Multicellular species and an entirely new UI for environmental toler…

Progress Update 2/21/2026

Originally, at this time we were supposed to be in feature freeze right now, preparing for the release of version 1.0.1. However, we decided to delay that by a week so that we will be able to squeeze in just a few more features that are very close to finished. What we have for you this week is already pretty exciting though!

First, we have what I would consider a major Multicellular Stage feature: Cell specialisation. At its basis it's pretty simple. The more of a cell that is jus…

Progress Update 2/14/2026

This week, the game code caught up to the Multicellular Stage officially not being a prototype anymore. Trying to enter it no longer warns you about it being a prototype, and instead you get that warning when trying to advance to Macroscopic. Similarly, our provisional “you won the game” message now appears when you reach 10 cells in Multicellular. There's also a more direct gameplay change: When first entering the Multicellular Stage, you now start with an actual multicellular organism…

Progress Update 2/07/2026

This was a busy week behind the scenes, but once again not as many patch notes on the list. A lot of work went into performance improvements for the compound cloud system, which had become slower after last week's fix to the “harsh lines” problem. But the result is that it now actually runs slightly faster than before that fix. There was also a significant delay due to technical difficulties with our lead programmer's computer.

There were still some notable fixes, for example a very…

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…

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…