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 the order your cells grow in. Also, multicellular organisms and colonies now turn less slowly. To make testing these and future multicellular features easier, the multicellular freebuild tool now starts you off in a world that already has oxygen.

Meanwhile, over on the developer forums, we had continued discussions on funding and outreach, multicellular stage design, the Thrive Launcher UI and the upcoming community contest for loading screen art. Look forward to seeing the latter announced quite soon.

Take a look below for the full list, and we'll see you next week!

Programming

• New Devbuild for our Patreon Supporters:
  • Implemented selecting growth order and the bud cell in the multicellular editor
  • Multicellular freebuild now starts with the world oxygenated and the starting patch is on the surface
  • Buffed multicellular and colony rotation speeds
  • Forced any species splitting from the player to pick a new colour before it was only likely to happen or the new colour may have been quite similar
  • Microbe initial compounds now take specific storage capacities into account
  • Fixed a desync between water current visuals and simulation
  • Updated to .NET 10
  • Fixed some new code warnings caused by the C# update
  • Updated copyright year to 2026 in the code
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Discussion on the design of the launcher.

Gameplay

• A comment on Multicellular Stage design
• The rotation speed of multicellular organisms and colonies was significantly increased.
• The Multicellular freebuild tool now sets the world to already contain oxygen, making it easier to test multicellular builds in more realistic situations.
• The starting compounds you get on some difficulty settings now take into account your storage capacity for specific individual compounds.
• You can now determine the cell growth order of Multicellular organisms. That includes selecting which cell to start with.

Sound

• Nothing substantial.

Theory

• Nothing substantial.

Outreach

• Discussing reaching out to content creators on Youtube.
• Preparations for the loading screen art contest.
• Discussion on more exclusive benefits for donators.

Other

• Please welcome our new programmer, Proudnhello!