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 did make it into the game. Some of the ice chunks made a while a big were finally added to spawn in the ice shelf. Some different handling of collision models had to be introduced to handle their more awkward shapes. The mouse-over details panel now shows the health of cells. A frequent source of errors from turning cells in the Multicellular Editor was also fixed.
Meanwhile, over on the developer forums, we had an extensive discussion on Multicellular stage design, and in particular which features to tackle first. Currently it's looking like the first focus will be tuning movement and growth speed to make the Stage flow a bit better. This will most likely be followed first by a system to encourage you to specialise cells, followed by a system to provide adjacency bonuses for placing the same type of cells next to each other (making tissues).
This week we launched our Thrive community art contest. The best will be selected for use as loading screens in Thrive itself, but our developer Juuzo Lenz will also use every piece of art he can for his ongoing speculative evolution Youtube series of a Thrive-like world called Pangonia. So even if you are less confident in your artistic skills, we would still love to see what you can do. And we already have our first contribution from community member Trappist-1e.
Finally, we have something very exciting to share: our wonderful community member Punctdan played through every single available release from 0.01 to now, and compiled them all into a set of videos. Part 1 is released today and the second will be released next week. This is an idea that has been around for a very long time, and some others have even attempted to accomplish it in the past. But those efforts always fizzled out at some point. Besides difficulties with getting older version working, there was also the sheer amount of time required to play and record a lot of footage. And that is not even mentioning the editing! Suffice to say, we greatly appreciate the effort Punctdan put into this, so please do give it a watch, and share it with anyone you know!
Did you watch it? If so, take a look below for the full progress list, and we'll see you again next week!
Programming
- New Devbuild for our Patreon Supporters:
- Added big ice snowflakes to the ice shelf
- Fixed incorrect organelle position calculations for rotated multicellular cells which was able to cause various different errors in the editor.
- The hover panel now displays other cell's health
- Added a debug console to the game (default hotkey is F10)
- Added a console command to directly load any scene or stage
- Made balance changes to various patch events
- Fixed the save list items continuing to load in the background even after closing the menu. Now they cancel the load once that menu is closed. This should fix a problem where loading a stage waited for a long time before starting due to the load queue being full.
- Updated translations failed check to no longer mention Babel, which was a tool we last used multiple years ago
- Improved efficiency of our input manager registration
- Fixed more code warnings caused by the .NET 10 update
- Fixed our SimpleBarrier implementation
- Changed our thread short wait for ARM to use a C# command to request that the current thread doesn't eat as much CPU time, though this operation may not be implemented for all CPUs so we likely need to do further changes related to this.
- Updated System.IO.Hashing from 10.0.1 to 10.0.2
- Updated translations
Graphics
- Nothing substantial.
Gameplay
Discussion on Multicellular Stage design and the order to start implementing features in.
The ice shelf now contains bigger ice flakes.
The mouse-over hover panel (top right corner of the screen) now displays the health level of targeted cells.
Sound
- Nothing substantial.
Theory
- Nothing substantial.
Outreach
- Punctdan's video of every Thrive version from 0.01 to 0.5.10. Have you watched it yet?
- The loading screen community artwork contest is live!
- More discussion on more exclusive benefits for donators.
Other
- Please welcome our new programmer, Fractalino!
