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Progress Update 10/03/2026

Posted on October 03, 2026

Progress Update Banner 2026-10-03

Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! This week's patch notes look perhaps a bit more quiet than expected, as several bigger features were being worked on but not finished yet. But we do still have one significant new feature, a UI update and some smaller fixes.

The one big new gameplay feature is a new “always reset the environment” toggle that, when turned on, always gives you a fresh start whenever you exit the editor (like what happens when you move to a new patch). Whether keeping the same situation from before the editor after the editor is a good idea has been a hotly debated topic within the dev team for years. But now as the player you have the ability to choose for yourself!

The storage and ATP production tooltips in the editors have been updated to show how much of the number is coming from cell specialisation and adjacency bonuses, hopefully making its value more clear to players. The camera view when gametes fuse was improved, and there were also some fixes to last week's new manual layout feature. Meanwhile, over on the Development Forums, there were a number of discussions on hydrogen sulfide resistance, implementing some more Multicellular Stage cell parts, and Macroscopic Stage design.

We also would like to take this opportunity to apologise to our volunteer translators for the inconvenience of the Weblate translations dictionary getting wrecked. There were issues after a recent update throwing up various errors, and this happened by accident while trying to get those cleaned up. We are looking to move away from Weblate in the near future to a tool that better works for us instead of causing these kinds of problems regularly.

Look below for additional details and screenshots if you're interested, and we'll see you next week for more updates!

Programming

New Devbuild available to our Patreon Supporters:
- Added an option to reset the world state each time upon exiting the editor
- Added the specialization bonus to storage and ATP tooltips
- Improved full cell layout restoring from saves
- Improved the camera animation upon gametes merging
- Disabled layout shifting in full layout preview as there it causes some issues
- Fixed manual layout movement being able to try to use too many hover hexes
- Updated code checking tools
- Updated AngleSharp from 1.8.2 to 1.8.3
- Updated translations

Graphics

The camera movement focusing on gametes fusing for sexual reproduction is now smoother and more consistently on-target.

Gameplay

Added a new “New Game” setting in the “Misc” tab (currently always defaults to “off”) to always place you in a new environment when you exit the editor, instead of only doing so when you move to a different patch. Enabling this does also mean that you don't get to keep any amount of the resources that you had before you entered the editor, instead you receive the default amount you also get when you re-spawn after death. The intentions here are:
- To give you a “fresh start” each generation to really test your current design in, instead of letting you coat for multiple generations on an evironment-rich spot you found.
- To ensure that compounds and other elements removed from the patch between generations (like by patch events) don't stick around in your environment. So, this makes the environment you see match better with what the patch map and auto-evo see.
- Avoid the loss in verisimilitude purely from having the immediate environment stay exactly the same for millions of years.
Game design discussions:
- A condensed version of the Macroscopic Editor design.
- Return of discussion on more gradual hydrogen sulphide resistance
- A design for translating Multicellular species to Macroscopic species at the Stage transition.
- Some questions about what the final design for some Multicellular parts is.

UI

Added the effective improvement provided by cell specialization and adjacency bonuses to the storage and ATP balance tooltips. There are plans to do this for other displays as well.