Home FAQ Get Involved News Download

Progress Update 10/04/2025

Posted on October 04, 2025

Progress Update Banner 2025-10-04

We have a quite a few more tangible improvements for you this week! With some of the major overhauls out of the way last week, there was more time for the fun stuff. Of course, by tangible I mean Thrive's terrain system. Some of the new terrain chunks you've seen over the past few weeks are now spawning in patches, and in the future be set to spawn in different amount and with different types, depending on the biome. We hope this will make navigating the microbial world significantly more interesting.

A major rebalancing effort was also integrated into the game this week. Most noticeably, oxygen builds up a lot slower, meaning the world be in a low oxygen state for much longer. This, in combination with an overall reduction in ATP production, means energy production will be a bit more engaging, and changing over time. But the other metabolisms have been adjusted as well, tuning the strongest ones and tuning up the ones that were more difficult to use. Full details below!

As for the technical issues mentioned last week: The Mac build crashing has been fixed. Work on the new saving system was mostly delayed because of required computer maintenance. Development here will hopefully pick up again next week.

So we hope you enjoyed this progress update, and we'll see you next week!

Programming

New Devbuild for our Patreon Supporters
- Added microbe terrain. This is an initial implementation where not all patches with planned terrain are configured properly, and many patch-specific terrain types are still missing.
- Made balance changes to oxygen and co2 generation
- Debuffed iron and oxygen metabolism
- Fixed auto-evo not using actual available enzymes in digestibility calculations and instead accidentally assuming lysosomes provided all possible enzymes
- Fixed GDExtension build flags and fixed Mac crashing
- Updated our import files for Godot 4.5 with automatically added properties
- Updated xUnit library
- Updated translations

Graphics

Another new terrain chunk: a particularly shiny piece of pyrite.

Gameplay

Some more discussion on poisonous cells.
Continuing comments on the macroscopic editor concept.
Major rebalance:
- Slowed down the speed at which oxygen accumulates, and lowered how much oxygen is build up on average, while pacing carbon dioxide build up as well. This means non-oxygen based metabolism will be dominant for longer.
- Once there is oxygen, metabolosomes and mitochondria will still be a bit less productive, making you think about your energy production more.
- Cytoplasm, hydrogenase and hydrogenosomes also all produce less ATP, so producing a lot of excess energy will be difficult until you can and do transition to oxygen.
- The nucleus now slows you down less, so travelling and hunting should be a bit easier than before after you add one.
- Thylakoids and chloroplasts now slow you down more, making being a photosynthesising predator a bit harder.
- Iron respiration uses up iron faster, so you will want to stick around iron chunks, or add enough storage to bring it with you.
- Melanosomes will be producing ATP for a bit longer after you've left a radioactive chunk behind.
A start to the terrain system. Different patches in Thrive will spawn different terrain chunks in different amounts and shapes. Very early example below.