Progress Update 4/11/2026

With Easter still eating into the workdays, and about half the work time still going into our development infrastructure in the background, progress is once again limited on the visible side this week. Several volunteer contributions are also close to completion, but not yet merged this week. However, we do have a significant amount of development discussion.

One relatively significant change that did make it in is that the difficulty setting “osmoregulation cost” (which is for example reduced on “easy” difficulty) was reworked to also affect other energy costs such as base movement and flagella. This will make it easier to significantly lower the difficulty in a visible way, since the average new player isn't exactly sitting still to conserve resources. We're looking into using this to make a “very easy” difficulty preset to help people struggling with not starving to death in the game.

Another visible change is that there is now a visualisation in the Macroscopic Editor prototype to show which metaballs connect to each other. This will make it much easier to move them around without triggering unexpected changes or being blocked. The process panel for colonies and Multicellular organisms was updated to improve performance, which coincidentally fixed a bug that was reported after that change was made!

Meanwhile, over on the development forums, there was a bit more activity this week. Firstly, there is an ongoing development team vote for which artwork will win the community art contest and be added into the game as a loading screen. There were also posts and discussions on size-costs in the Multicellular Stage, long-term effects of Stages, toxin resistance and starting implementation of Multicellular auto-evo.

Look below for the full progress list, and we will see you next week with more progress on the roadmap!

Programming

• New Devbuild available to our Patreon Supporters:
  • Changed the osmoregulation difficulty slider to a general energy slider which now affects almost everything handling ATP
  • Tab change button prompts are now less visible when at that end of the tab bar
  • Added display of metaball hierarchy as lines to the macroscopic editor
  • Fixed our automatic checks trying to rebuild on Windows for InspectCode which did not work due to file locking
  • Fixed process panel summing environmental compounds from multiple cells in a colony
  • Optimized the updating code for the process panel
  • Updated code checking tools
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Graphical visualisation of metaball connections in the Macroscopic Editor.

Gameplay

• Changed the osmoregulation difficulty slider to a general “energy cost” slider which now affects most things consuming ATP, like movement costs. However, compound conversion processes that consume ATP were not included due to technical reason. This should make it much easier to adjust the difficulty in avoiding starvation.
• Game design discussions:
  • Discussion on Multicellular Stage size cost.
  • Continued discussion on toxin immunity.
  • Observations on what are the current and planned long-term effects from Stages
  • A couple of questions on Multicellular auto-evo implementation.

Sound

• Nothing substantial.

Theory

• Nothing substantial.

Outreach

• Voting on the loading screen community art contest.

Other

• Nothing substantial.