Progress Update 4/18/2026

There's been a few, but significant, changes to the game this week. There's been a balancing round that was mainly aimed at making photosynthesis a bit less easy to use, and making non-engulfing membranes a bit more useful. The amount of glucose per second produced by thylakoids/chloroplasts has been reduced by quite a bit. But to compensate, the osmoregulation cost reductions of most non-engulfing membrane types have been improved, so those are now a better combination with photosynthesis, as the reduced glucose production will bite less. These are fairly large changes, so further tuning is likely.

In other developments, getting hit by toxins while in a colony (including Multicellular Stage species) now spreads the damage across all cells, instead of applying to only the cell hit. This makes it less likely for you to lose cells to a swarm of toxin-using predators attacking one spot. Of course, a large enough threat will still kill you much the same. In another Multicellular Stage change, slime jets now apply their movement effects immediately even when you're not currently moving, instead of building up movement force like spring and suddenly launching you when you do move.

Meanwhile, over on the development forums, there was a bit less activity this week. One ongoing discussion on long-term choices in the game, Juuzo's next speculative evolution video for review, and the Revolutionary Game's Studio's report on activities in 2025.

The work on our background supporting infrastructure is now pretty much finished, so in the coming week, work on Thrive itself will accelerate again. 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:
  • Rebalanced photosynthesis and membrane stats
  • Toxin damage is now distributed among all colony members to make toxins less effective against big multicellular colonies
  • Fixed multicellular slime jets queuing force when not moving and being able to use it all at once
  • Updated Thriveopedia pages to use Godot 4 bullet point lists rather than our previous manual approach that was hacked together
  • Fixed Thriveopedia pages missing h4 level headings and put in the missing content for all pages
  • Fixed tolerance slider padding elements being able to eat mouse events, which made using the sliders sometimes more fiddly than necessary
  • Added more safety code for microbe colony rotation calculation which could in rare cases lead to a game crash before this improvement
  • Fixed physics debug draw to work also on Windows and Mac and with computers that don't have AVX instructions (previously it only worked on Linux). Note that only game debug builds have this feature.
  • Updated YamlDotNet from 16.3.0 to 17.0.1
  • Updated System.IO.Hashing from 10.0.5 to 10.0.6
  • Improved our CI running pipeline
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Nothing substantial.

Gameplay

• Toxin damage is now spread out across cells of a colony or Multicellular Stage organism.

• Balance changes: photosynthesis has been made less powerful, and many membrane types have been granted better osmoregulation cost reduction to make photosynthesis as a strategy more separated from predation. To be more specific:

  • Glucose output for thylakoids has been reduced from 0.03 to 0.02.
  • Glucose output for chloroplasts has been reduced from 0.36 to 0.10
  • Membrane type changes:
    • Health slightly decreased for Normal and Cellulose, slightly increased for chitin, and greatly increased for Silica.
    • Osmoregulation cost lowered for Cellulose, Calcium Carbonate and Silica.
    • Movement speed greatly reduced for Cellulose and Calcium Carbonate, and even more so for Silica.
    • Toxin resistance increased for Chitin and Silica, and reduced for Cellulose and Calcium Carbonate.
    • Physical resistance decreased for calcium carbonate.
  • So compared to the Double membrane, the situation is now:
    • Chitin: Slightly less osmoregulation cost, slightly less mobility, slightly more resistant (but more so against toxins) and defends against engulfment.
    • Cellulose: A lot less osmoregulation cost, a lot less mobility, slightly more resistant against physical damage, but more vulnerable to toxins and defends against engulfment.
    • Silica: Even less osmoregulation cost, the least mobility, the most health and resistance to physical damage.
    • Calcium Carbonate: The least osmoregulation cost, greatly reduced mobility, good increase in health, more so against physical damage, but less against toxin damage.

• Game design discussions:

  • Continued discussion on long term effects of stages.

Sound

• Nothing substantial.

Theory

• Nothing substantial.

Outreach

• The next speculative evolution video, posted for review.

Other

• Revolutionary Games Studio ry - Report Of Activities 2025