Progress Update 6/06/2026

Hello everyone, and welcome to another weekly Thrive update! With our lead programmer going taking a well deserved vacation for about 5 weeks, this will be the last one for a while with significant changes actually being added into the game. We are however, still planning to provide you with reports on in-progress volunteer contributions during the break. And while the main objective this week was to get the game into a stable state without things left hanging, there are still some significant additions.

We added another new reproduction mode named “mass budding” which lets you spawn in as a multicellular bud, instead of just starting as one cell. This should help a lot when you create more specialised cell types that need each other to function well. There's also been another round of improvements to auto-evo, with it now scoring and altering all behaviour settings. In particular, non-predators tend to be less aggressive. There's also been some additions to our secret easter egg biome, adding more chunks and terrain of a suitable shape.

There were also some more technical changes, with the old unused “protoplasm” finally being removed and an occasional bug in auto-evo being patched. Meanwhile, over on the development forums there was discussion on pre-set interstellar civilisations to also be used for loading screen images.

Look below for the full progress list, and we'll see you next week for the first vacation Progress Update!

Programming

• New Devbuild available to our Patreon Supporters:
  • Added mass budding reproduction mode
  • Added an option to change the alternative speed mode in the game to go up to 5x speed if the CPU is fast enough
  • Tweaked predator and behaviour handling in auto-evo
  • Added more random rotation to terrain chunks and tweaked their spawning
  • Added a new chunk model to the banana biome and a new terrain shape
  • Updated to Godot 4.6.3
  • Fixed major problem with migrations using the same miche tree as mutation generation concurrently which likely was able to cause random errors and slight weirdness in auto-evo
  • Added pagination to patch notes views
  • Added actual used renderer detection and showing new possible values
  • Removed protoplasm definition and Thriveopedia page
  • Added caching for simple collision shapes
  • Added a hotkey for fast-forwarding the credits
  • Fixed a few minor missing code changes from before
  • Improved generation of the license text and unified between the game and our helper scripts
  • Steam: added a top level license file on export
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Nothing substantial.

Gameplay

• New Reproduction Mode: Mass Budding. This allows you to spawn with more than one cell, with the exact number being set with a slider. Right now the slider is unlimited, but we'll probably put a lower cap on it later on.
• The “Speed up” button can now have the exact speed-up amount set in the game settings.
• Auto-evo has been updated, mainly around Behaviour settings. Mutations were added for Responsive/Focused and Cautious/Opportunistic. Aggression and Fear now are considered negatives both on energy consumption and collection of compound clouds/chunks, as they interrupt said activity. The main results are that the species with large populations due to non-predator food sources will tend to be less aggressive, and that non-predators will only be as fearful as they need to be. These additions did cause some slow-down in auto-evo of course, but hopefully not too much due to previous optimisations.
• Game design discussions:
  • Comment on pre-set space civilizations for loading screens.

Sound

• Nothing substantial.

Theory

• Nothing substantial.

Outreach

• Nothing substantial.

Other

• Nothing substantial.