Progress Update 8/08/2026

Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! With great new features often come great new bugs, and last week's addition of Sexual Reproduction certainly was a great new feature.

As a result, most of this week was spent fixing those bugs up, but there were also some other big problems discovered with the physics engine and a graph library used in the food chain tab. The physics problem caused colliding gametes to seemingly disappear, amusingly along with anything else they were touching.

The feature also has some other refinements made. The Signalling Agent ability to call mates will now actually spawn one if none currently exist, and a chemoreceptor-style line will be cast towards them. Both functions are set by a difficulty setting that is on by default, but disabled on Hard. Player gametes now also all despawn upon going to the editor, so that they don't exist afterwards.

Also this week, the new updates to the Thrive official soundtrack have arrived on Steam. There is now over 4 hours of music in the soundtrack for your listening pleasure! All proceeds from the soundtrack on Steam go towards supporting the continued development of Thrive. So if you are interested in listening to the Thrive soundtrack whenever you like, or just want to support Thrive even more, please consider purchasing the soundtrack!

Meanwhile, over on the Development Forums, there was continued discussion on motility versus sessility and organ systems, both Macroscopic Stage features.

Look below for some additional details and we'll see you next week for another Progress Update!

Programming

• New Devbuild available to our Patreon Supporters:
  • Fixed player gamete type not saving and the gamete type selection not working at all
  • Fixed the reproduction options not fully restoring after loading a save
  • Implemented a new console command “edit” to go directly to the editor at any time
  • Switched to a custom-patched physics engine version that fixes an entity disappearing bug as a temporary measure
  • Tweaked gamete spawning
  • Player gametes now all despawn upon going to the editor
  • Replaced the previous graph processing library with one that still implements the Sugiyama algorithm but is licensed in a better way
  • Added difficulty options to spawn a compatible mate upon calling for one. This defaults to on with normal difficulty.
  • Added a line pointing to a compatible mate upon calling one
  • Added preregistration of all of our ECS components to make entity creation thread-safe
  • Added extra physics data safeguards in our code
  • Fixed a unit test that was intermittently failing in CI
  • Updated AngleSharp from 1.7.0 to 1.7.1
  • Updated code checking tools
  • Updated translations

Graphics

• Nothing substantial.

Gameplay

• Sexual Reproduction refinements:
  • Player gametes now all despawn upon going to the editor, to ensure none are around afterwards (otherwise, they may sometimes quickly open the editor again)
  • Added a difficulty option-controlled ability to spawn a compatible mate upon calling for one. This defaults to on with Normal and lower difficulty, but is disabled at Hard. A chemoreceptor-style line points to this spawned mate upon calling one.
• Game design discussions:
  • continued proposals on motility and sessility in the Macroscopic Stage.
  • More discussion on Organ Systems in the Macroscopic Stage/Editor.

Sound

• The official soundtrack on Steam was updated to include the few missing microbe stage tracks, as well as all the finished tracks for all stages so far.

Theory

• Nothing substantial.

Outreach

• Nothing substantial.

Other

• Nothing substantial.