This month marks a major turning point in our history as for the first time, Thrive makes it’s official debut in stores! We are proud to announce that Thrive is now available for purchase on both Steam and Itch.io for those who wish to support Thrive’s further development. The store releases are priced at $4.99 USD (3.99€ EUR), but Thrive will also remain free to download on our website!

For this release, we held a major focus on overall quality and bugfixes for Thrive, which ultimately resulted in a substantial improvement to stability and performance that will ensure a smoother experience than ever before. Even still; We also managed to squeeze in a few defining features that sufficiently expand the depth of functionality such as the long awaited behavior editor enabling customization of allied cell’s actions, the ever promising mod loader that is sure to inspire customization beyond the game’s convention, and an expanded auto-evo system that now even include the player’s population. We hope that you enjoy playing with this update as much as we did making it!

You can download the launcher below to get the newest version, and read on for more information.

Thrive 0.5.6

If you want a summary of what this version brings, here are the patch notes for this release.

Behavior Editor

After years of only existing as a greyed out button, the behavior editor has finally become a reality! While it may be simple at the moment, it now grants players more complete control of their species by dictating how they think.

Will your species be a peaceful scavenger, carefully avoiding any threats in their ceaseless search for sustenance? Will they be an opportunistic predator, cleverly keeping their distance as they whittle down prey with toxins? Or perhaps nothing more than an unresponsive sessile plant? The choice is now yours to decide!

Each slider corresponds to a mutually exclusive trait that determines how a cell behaves in specific circumstances, such as determining how much stimulus is needed for your cells to decide to move, or how threatened they can get until they fight back. Try experimenting and see what kind of behavior works best for you and your species!

Mod Loader

Thrive now comes packaged with a fully functional mod loader, enabling safer and easier use of multiple mods at once. Previously, players would need to manually replace the files in Thrive with modified versions for installation, but now that ordeal is a thing of the past!

You can access the mod loader by entering the “Extras” menu alongside the Licenses. Players who have bought Thrive on Steam will be able to enjoy the benefits of full Steam workshop integration, where they can easily browse and download mods without needing to do anything manually.

Should you not have access to Steam workshop, you can still install mods by downloading the mod files into the mods folder which you can access through the mod loader menu.

Auto-Evo

With this release comes further improvements to our auto-evo algorithm, with new changes such as AI species now splitting from each other in addition to the player’s own species.

But that’s not all! The player themselves are now subject to the rigors of interspecies competition like never before, as auto-evo now calculates the fitness of the player’s species to survive alongside others as they fight to occupy the same niche. While you as an individual might survive just fine, your entire species may not fair so well if you have not designed them competitively. Will you continue to Thrive?

Misc. changes

• Toxins can now be fired with less than the required amount of toxin, but they deal reduced damage in that case
• Fixed some colony physics issues
• Fixed a crash when cell that was going to bind just died
• Fixed incorrect rotations in colonies that happened in some cases
• Mouse hover panel no longer shows the exact compound values, instead only the rough category of how much stuff there is, is shown
• Mouse hover panel now shows all cells of one species on one line instead of one line per cell
• Balance changes
• Microbe AI tweaks (toxin shooting, running away)
• Current patch name is now shown with a fancier fading in and out large text
• There is now a JSON debug mode that activates automatically on save failure. This will provide much better information to us regarding saving failures when players report them.
• Extinction screen now has buttons to load a save or exit to the menu
• Updated to Godot 3.3.4
• Solved a save upgrade problem from 0.5.4 with extinct species still existing in historical graph data
• Adjusted volumes of quite a few sounds and music tracks
• Quitting the game now has a confirmation popup if it has been more than a few seconds since the last save
• Added credits in the game
• Added licenses display in the game
• Added a button in the editor to generate a random species name
• Added a tutorial that pops up if the editor button is enabled for too long without the player noticing
• Updated to a newer font version to fix some translations having broken characters (the font now looks slightly different)
• Added a special extinction music track that plays on the extinction screen
• Toxins no longer go through floating chunks
• Added a key to hide the GUI of the game, useful for screenshots
• Moving to any patch in freebuild is now possible in a single step
• Increased the amount of personality mutation possible in a single step
• Translation progress is now shown under the selected language in the options
• Added tooltips for the bottom left buttons in the microbe stage
• Implemented a custom dialog box class and switched over to it. Now many more dialogs can be dismissed with ESC
• Implemented a tweaked colour picker that has better tooltips and translation support
• It’s now possible to control the number of worker threads from the options menu
• Fixed a slight angle in the health and ATP bar filler textures
• Added highlight effect to checkboxes and moved to using a custom checkbox control
• Improved performance of line charts with many points
• Win and extinction screens are now on top of the tutorials
• Text in dropdown buttons is now localizable
• A warning popup is now shown when attempting to open screenshots or saves folders if they don’t exist
• Empty datasets in graphs now have text saying they are empty
• Engulfing button in hotbar is now hidden if cell can’t engulf
• Other GUI tweaks
• Added hotkeys for delete and move in the editor
• Implemented a proper system for game objects to refer to each other over multiple frames, this should fix at least one saving error
• Auto-evo now uses all available executor threads when the loading screen is waiting on it
• Music tracks within a single stage now cross fade
• Added a cheat to spawn an enemy cell
• Taking a screenshot now temporarily disables the colour filter if one was enabled
• Improved the mouse over GUI element detection in the microbe editor
• Fixed being able to get an enemy cell into your colony
• Fixed editor button state not updating after colony bind and unbind
• Fixed an exploit allowing the binding agent to be placed without the nucleus
• Fixed AI species being able to evolve an organelle that can be placed just once, multiple times
• Fixed some game settings applying while loaded in the Godot editor and causing issues
• Fixed microbe colonies making compounds disappear if the colony members have different sets of useful compounds
• Fixed save slot rotation not working with 10 or more saves
• Fixed placed hex material colour not restoring when hovered with multiple hover hexes in the editor
• Fixed keyprompts staying stuck on the screen if tutorial was disabled in the editor
• Fixed organelles flickering when moving (was caused by render order of them not being fixed)
• Fixed rare crash in compound cloud simulation
• Fixed osmoregulation missing in some organelle tooltips
• Fixed microbe intro restarting if space was pressed during it
• Fixed ATP balance bar icons having one organelle placement delay in hiding or showing themselves
• Fixed the reproduction bars being full after loading a save where the player is dead
• Fixed the microbe stage background not working in really wide aspect ratio (it’s still possible to get around this, but now any realistic resolution should work)
• Fixed back to main menu buttons not working while a submenu animation is playing
• Fixed a crash related to changing the chromatic filter options
• Fixed a potential softlock if the game was paused before the tutorial popup
• Fixed the reproduction cheat crashing the game if the player is dead
• Fixed ESC pausing the loading screen
• Fixed button press sound being restarted in the middle of it if another button was pressed too fast
• Fixed duplicate player cheat not working after being in the editor
• Fixed rigidity slider not re-enabling when undoing gives back some MP
• Fixed floating chunk not properly checking for failure when retrieving touching microbes
• Fixed some code still referring to membranes with old names. Fixes some missing info in membrane tooltips.
• Made sure that cells with a cell wall that doesn’t allow engulfing cannot enter engulfing mode, and stopped the AI from even trying it
• Arrow key rebinding for movement should now work
• Saving is no longer possible while extinct
• The spinning Thrive logo in the loading screen now rotates smoothly
• Extinction theme is now played just once
• Added extra checks for allowed species name formats
• Quit button no longer plays a sound to not have it sound glitchy
• Fixed warnings about non-power-of-2 textures
• Microbe editor grid is now created in the shader and not loaded as a texture
• Tweaked the dissolve effect for chunks
• Exiting the editor no longer prints to log that game locale was changed even when it wasn’t
• Entering the main menu ensures the game is not paused
• Added defensive programming to one place in auto-evo where there was a very rare exception happening
• Increased cheat cloud density
• Added more explicit null checking in JSON serializer
• Slight efficiency increase to auto-evo by reusing already computed energy balance in one method
• Renamed the incorrectly named “remove organelle” input
• Refactored microbe AI to use a common method to check what can be engulfed to reduce code duplication
• BBCode in the game can now refer to some game constants
• Slight input rebinding code refactoring
• Mouse hover panel now keeps updating while the game is paused
• Removed Godot editor (tool) load attributes to reduce Godot automatically breaking those(we are still looking for a permanent solution: https://github.com/Revolutionary-Games/Thrive/issues/2751)
• Split Microbe class into multiple files to make it more manageable
• Refactored the patch map setup code
• Updated to C# 9.0
• Updated SharpZipLib to 1.3.3
• Updated the used game text extraction code to extract new Godot Node properties that were missing before from translatable strings
• Format checking script will now detect git merge conflicts
• Format script will now print out the text extraction tool version if translations are detected to not be up to date
• Format script changes checking should now work properly on Windows
• New languages: Danish, Ukrainian, and Hungarian
• The “@” in process environment display is now translatable
• Updated translations
• Improved instructions for working on the game and PR templates
• Added a documentation page about getting started with Godot
• Sadly removed some work from people who we didn’t manage to contact to sign our CLA
• Steam: added mod uploader to workshop and loading subscribed workshop items in the mod manager in the game
• Steam: Steam username is now used inplace of the operating system account name

What’s next?

With the grand slew of bugfixes we have made in this update, we have successfully freed ourselves up enough to potentially begin focusing on the implementation of new features and reworks. Of course, we will steadily continue to ensure that Thrive remains stable to play as we do so.

We now have our eyes set on the revitalization of our spawn system, as well as the potential implementation of new parts and mechanics for your cell species. So keep your eyes out for later Progress Updates to see what’s coming!

If you would like to ask us questions about Thrive, you can do so in this thread. We’ll answer them in a new Thrivestream starting later today. (Update links)