Today we have released version 0.5.7 of Thrive which includes a new cell part for players to play and experiment with, and an expanded report tab in the editor. Players will never need to worry about not finding what they are looking for, because by evolving the new chemoreceptor part, cells will be able to sniff out resources from considerable distances! Suddenly realized a species is missing and want to know when they went extinct? The history of your world is now chronicled in the newest feature of the report screen; The timeline tab. Alongside these new features are a host of various bugfixes and optimization to ensure that everyone can properly enjoy Thrive at its fullest. We hope that everyone enjoys this release of Thrive as much as we enjoyed making it, and are looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks.

Note that if you are upgrading an old save game to this latest version, the player cell needs to first die and respawn before the chemoreceptor functions properly.

For those inclined, our first report of activities is now publicly available if you are interested in knowing how our association has done this year.

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

Thrive 0.5.7

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

New Chemoreceptor Part

No longer will players have difficulty finding what they need, because this release features an exciting new addition to your cell’s arsenal; The chemoreceptor.

This cluster of specialized olfactory cilia is used to greatly enhance the cell’s ability to sense various compounds in it’s environment, allowing it to effectively track down vital nutrients from a considerable distance.

By evolving the chemoreceptor, a player will be guided to the nearest cloud of a compound of choice, even if that cloud is beyond their normal vision range! With the chemoreceptor, players will no longer have any difficulty finding what they need in the expansive world of Thrive.

Of course, that’s not all the chemoreceptor brings…

The chemoreceptor is the first part to feature full customization options through the long-awaited modification menu! By right clicking a placed chemoreceptor and clicking the “Modify” option, players will be able to select which compound the receptor will track, alongside many other useful customization options. Want to be able to track two different compounds at once? The modifications are tracked per part so by placing two different receptors, you can customize each of them to track separate compounds with unique colours for identification.

In the future, we hope to expand the modify menu beyond the receptor, and to the rest of the parts, so that we can provide players with much more meaningful and expansive customization options.

Timeline Tab

Want to know what happened a few generations back in the world at large? Players will find a new tool in their report tab for keeping up with species throughout the history of their planet.

The newly implemented timeline tab displays a comprehensive list of notable events that have occurred each generation since the beginning of life, providing analytical minds with a new way to understand the evolution of their world.

Misc. changes

• Updated to Godot 3.4.2. We are using a custom Godot build as our Breakpad code was not merged yet.
• Reduced max entity count a lot again. This should make it so that extremely low performance of the game doesn’t happen anymore. We are still investigating the performance issues and will increase the game entity counts again once we have addressed the part of the game that is actually too slow.
• Added a crash dumping system back to the game. Combined with the latest launcher version this allows reporting the crashes to us developers to view on ThriveDevCenter Note that the crash reporting is not implemented for mac, yet.
• Fixed the choppy intro video playback in the previous release caused by Godot removing optimized webm playback on Windows
• Fixed flagella animations not working after update to Godot 3.4
• The report tab of the editor now has a patch selector drop down that allows changing patches on that screen to easily view the graphs for other patches
• Player species is now always printed first in auto-evo results and other species are in alphabetical order
• Added a button on graphs to show the graph in bigger size to more easily see what the graph shows
• Adjusted microbe movement sound
• Added a separate ice damage sound instead of using the general damage sound for them
• Double clicking a save now loads it or asks to overwrite it if double clicked in the create save menu
• A few more tutorials are now forced (the close button for them has been disabled)
• Cell speed calculation has been improved regarding flagella that don’t point backwards. Now speed is calculated along the direction the player’s cell can move the fastest in, which is not necessarily forwards.
• Movement ATP drain was also updated with the above change, and now it also only considers flagella that can push in the maximum movement force direction. So no longer do forward facing flagella show up in editor as costing ATP when in fact they can’t operate at the same time as backwards facing flagella.
• Added scientific flavour text for the pilus
• Disabled multithreaded rendering option which seemed to cause rare issues while not helping at all in normal use
• Improved look and tooltip positioning for the editor sliders
• Added a sound effect for when cells collide hard enough
• Increased the fade duration when changing music tracks
• Remade the trash icon as higher resolution and added a pressed state for the trash buttons
• Graphs now group extinct species separately
• Tweaked the visuals of the toxin particle effect
• Tweaked the patch name display fade animation
• Reduced small iron chunk mass so that they are easier to push around than the big chunks
• Fixed external effects on extinct species causing errors – Fixed graphs using 32-bit integers to hold data, which caused the graphs to not display correctly when species populations got too high
• Fixed tutorial boxes being on top of the pause menu in terms of mouse clicks
• Fixed dialog resizing sometimes expanding them in the wrong direction
• Fixed a bug in our hybrid 3D audio player class not actually behaving spatially
• Fixed the widths of a few organelle tooltip titles
• Fixed really long save names causing GUI layout problems by enabling text wrapping for them
• Fixed pressing ESC in the game over load menu not closing the right thing
• Fixed folders ending in “.thrivesave” being detected as save files and causing problems
• Fixed the randomize species name button not being the same height as the text box it was next to
• Fixed some scenes (that are intended to be used like this) not being able to be started directly from the Godot editor due to resource loading order
• Disabled mouse wheel scroll on colour picker bars as they are usually within a scroll container causing issues depending on mouse positioning when scrolling
• Auto-evo prediction runs are now cancelled earlier to try to avoid error prints regarding them failing due to the player editing their species again before the run finished
• Reduced the volume of microbe-theme-7 to be more inline with other music
• Slight source code cleanup by moving the food source classes to the namespace they should have been in
• Updated our CI checking tools
• Improvements to our build scripts
• Updated translations

What’s next?

With the implementation of the modification menu for the chemoreceptor complete, we are hoping to expand modification options to other parts as well. And of course, we aim to continue looking into methods to further optimize Thrive so that everyone can properly play.

If you would like to ask us questions about Thrive, you can do so in this thread (if you are a VIP patron), or you can show up during the stream to ask questions. We’ll answer them in a new Thrivestream starting tomorrow.