Progress Update 4/25/2026

This week was a lot more busy with things changing in the game itself compared to last week. These changes include some very old issues in the game that were finally fixed. Additional changes include the ability to set more fine-grained compound cloud behaviour (at the cost of performance, or alternatively reducing quality to increase performance) and using a controller to turn cells/colonies. On the visual side, there's been an overhaul separating the process panel into “blocks” for ea…

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 photosynthe…

Progress Update 4/11/2026

With Easter still eating into the workdays, and about half the work time still going into our development infrastructure in the background, progress is once again limited on the visible side this week. Several volunteer contributions are also close to completion, but not yet merged this week. However, we do have a significant amount of development discussion.

One relatively significant change that did make it in is that the difficulty setting “osmoregulation cost” (which is for exam…

Progress Update 4/04/2026

We have exciting news this week as we have finally assembled our Multicellular Stage Release Roadmap! As we are still hoping to finish the stage this year, this is the list of things we are planning to implement by 2027. You may note that this looks like a lot of releases in one year, and a limited number of features in each release. It is quite likely that some of these will be merged into fewer, larger updates.

It's been another slow week in new feature terms, as work on our d…

Progress Update 3/28/2026

This week's update looks a lot more quiet, as much of the work has gone into our back-end systems that allow us to continue developing Thrive. Another factor is that while several volunteer contributions are in progress, there are less that were actually finished this week. There were still a few smaller bugfixes tweaks however. For example, the editor no longer warns about you not filling your storage before nightfall if that process does not actually rely on the sun, and the cell …

Progress Update 3/21/2026

It's been another busy week in Thrive development. Release 1.0.1.1 went out on Monday as a (mostly) bugfix update. Included in that was a fix for Multicellular design conversion sometimes failing (leaving you stuck at a black screen). But there were also other recent improvements included, like a reduction in auto-evo memory usage, and a new cell growth animation for Multicellular species.

In this week's improvements, we finally had the inclusion of a significant change to auto-…

Progress Update 3/14/2026

The theme of this week is “fixes and auto-evo”. Last week was the release of 1.0.1, and as always that produced some issues that had to be fixed. In particular, some people were experiencing an issue where the screen was stuck on black when trying to exit the Multicellular editor. This turned out to be a problem with some specific layouts not being able to find a good solution. So some extra safeguards were introduced to fix this. In other Multicellular news, we now have an animation fo…

Devblog #51: Onward to Multicellular

It's finally time for the first major update of the Multicellular Stage development process! We have a new cell specialisation feature allowing you to really take advantage of the multiple cell types you can make for your Multicellular species. Additionally, you can now control the growth order of cells, giving you far greater control over the course of life as a Multicellular organism. There are also several smaller additions and improvements to the stage, making it overall mor…

Progress Update 2/28/2026

As said last week, we delayed 1.0.1 to try to fit in a few more things, in which we succeeded. So today we are in feature freeze, and we have a release candidate build for all those interested to test before the full release next week. Of course, we want that release to be as bug-free as possible, so we appreciate any and all help!

Those particular features 1.0.1 was delayed for are environmental tolerances for Multicellular species and an entirely new UI for environmental toler…

Progress Update 2/21/2026

Originally, at this time we were supposed to be in feature freeze right now, preparing for the release of version 1.0.1. However, we decided to delay that by a week so that we will be able to squeeze in just a few more features that are very close to finished. What we have for you this week is already pretty exciting though!

First, we have what I would consider a major Multicellular Stage feature: Cell specialisation. At its basis it's pretty simple. The more of a cell that is jus…