Progress Update 9/26/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! Our lead programmer had fewer working days this week, so our patch notes are shorter this time. The major feature I hinted at last week did get implemented in its basic form, though more refinements are likely to come next week.
That feature is our new gameplay cell layout preview and adjustment system! One of the most consistent complaints about the Multicellular Stage has been that the algorithm translating the cell hex layo…
Read More →Progress Update 9/19/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! We finally got through the backlog of issues this week, so work has begun on a new major feature. Though since it is not yet finished, you will unfortunately not be reading about it today! Instead we have some smaller features, fixes and balance changes.
The Sexual reproduction mode now uses the same overall mechanics and UI for handling its special cell types as the Sporulation mode does, where it does not use one of your nor…
Read More →Progress Update 9/12/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! There's a laundry list of patch notes this week, though most of them are smaller items.
Most of those are still bugfixes of reports for the latest release, which means we were not working on new major features quite yet. Those include fixes for the Multicellular layout algorithm sometimes leaving gaps, as well as for some Sexual reproduction issues (such as the game sometimes not recognising that the two gamete types are in fa…
Read More →Progress Update 9/05/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! Last week, we released Thrive 1.6.0, and we hope you're enjoying the update!
As is usually the case with such an extensive release, there has been a substantial number of bug reports. With that, this week there have mainly been bug fixes, including but not limited to auto-evo, mass budding, colonies, and membranes. Slime jet force has also been buffed by 10%, and physics timestepping has been adjusted to be lower quality w…
Read More →Devblog #53: The Birds and the Bees Update
The time has finally come for Thrive 1.6, the third major update to the Multicellular Stage! So how come it's called 1.6? Three months have passed since the last major update, and a lot has been added in that time. So much, in fact, that everything in our roadmap planned up to version 1.6 was completed.
Included in this update are two new reproduction modes, Sexual Reproduction and Mass budding, both in different way playing with the mechanics for having different cell types in …
Read More →Progress Update 8/22/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! We are currently in feature freeze for the release of Thrive 1.6, expected exactly one week from now. That also means we have a release candidate build for that release, that you can play early and test. If you do, please report on that thread any bugs or other problems you encounter. We're particularly interested in whether you encounter any problems with the auto-evo simulation crashing in the Multicellular Stage.
Quite …
Read More →Progress Update 8/15/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! We have another major feature added this week with the new Actomyosin organelle.
Actomyosin represents an arrangement of Actin and Myosin proteins as exists in simple muscle cells that work together to contract. Thrive's Multicellular Stage of course lacks real soft body physics, but the Actomyosin organelle still boosts your movement and rotation speed by a significant amount, making it perfect for those large motile …
Read More →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 els…
Read More →Progress Update 8/01/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! The game is still progressing quickly, and we have a major new feature added this week.
That new feature is the new reproduction option: Sexual Reproduction. As you would expect, unlike the previous reproduction types, you need another member of your species to progress. Specifically, once fully grown, you do not directly unlock the editor/reproduction button. Instead, this button will “launch” gamete cells (designed by yo…
Read More →Progress Update 7/25/2026
Hello and welcome to your weekly Thrive Progress Update! With most of the vacation catching up done last week, progress on the roadmap is picking up again.
The first major point on the roadmap is that cell membrane types are now uniform across all cells in a Multicellular Stage species. You can still switch membrane types, but this will switch all cells over at once, and cost you 100MP. The current plan is to completely disable this switching of membrane types in the Macroscopic Sta…
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