Progress Update 3/15/2025

Another week with incredible progress! Water currents are now in the game, affecting how microbes move and how particles flow. This makes the environment feel more alive and adds new challenges. We've also made some balancing to the game, making chloroplasts a more appealing upgrade from thylakoids for photosynthesis and much more!

We've also improved visuals, with better icons, models, and tweaks to things like ice and sulfur chunks. Stay tuned for more updates!

Programming

• New DevBuild for our patrons:

  • Added water currents that affect microbes and particles that visualize the currents

  • Increased maximum tolerance debuffs and MP costs

  • Buffed chloroplasts 20% to make them a more tempting upgrade from thylakoids

  • Added a popup after the welcome tutorial prompting the player to select their preferred 2D movement mode. Hopefully with this change there won't be more feedback on the default movement mode.

  • Added a ‘T’ suffix to primary displays of population to finally try to solve the confusion some players have that think that a population of 100 microbes literally means just 100 individuals, whereas in reality there has always been an abstract multiplier for the numbers as entire oceans have very high number of bacteria

  • Iron metabolism no longer depends on co2

  • Reduced player species spawn rate by 50% to make it less likely to experience the player's species overcrowding them

  • Updated the look of the hydrogenase organelle

  • Added instant kill protection for the player when the player's health is above a few units of health to prevent deaths from large single damage events

  • Fixed initial compounds in multicellular not giving glucose correctly. A fix had been made earlier to the microbe stage but was forgotten to apply to the later stage as well.

  • Fixed tolerances making it harder to survive after getting a patch extinction and having to return to a previous patch. The game now helps out by adjusting tolerances automatically to not get debuffs in the new environment.

  • Fixed lag on the patch map with large maps

  • Added HUD message warnings when binding or engulfing mode ends due to running out of ATP

  • Added anisotropic filtering options

  • Increased the radius at which AI cells are no longer forced to move towards the player to “get on stage”

  • Added a large sulfur chunk variant

  • Tweaked ice chunk visuals

  • Fixed realism issues in the wording of iron metabolism

  • Fixed Eas

  • Added setting the game window clear colour to black in exported versions to hopefully avoid some bugs where a grey background is sometimes visible on Windows

  • Added a tutorial prompting the player to place a nucleus after many generations in the editor in case the player forgot the early goal

  • Fixed our shuffle bag implementation to shuffle bags with just 2 items

  • Updated setup instructions regarding .NET and Godot version

  • Updated System.IO.Hashing from 9.0.2 to 9.0.3

  • Updated translations

Graphics

• New Hydrogenase model

Started working on more event-icons

Gameplay

• New pop-up to choose a type of movement

Sound

• Nothing Substantial

Theory

• Nothing Substantial

Outreach

• Nothing Substantial

Other

• Nothing Substantial