Thrive version 0.5.8 is finally here; And with it comes the versatile signaling agents, which allow you to actively communicate with your allied cells; New randomly generated region names, which gives each world a new and unique flair; The highly anticipated multicellular prototype, which permits you to progress further than ever in the grand journey of Thrive; And of course, a grand host of other changes and bug-fixes! [previewyoutube=7ygUoOw5kJo;full][/previewyoutube] If you want a summary of what this version brings, here are the full patch notes for this release.

The Multicellular Stage Prototype

Included in 0.5.8 is the exciting prototype for the next stage of Thrive; Multicellular! Once you have acquired the nucleus and binding agents, you will be prompted with the option to proceed to the next stage should you have a per-requisite number of cells in an active colony at the time. Clicking this button will bring you to the multicellular editor where you will be able to design your newly multicellular organism! (Note that the multicellular stage cannot be entered in free-build mode.) When you initially enter the editor, your organism will only consist of your initial cell. You can quickly change this by placing more of this type, or duplicating it to create an entirely new class of cell. At any time you can edit your cell types in the familiar microbe editor to change their functions and purpose. There is only one reproductive method available in the prototype, which is Budding. When you exit the editor, you will split off from your parent as a single cell, but will gradually grow other cells as you acquire the appropriate resources. Once fully grown, you only need to acquire a few more resources so that you can create a budding cell of your own, and thus repeat the cycle. We hope that everyone enjoys this exciting new feature, but remember; It is a prototype, and is far from a polished product. Merely a glimpse into the future of Thrive through the murky lenses of development. We will remain focused on wrapping up our plans for the microbe stage before we can focus on developing the multicellular stage proper.

New Signaling Agents Part

With signaling agents, the player is now able to communicate with allied cells. This grants a new angle of control that creative players will undoubtedly delight in. Accessed by holding down the V key, the signal menu presents the player with 4 basic commands.These commands remain in effect until the player selects the No Command option to disable them. Follow Me orders nearby cells to accompany the player. Move To Me prompts nearby cells to approach the players position. Become Aggressive alters the behavior of nearby allies so that they become much more likely to attack other cells. Flee encourages allies to disengage and move out of danger. While simple, these commands can be used for many various effective strategies previously impossible to the player, such as pincer maneuvers when hunting particularly dangerous prey, or simply calling nearby cells to bind to.

Misc. changes

• Colony members now affect how fast a colony can move, their mass now has a slowing effect but their flagella will help the colony move
• Increased compound cloud brightness in brighter biomes to make them much easier to see
• AI now knows how to use the chemoreceptor
• Generated membranes are now cached to reduce lag spikes also slightly made the membrane generation algorithm faster as well
• Cell corpse chunks are now added to be counted in entity limit which seems to help a bit with performance
• Increased entity limit considering the recent performance improvements. Its also no longer save file specific so older saves will also use the new limit now
• Taking damage due to being out of ATP now has a specific sound for it
• Auto-evo now takes environmental compound availability into account when calculating fitness
• Balance tweaks, includes adjustments to organelle costs
• AI will now stop moving if it is out of ATP and wait to recharge
• Brought back the accidentally deleted win screen background
• Binding mode sound now fades in and out better
• Chemoreceptor colour is now automatically selected to match the compound colour in the modify GUI
• Extinction music now starts earlier to sync up more dramatically with the appearing extinction text
• Tweaked the wording of most of the tutorials
• Made the tutorial highlight background darker to make tutorials pointing to GUI elements more obvious
• Added a command line flag (to be used with a new launcher version) that disables all videos as one player had a problem with the intro video crashing their game
• Disabled the X button on the organelle modify popup as that seemed a bit too error-prone to a player
• Saving will now detect if the save name is too long or invalid and give an error instead of silently failing to write the save to disk
• Charts will no longer show x or y incorrectly when they werent supposed to
• Added some code to the binding process that tries to detect disposed cells earlier, hopefully improves sometimes buggy binding
• Implemented custom logic to workaround Godot colour picker pick from game window having a (potentially crashing) bug
• Improved theming for file dialog
• Removed duplicate phosphate icon file
• Disabled resizing the editor report tab panels as that could break the text layout
• Translations now use no line wrapping, this time unnecessary changes caused by that with Weblate disagreeing with gettext seem to be finally fixed

Whats next?

We hope to continue work on the Microbe stage, in a constant effort to wrap up its development in preparation for moving on. There are still a lot of big features that need to be completed before we can officially begin development on the multicellular stage, but this goal becomes ever closer as our development team expands, and rate of progress only increases in speed. We have a Thrivestream starting in a few minutes.