Brace yourselves for another feature-packed update: 0.7.1 is here! Along with enhancements to the various reports available to the player in the editor, a lot of visual improvements to our cells, backgrounds, icons, and textures are here. Furthermore, oxygen is now dynamically simulated, being introduced by photosynthetic life forms on your planet. This has an immense effect on gameplay and progression throughout the Microbe Stage. Your organism, which now starts its journey on an anoxygenic world, must now strategically evolve its metabolism around the pace at which oxygen is introduced to your atmosphere. A significant chapter in Thrives development has begun the introduction of a changing, scientifically accurate world that evolves with the life on your planet!

Thrive 0.7.1

[previewyoutube=m7g-_lwM29k;full][/previewyoutube] Read on for more details, or just jump in the latest version and play it.

Food Chain Tab, Auto-Evo Report, Thriveopedia Revamp

Consistent with the theme of our roadmap items for version 0.7.x, significant work has been put into reworking and adding upon our auto-evo reports. Players will now have a better understanding of what exactly is going on in the world they inhabit. Among the most notable additions is a long requested feature: the Food Chain Tab! Players will now have a chart of the food web within a patch, letting them know the distribution of organisms across different trophic levels. You will be able to see what metabolisms each organism utilizes, the primary producers in an environment, the top predators in an ecosystem, and overall predator-prey relationships.
Various other important changes have also been made to make information more accessible. The auto-evo tab is now much more visual, allowing players to know exactly what organism is being referred to, their population, and other notable characteristics important to performance.
Finally, the Thriveopedia has also been expanded, bringing much more relevant information from the developer wiki into the game. This will allow players to have an in-game reference regarding important mechanics, parts, and strategies. More work has been done on information accessibility as well for example, the microbe editor has additional functionalities, allowing the player to see net production at rest and at maximum movement, their cellular processes, and their energy balances with or without specific metabolisms. We hope that players now have much more relevant information, and are now better able to understand exactly what is happening.

3D Membranes, Backgrounds, Bloom, and More

With improved backgrounds, graphic effects, and texture reworks, this update continues to bring significant improvements to Thrives visuals! First, our membranes are now fully 3D, making cells look more realistic. Cells are now represented with membranes that have height creating a visually-pleasing appearance of depth and shape. A different normal map has also been applied to our membranes, making their texture stick out more and creating a realistic look to our cells. Their opacity has also been altered slightly, which helps to make it so that cells look distinct. Second, our backgrounds are much more dynamic, with the introduction of mobile background elements like bubbles, and a new optional distortion effect. Rather than a simple parallax display, layers which contained elements that should move around a bit have some independent motion. A toggleable distortion shader (accessible in the Graphics option menu) is also applied to the layers below, resulting in distortion similar to that of light reflecting through fluid. Furthermore, a bloom effect is now available, making colors pop and, combined with the background, creating a feeling of depth in a previously flat visual landscape. Like the distortion backgrounds, bloom can be turned on and off, though performance should not be significantly affected on most PCs. More subtle work has also continued in increasing visual richness. New ice chunks have been introduced, resulting in more variety in frozen ocean patches. Some work on the assets of the later stage prototypes, such as the Societal and Space Stages, has also been completed. We would like to note that several visual improvements, such as those to the membranes, backgrounds, textures, and bloom, are going to see more work. The distorted background will likely eventually be enabled by default. If you have feedback after playing the update, please share it with us in the comments below or on either our forums or our Discord!
Bloom, enhanced backgrounds, and 3D membranes resulting in a more polished look for the Microbe Stage.

Oxygenation Events

After many years of conceptualization and development, a highly requested feature oxygenation has finally been implemented! Similar to Earths history, players will now initially spawn in a world without oxygen. However, as photosynthesis emerges, oxygen will be slowly produced by the lifeforms on your planet either from other cells, or your own. Tweaks to existing metabolisms, such as iron respiration, have been implemented to provide options for the player. A new anoxygenic metabolism has also been introduced in the form of clostridial fermentation, represented by the Hydrogenase part. With time, oxygen will increase to the point of allowing more powerful, aerobic forms of respiration to form, and ultimately, more complex life. In other words, the Great Oxygenation Event can now be simulated.
A picture of the atmospheric auto-evo report tab, indicating changing oxygen levels in light blue. The dark blue line represents carbon dioxide levels, which also dynamically changes based on the organisms present within a patch. Dynamic oxygenation represents the first of a string of new features which will culminate in a fully dynamic world that changes from generation to generation. These updates will likely require a lot of fine-tuning and balancing to get just right, so feedback is always appreciated. A more dynamic simulation of the environment is available as an experimental feature (needs to be enabled when starting a new game), though the experimental version is less balanced.

Additional Features

• Flagellum length can now be modified: longer flagellum length results in faster speed but use more ATP, while shorter flagellum results in slightly slower speed but uses less energy.
• Two new patch-specific themes have been added, one for ice shelves, and one for tidepools.
• An improved wiggle animation for cells has been introduced, making membranes look more dynamic.
• Balancing and bug fixes related to engulfment and the strength of currents generated from cilia while engulfing.
• Reworks of certain compound icons, such as those for Nitrogen. And many more icons have been redone as SVG images.
• Improvements to rendering of macroscopic organisms, allowing smoother high-poly meshes with minimal performance impact
• And many more changes

A full list of changes is at the end of this post.

Art Contest Winners

After a long time coming, we have hosted our first Thrive art contest in years on both our forums and discord. We had some amazing submissions, and we are proud to show off the winners below!

First place: Zorkman

All stories have to begin somewhere, and ours did so an unfathomable amount of generations ago when we first peeked beyond the waters surface. Enarosat Xday, renowned biologist and archaeologist from the Avoreth Academy of Natural Sciences The runner ups are highlighted on our website at: https://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/devblog-44-oxygenating/

Whats Next

Most items under section 0.7.x have been knocked off the roadmap through this update, a great sign of progress for the completion of the Microbe Stage. Some items remain however, so it is likely that our next update will be named 0.8, and might contain some features listed under the next phase of Thrives development. Development focus will likely switch towards fleshing out the world the player lives in, particularly related to dynamic environments and compounds. Again, such a feature will likely require thorough balancing to get just right, so it could be a very iterative process. Remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream that's starting very soon, where we will answer questions asked by you, the community, and cover the results of our latest community art competition! You can leave feedback in the comments below or visit our feedback thread on the community forums to give us your impressions on the release. [previewyoutube=96KldIqwl-o;full][/previewyoutube]

Full Patch Notes

• The world now starts off with no oxygen and photosynthesis, once evolved, will add oxygen to the world. This effectively locks many organelles that require oxygen during the early game.
• Created a new much more graphical auto-evo report screen
• Implemented the food chain tab in the editor
• Added 3D membranes for microbes
• Improved the Thriveopedia with various new pages
• Converted the old help menu to open a relevant Thriveopedia page with links to important pages
• Upgraded to Godot 4.3
• Added a microbe background distortion shader effect that can be enabled in the options (this may become the default in the future)
• Added an experimental bloom effect that can be enabled
• Added mesh subdivision for the convolution surfaces to make them look better
• Metabolosomes are now locked until reaching a patch with oxygen
• Added hydrogenase as an early game glucose to ATP converting organelle
• Switched default toxin type to cytotoxin and modified the toxin creation process to not always require oxygen
• Renamed oxytoxy to just toxin in general toxin contexts where other toxin types are also used
• Iron respiration no longer requires oxygen to keep it viable in the vents biome
• Added an upgrade for flagellum for picking between long and short variants that have different energy cost and speed
• Added a new music track for the tidepool biome
• Added a new music track for the ice shelf biome
• Buffed engulfing resource gain
• Increased engulf size requirement for big phosphate chunks
• Added multiple new ice chunk types for more variety
• Made AI wait behaviour not trigger as much when out of just one compound type to reduce unnecessary AI sessility
• Added resource limiting mode for the ATP bar to view what would happen if some resource was missing from the cell storage
• Increased opacity of microbe membranes
• Added a new bump map for the microbe membranes
• Changed membrane bump map UVs to not distort with the membrane animation
• Added new radio and check button icons as SVG images
• Added one new microbe loading screen image
• Added type icons for compound and environment panels
• ATP balance bar tooltips now show which compounds are required to produce that amount of ATP
• Tweaked editor GUI to be closer to what it was before the Godot 4 update
• Abbreviated per second as just "s" in chemical equation speeds
• Updated the space and industrial stage prototype visuals
• Reduced pulling cilia power a bit when there are many of them
• Added an animation for when something is digested so that it shrinks to a small size instead of just visually popping out of existence
• Redid compound icons as SVG images
• Reworked patch and some UI icons as SVG files
• Created priority levels for PhotoStudio image generation to avoid important images taking minutes to load on slower computers
• Added an in-memory image cache for the PhotoStudio to speed up displaying images of the same species again
• Added a GDExtension for Thrive that will be used in the future to improve various things
• Added a compound cloud benchmark
• Added experimental dynamic compounds feature where patches dynamically change their available compound amounts based on the species that are in it
• Fixed mucocyst to work in cell colonies
• Fixed water currents not affecting chunks correctly ever since the ECS refactoring probably
• Fixed loading screen loading spinner not spinning smoothly
• Fixed Thriveopedia search not working
• Fixed a bug where the editor showed patch compounds as they were during the previous generation
• Fixed initial species compounds calculation never giving iron due to calculating only with available compounds in the default biome type
• Fixed the strain system always taking movement ATP while not moving
• Fixed used matter storage size flickering when ejecting too big objects that no longer fit in storage
• Fixed some cases where ejected cells wouldn't properly die and despawn
• Fixed saving status text not fading out properly
• Fixed image sizes in concept art gallery cards
• Fixed clicking on a miche node that is empty not clearing the info box which was pretty confusing GUI behaviour
• Reduced lag spike on selecting different patch to show details for
• Added a limit to the recent patch notes shown to ensure it doesn't try to display truly ridiculous number of notes for someone who hasn't played Thrive for years
• Fixed editor saves failing to load with a completed endosymbiosis action
• Fixed right editor panel being able to be too wide in certain translations
• Fixed auto-evo being able to remove the nucleus as a mutation
• Fixed art gallery model viewer not working correctly with 3D menu backgrounds being enabled
• Fixed "x worlds" text not being translated initially in the auto-evo exploring tool
• Hopefully fixed some engulf digestion and cells dying during it issues that caused cell chunks to spawn
• Added missing models to the art gallery model viewer
• Reimplemented debug line renderer as a GDExtension to make it much faster than before
• Refactored our compound related code to use enum values to simplify a lot of our code that needed to define special operations for various compounds
• Added code project for running small code benchmarks easily in the future
• Organelle tooltips are now dynamically generated from the organelle JSON data
• Improved our setup instructions for compiling on Linux
• Added new automatic code style checks related to post-increment
• Updated YamlDotNet from 16.0.0 to 16.1.3
• Updated Jolt Physics Engine
• Tweaked the pre-commit hook to be much shorter
• Updated code checking tools
• Improved our wiki content updating script
• Updated wiki text content
• Updated translations