Evolution sim Thrive adds radioactive chunks, environmental tolerances and thermosynthesis

The open source and cross-platform evolution sim Thrive has added in some even more advanced gameplay elements, making it a whole lot more interesting. Survival is very much the name of the game here, evolution is a tough business and you start off at the bottom. Much like the classic Spore from EA, the microscopic stage is full of features. But they're still working on the later game.

Some big new features have been added in Thrive 0.8.1 including environmental tolerances, meaning you need to adapt to different conditions across the planet. There's new radiation-eating cells, be wary of the green lights, it's pretty — but may be deadly. You can adapt to eat away at the radioactive chunks though. There's even a new full thermosynthesis implementation meaning you can use temperature to generate energy, although this feature is only in non-LAWK (life as we know it) games which you can pick when you start a new game.

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Some other new bits in this release:

• Added microbe background blur and enabled distortion effect by default.
• Added an option to select between the different fullscreen modes supported by Godot Engine. When using exclusive fullscreen mode this fixes a one pixel border problem on Windows.
• Late multicellular was split into its own full stage: Macroscopic.
• Implemented multicellular organism statistics panel.
• Various improvements to auto-evo to allow it to evolve new organelles / upgrades. And improved the microbe AI to be able to use newer features of the game.
• Fixes to the organelle suggestions feature to make it not suggest the nucleus too early.
• Improved cell image generation to make it less likely for the images to be cutoff.
• Tutorial and Thriveopedia tips page improvements.

How fun is it? Right now, that's difficult to answer. It's a somewhat complicated game, it takes quite a while to learn and since the game evolves with you it's quite different every time. That, and every update brings in major new additions to it. Thoroughly interesting though and it has some really unique ideas, and more depth than pretty much any other evolution sim I've ever seen.

Pictured - Thrive on Linux