If you were a big fan of Spore’s cell stage - you might have heard of the open source game Thrive, which is currently in development by Revolutionary Game Studio, unlike Spore, Thrive treads much closer to science and realism. It already features a pretty well-thought out cell stage and already is exploring the beginnings of multi-cellular life. The new 0.6.2 update however starts prototyping evolution onto the land!

What’s New in 0.6.2?

• New further prototypes: going on land is now implemented, becoming aware and awakened has been added, added basic crafting, inventory and resource gathering, placing buildings and founding a settlement is now possible, accumulating resources and placing buildings is now possible in the society stage, and finally researching a new technology and placing a factory allows moving to the industrial stage. The industrial stage prototype is where the current prototype work ended up at. That stage has just a placeholder graphic for a city.
• Added entirely new 3D scenes to be backgrounds for the main menu, some of these are a bit performance intensive and can be disabled in the options
• The membrane generation algorithm is now massively faster, and only results in slightly visually different membranes
• Tweaked membrane generation to be tighter around organelles to more closely match the physics, and made multihex organelles send all of their positions to the membrane to fix large organelles in certain cases poking outside the membrane
• The editor compound balance now shows the situation at ATP equilibrium, instead of assuming all processes run at maximum speed always
• Compound cloud visuals have been slightly improved with a higher resolution noise layer
• Separation between divided cells and colonies is now much better
• Tweaked the visuals of button focus highlights, along with a few other element types
• Microbes now spawn with initial compounds that are proportional to their compound usage (instead of fixed values)
• Added late multicellular stage underwater panoramic background
• When the player now reproduces the game will try to keep the entity count under control by despawning existing entities if there are too many (player daughter cells are prioritized if they make up a large fraction of the total entity limit)
• Cells in colonies are now counted in entity limit (except the player colony as the player is not part of the entity limit)

Download

You can download Thrive from a few places, you can get it for free from their Github page, but please do considering buying it on Steam or itch.io, it’s only about £3.99 and it will help support the game’s development! It’s about time we had a game that took the best elements of Spore and actually made a good game with them!