Devblog #51: Onward to Multicellular
Thrive News — March 7, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
It's finally time for the first major update of the Multicellular Stage development process! We have a new cell specialisation feature allowing you to really take advantage of the multiple cell types you can make for your Multicellular species. Additionally, you can now control the growth order of cells, giving you far greater control over the course of life as a Multicellular organism. There are also several smaller additions and improvements to the stage, making it overall more fun to play and building a foundation for future development.
Though our work is focused on the multicellular Stage, we also have some more general changes, such as a new environmental tolerances UI, updates to water currents and bigger pieces of ice in the ice sheet patch. That's not mentioning the many bug fixes, balance changes and and performance improvements.
This is just the first step of Multicellular Stage development, and a lot of time near the start of the year was spent on maintenance and the fixing of issues from the 1.0 release. Which is to say, we can hopefully show you even more progress in the next update!
Read on for more details, or play the new version now.
Thrive 1.0.1
Multicellular Stage
As development is now focused on the Multicellular Stage, it is no longer marked as a prototype and the "you are entering prototypes" warning has been moved to the Macroscopic Stage. With that, there have been quite a few additions and improvements to the Stage. Similarly to how you can set the duplication order of cell parts in the Microbe Stage, you can now set the growth order of cells in the Multicellular Stage. Significantly, the first cell in your selected growth order is also the "core" cell of your organism which the rest of the cells turn around.
Another improvement is in the algorithm that translates the multicellular editor design into the actual in-game multicellular colony shape. The latter now visually matches much better with the design you actually made. Unfortunately, there is still the fundamental problem that your multicellular design is made up of perfect hexagons on a hexagonal grid, while the cells you make can have pretty much any shape and size. So most likely there are always going to be designs that cannot be translated to a real physical shape with good accuracy.
There's also a variety of other changes to start making the Multicellular into a more complete and fun experience. Firstly, the environmental tolerances system now functions for Multicellular species. You can set the tolerance sliders in the tab in the main editor. The effects on tolerances from cell parts are averaged across all cells.
Smaller changes include turning speed being increased for all colonies (which includes Multicellular species) and growth speed being increased in Multicellular. We hope these change make the stage more enjoyable to play. Finally, we felt the transition from a colony at the end of the Microbe stage to a single cell in the Multicellular stage felt odd, so you now start off with a species design made up of 3 of your starting cell type.
Cell Specialisation
One new Multicellular Stage feature of significance is cell specialisation. Now, cells will get a bonus to process speeds based on how much of the cell is made up of just one type of organelle. So the more focused in function a cell is, the more powerful and easier to fuel with ATP it becomes.
The intention here is that you create separate cell types for separate functions and processes that you want to perform in the species as a whole. This is similar to how in real life you see different cell types focused on photosynthesis, storage, movement, etc. This is expected to form the basis for other mechanics in the Multicellular Stage.
Technically this feature is not Multicellular Stage-exclusive, it applies to single-cell microbes as well. But obviously, those have to balance cell specialisation bonuses with needing to fit all the functions you want to have in one cell. The Multicellular Stage then allows you to break this limitation, allowing you to have many different functions while still maximising the cell specialisation bonus. We hope this demonstrates what may be a very real advantage multicellular species have over single-celled species.
New Tolerances GUI
This new UI was first created quite some time ago, but the effort eventually stalled out. Recently, another contributor picked it up, and pulled the feature over the finish line. Not only are the visuals new, but it is also easier to use. In particular, Pressure tolerance is easier to manage, and modifier numbers are clearly shown. You can also clearly see the offset effects on the sliders caused by organelles in your cell(s).
Additional Features
- Updated to Godot Engine 4.6
- Added an option to change the GUI scale (mostly meant for reducing the scale)
- Initial multicellular body plan now consists of 3 cells
- Updated biome current settings to have much more varied currents across different patches
- Multicellular freebuild now starts with the world oxygenated and the starting patch is on the surface
- Fixed realism bug with ATP transferring between the cells of a colony (and in multicellular)
- Fixed straight edges appearing in compound clouds
- Improved compound cloud performance by adjusting the math
- Made balance changes to various patch events
- General balancing and other improvements to auto-evo
- Multicellular growth rate is now not limited to the same value as in the microbe stage, instead it is multiple times higher like it was supposed to be set originally
A full list of changes is at the end of this post
What’s Next
With this release of Thrive we are moving officially into the Multicellular Stage development as planned. So while our main focus will be to finish the multicellular stage this year, there will still be some Microbe Stage improvements as well when volunteers make them. As the Multicellular Stage uses quite many Microbe Stage mechanics, we think we can finish it this year and many of the improvements for the stage will also help the Microbe Stage. This release was a bit of a gentle easing into the Multicellular stage, but for the next release we plan to get into the features that will make Multicellular feel special.
Join us a bit later today for our developer Thrivestream where we'll celebrate the release on the stream, but also answer the usual question of what's coming in the next releases. You can visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this release or comment below.
Watch the stream:
Patch Notes
- Overhauled the tolerances editing GUI entirely
- Implemented tolerances for the multicellular stage
- Implemented selecting growth order and the bud cell in the multicellular editor
- Added microbe and cell type specialization that grants a bonus for cells that mostly consist of a single organelle type
- Made the specialization feature show average specialization in the multicellular editor
- Updated to Godot Engine 4.6
- Added an option to change the GUI scale (mostly meant for reducing the scale)
- Initial multicellular body plan now consists of 3 cells
- Marked multicellular as no longer a prototype
- Moved the game win condition to the multicellular stage from microbe
- Updated biome current settings to have much more varied currents across different patches
- Water current strengths have been increased to make the max effect more noticeable
- Multicellular freebuild now starts with the world oxygenated and the starting patch is on the surface
- Fixed initial microbe tolerances not being always calculated correctly when starting directly in the multicellular stage
- Fixed realism bug with ATP transferring between the cells of a colony (and in multicellular)
- Created a new cell layout algorithm for multicellular that tries to preserve cell positions more closely
- The process panel now shows all processes in a microbe colony
- Fixed straight edges appearing in compound clouds
- Improved compound cloud performance by adjusting the math
- Improved compound cloud performance with world shift coordinate caching
- Added big ice snowflakes to the ice shelf
- Buffed multicellular and colony rotation speeds
- Buffed meteor impact events by adding a rare new bigger size
- Made balance changes to various patch events
- General balancing and other improvements to auto-evo
- Reduced migration sizes in auto-evo
- Multicellular growth rate is now not limited to the same value as in the microbe stage, instead it is multiple times higher like it was supposed to be set originally
- Enabled organelle unlocks for the multicellular stage
- Improved multicellular MP calculation by tracking which type each cell type was split from to allow better changes detection
- Added 2 new macroscopic music tracks
- Forced any species splitting from the player to pick a new colour before it was only likely to happen or the new colour may have been quite similar
- The hover panel now displays other cell's health
- Added a tooltip for the run auto-evo during gameplay option as some people misunderstood what it did
- Improved auto-evo performance by implementing custom species score key hashes
- Improved auto-evo performance by removing useless data caches and improving cache lookup efficiency
- Microbe initial compounds now take specific storage capacities into account
- Microbe AI in control of colonies, where just other members of the colony can engulf, is able to now use engulfing
- Added slight randomness to microbe AI think interval
- Made sure AI cells cannot look for mucilage thinking it is useful
- The option to show ATP balance without external resources now allows compounds that the cell itself can generate
- Added a debug console to the game (default hotkey is F10)
- Added a console command to directly load any scene or stage, there's also a command history and a few utility commands
- Implemented editor cheats for the multicellular editor
- Disabled evolutionary tree rebuild if it is not required to make saves with a long history load much faster
- Small GUI tweaks to organelle popup menu and the microbe HUD
- Small tweaks to the Thriveopedia GUI and a fix to the side panel collapse animation
- Stopped species with 0 focus from always thinking they could fire toxins (even if they had none)
- Added a safety check in eject engulfed object to address a bug report but it is unknown what the effect of this is as the original problem is very rare
- Fixed not being able to place even a single part when mutation cost difficulty setting was set too high. Now each edit costs always at
- st 100 MP.
- Fixed not being able to properly control mucocyst state in multicellular colonies with different kinds of cells
- Fixed incorrect organelle position calculations for rotated multicellular cells which was able to cause various different errors in the editor
- Fixed the save list items continuing to load in the background even after closing the menu. Now they cancel the load once that menu is
- osed. This should fix a problem where loading a stage waited for a long time before starting due to the load queue being full.
- Fixed vacuole tolerance bonus effect not being calculated correctly
- Fixed multiple places in the GUI with too long text in some languages
- Fixed incorrect tooltip on temperature symbol in the planet configuration screen
- Fixed the cell statistics panel in multicellular editor referring to the organism as a whole
- Fixed weird connection lines appearing in multicellular colonies that were spawned fully grown
- Fixed auto-evo prediction not predicting any energy gain from miches that were empty originally
- Fixed MP calculation error when using symmetry mode and the hover hexes overlapped
- Fixed not updating the species details text if the species was visually the same in the evolutionary tree
- Fixed loading saves with custom auto-evo configuration
- Fixed the heat accumulation bar not being anchored to the bottom right of the game window
- Fixed an error in the editor caused by a few operations trying to trigger too early
- Fixed population indicator circles not being correctly centered on the patch icons (instead they were in the top left)
- Fixed the multicellular editor not updating editor hover positions which was incorrect but didn't cause visible bugs yet with the MP system
- Prevented root metaball deletion in macroscopic and fixed a debug check error when deleting many other metaballs
- Fixed macroscopic editor allowing deleting an in-use cell type
- Fixed changing selected stage in the main menu Thriveopedia triggering an error
- Fixed duplicate texture name where they only differed by case
- Removed the option to disable the prototypes on new game
- Suppressed popup error about missing monitors, which could be caused by configuring the game for a specific monitor and then removing the monitor
- Added ignoring for more release mode signal disconnect errors so that they aren't reported as the recent reports have not been useful at all about them
- In languages that want to customize percentage format, the percentage symbol is now hidden from the MP bar(as it is pending a bigger improvement to make placement of the percentage symbol more flexible)
- Fixed a desync between water current visuals and simulation
- Fixed a bug in the direct multicellular stage starter causing an error when trying to use it
- Adjusted auto-evo tolerance change debug code to not trigger in situations where perfect adaptation was reduced
- Added safety check code for the cheapest possible organelle
- Added automatic check against files being added in the future that differ only by case
- Improved the hashing algorithm for shape caching to fix conflicts
- Improved efficiency of our input manager registration
- Updated to .NET 10
- Fixed some new code warnings caused by the C# update
- Fixed new null propagation warnings in the code
- Updated copyright year to 2026 in the code
- Updated translations failed check to no longer mention Babel, which was a tool we last used multiple years ago
- Fixed our SimpleBarrier implementation
- Improved the code for the SimpleBarrier class by increasing its memory padding
- Changed our thread short wait for ARM to use a C# command to request that the current thread doesn't eat as much CPU time, though this operation may not be implemented for all CPUs so we likely need to do further changes related to this.
- Switched to our SimpleBarrier and re-enabled ThreadLocal data for slight performance optimization
- Some code improvements
- Improved some code comments and fixed a few problems
- Added some missing periods to our README file
- Added developer documentation for the console
- Updated the visual studio code setup instructions
- Updated gdUnit to 6.1.1
- Updated System.IO.Hashing from 10.0.1 to 10.0.3
- Updated Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.NetAnalyzers from 10.0.101 to 10.0.102
- Updated dependency packages
- Updated code checking tools
- Updated Thriveopedia text
- Updated translations