Thrive · Community Announcements · October 24, 2026
Read the original on Steam ↗Thrive 1.7 has been released as the fourth major update to the Multicellular Stage! The time since the last update hasn't been quite as long as the one before that, but we still have a significant number of additions for you.
Included in this update as a major new feature is a new manual cell layout feature for people annoyed with how the automatic layout performs. Secondly, we have additional requirements to move to the Macroscopic Stage beyond just “add enough cells.” We also added new achievements for while you're in the Multicellular Stage. If you don't like the environment staying the same between thousands of generations, we have an option for that now too. We even have some updates to future Stage prototypes! And of course, quite a few smaller features, and a whole lot of bugfixes.
We would also like to remind people that our second community art contest is still ongoing. Art from this contest is to be used as Thrive loading screens and/or Juuzo Lenz's Thrive-inspired speculative evolution series. Art of all levels and diversity of quality is welcome!
See the full patch notes at the end of the post, or read the following sections for some highlights.
Precise Cell Layout
A longstanding complaint about the Multicellular Stage has been that the automated system for converting the hex cell layout to something that works in-gameplay does not always provide satisfactory results. The previous added membrane stretching system helps fill in the gaps, but did not change the logic of where cells are generally placed.
In order to address this, a new tab was added to the Multicellular Editor that allows you to preview what the gameplay layout generated from your current cell hex design is going to look like. More than that, it allows you to switch to fully manually making that layout yourself. We hope this will resolve frustration with the automatic layout system not fitting what you as the player had in mind with your design.
Of course, we do place some restrictions on exactly where you can place cells in this precise layout to ensure the game continues to function properly:
You can't allow any cells to be fully detached from the rest of the body.
Each cell needs to be within a few hexes of the cells it is adjacent to in the less-precise layout design (with an allowance for two disconnected cells).
Cells can't be disconnected at any point in the growth order.
Stage Transition Requirements
Up until now, the requirement of simply reaching 20 total cells in order to transition from the Multicellular to the Macroscopic Stage has been rather easy. The only way to directly make this take much longer would be to make placing new cells more expensive. However, this would obviously make playing around with the core features of the Multicellular Stage more difficult as well.
Instead, we decided to add a new set of requirements that your species needs to meet before you can transition to the next stage. These symbolize evolving into a more complex multicellular form with differentiated cell types before you can grow much larger. The new requirements include a minimum average specialization across your organism, a minimum average cell adjacency bonus, and switching to a more advanced reproduction mode. We also reduced the required number of cells to 15, as 20 cells is really the point where the game's systems and game design start creaking under the strain.
It's quite likely that we'll continue to tweak the numbers based on your responses after this release.
Achievements
One of the features considered required for the completion of the Multicellular Stage was a set of achievements matching the ones we already have for the Microbe Stage. We selected a number of different objectives covering different play-styles, and tried to make sure that they do not trigger at the same time all that much. These achievements are of course also implemented as Steam achievements. As you can see them there anyway, the new ones are listed here:
Ultimate Colony: Grow a multicellular colony of at least 21 living cells.
Ultimate Cellular Firepower: Fire at least 10 toxin projectiles at once as a multicellular organism.
You Animal!: Reproduce as a multicellular species with at least 10 cells, with every cell only getting ATP from glucose and no organelles producing glucose.
Specialized Weapons: Leave the multicellular editor with a cell type containing at least 5 pilus or toxin organelles, while every other cell type has at most 1.
Specialization Specialist: In multicellular, have at least 3 cell types with over 50% specialization and a different most common organelle in each.
Just a Flesh Wound: Lose at least 30% of your total body plan of at least 10 cells, then survive to the editor.
In Search of a Home: Travel at least 1,000 units of distance during a single life as a spore.
Microscopic Birds and Bees: Successfully reproduce sexually in the Multicellular Stage.
Perfectly Packed: Leave the multicellular editor with a body plan of at least 10 cells and no gaps or holes in its full layout.
Beyond the Microbial: Reach the macroscopic stage.
New Game Option
There's been a very long-standing discussion within the team on whether it's right for the environment you were swimming around in to stay the same between entering the editor and leaving it again (As has been the case up until now, unless you move to a new patch). Now, an option was finally added that, if enabled, always re-spawns you in a refreshed environment once you leave editor. You can find this in in the Miscellaneous tab of the advanced New Game options.
Macroscopic Stage Preparations
While development is still focused on the Multicellular Stage, some of our volunteers have been working on features we will need for the Macroscopic Stage.
One of these is a new tool for rotating the position of a metaball around the parent metaball it is attached to. When the tool is selected, clicking on any metaball will create two rings around the parent metaball, intersecting the selected metaball. Click-and-dragging the rings will change the position of the selected metaball accordingly, with a ghostly outline showing where the metaball will be placed if you release the mouse button.
The other feature is a new system for displaying textures on the 3D organisms. It does this by taking the given texture and pasting it several times on different partitions of the skin, and then blending the seams. As the system can technically display any image on the organism, we had some fun with this as well. The actual textures themselves shown right now are generic placeholders, and not intended to be final.
Additional Features
Non-player species can now become multicellular by themselves.
The density of terrain is now decreased once the player moves to the Multicellular Stage.
Added a set of new Multicellular Stage tutorials to the editor.
Exiting the editor with unused cell types is now disallowed.
Reworked how movement speed and buffs are calculated, especially for cell colonies.
Reworked how glucose is provided for engulfed and killed cells. You will generally get more consistent amounts of glucose based on the cell's size.
Increased the max zoom out distance when controlling a large multicellular colony, and it now dynamically increases as you grow more cells.
Improved functionality, HUD notifications and visuals of sexual reproduction.
Added the specialization bonus to storage and ATP tooltips
Changed the visuals of the society stage buildings and added separate visuals for the factory.
Many optimizations in processing time and species quality for auto-evo.
Improvements to the auto-evo exploration tool, including the ability to load existing saves.
A full list of changes is at the end of this post.
What’s Next
We're closing in on the end of the year, and with that, the point where we need to wrap up development on the Multicellular Stage, polish it, and declare it finished. As you can see on the Release Roadmap, not everything was implemented in the order originally planned, with some things delayed and others moved forward. Overall, we're still on schedule for that goal of starting Macroscopic Stage development around the start of the new year.
Coming up will the implementation of the Axon organelle as this was almost, but not quite, ready for this update. Another likely feature from our non-optional list is size-related costs, intended to give some additional pressure to specialize and smartly place cells as your multicellular organism grows larger. Additional updates to auto-evo are very likely as well, including a difficulty option to disallow the AI transitioning to the next Stage before you do.
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. (Questions can also be asked in advance in this thread). You can visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this release. Or comment below with your thoughts.
Added a viewer and editor for the full multicellular colony layout to give players insight into why their colony is shaped the way it is and optionally to change it (while keeping the overall structure)
Added a set of 9 achievements for the multicellular stage
Added a set of new multicellular stage tutorials to the editor
Added more complex conditions for advancing to the macroscopic stage
Exiting the editor with unused cell types is now disallowed
Added an option to reset the world state each time upon exiting the editor
Reworked how movement speed and buffs are calculated especially for cell colonies
Reworked the actomyosin to no longer impact flagella or cilia movement, instead it now acts on the base movement only
Buffed slime jet force by 10%
Limited dropped cell chunks down to 6 (from 20) and total chunk count as well to reduce frame drops caused by cell deaths
Adjusted physics timestepping to be lower quality when the game performance is low. And added enabling a physics time slow down when performance is extremely low.
Added a 10-second timeout for the fancy cell placement algorithm to reduce the time a black screen could be shown upon trying to exit the editor
Non-player species can now become multicellular by themselves
Implemented the special cell type selection GUI for the gamete types (as it was only implemented for sporulation in the previous release)
Increased the max zoom out distance when controlling a large multicellular colony
Reduced terrain density by 50% in the multicellular stage
A fresh auto-evo run is started when becoming multicellular to ensure auto-evo gets a chance to make initial multicellular species
Improved the mate spawning option to be more reliable and added HUD notices to tell the player what is going on
Improved the gamete shooting command to force ejection and fixed some compatibility checks
Increased gamete sensor radius by 50%
Improved the camera animation upon gametes merging
Added the specialization bonus to storage and ATP tooltips
Increased max digestion efficiency from 0.6 to 1.0
Reworked how bonus glucose is calculated on cell death / engulfment
Significantly reduced auto-evo runtime by skipping duplicate organelle deletion checks
Added caching of mutation scores during auto-evo sorting to slightly improve performance
Added tooltips to the achievements view to always show their unlock conditions
Fixed germinating a spore not always starting from an initial growth state which could rarely cause very strange issues
Fixed delay-spawned colony members being able to be despawned before they got attached
Fixed gamete spawn rotation and spawn position in a colony
Fixed some colony engulfing checks and fixed reattaching to engulfers to stop cells just becoming broken
Fixed a problem where a colony member was potentially still trying to generate a membrane when the leader was removed
Fixed some errors caused by trying to use membrane data before it was ready
Fixed a bug with multicellular fallback cell placement algorithm being able to create gaps
Fixed distributed colony damage causing each entity to play a sound which made things like damage sounds much louder than intended
Fixed process speed and specialization bonus to be independent of the order they are applied in. This has a slight impact on the entire bioprocess system.
Fixed cell duplication not giving any compounds to the daughter cell if the dividing cell had not ran processes and calculated useful compounds list
Fixed changing organelles in multicellular not refreshing tolerance warnings
Fixed mass budding causing an action history entry for other reproduction modes when starting the editor with just a single cell
Fixed placing stuff in the editor after a history resetting action like the new cell button in freebuild
Fixed initial composition being only released on cell death if the cell stored any amount of that compound
Fixed actomyosin reproduction cost not matching its hex count
Fixed a bug with the editor button becoming immediately available if the player died while going to the editor
Fixed the editor warning about needing at least 2 cells for sexual reproduction not actually displaying
Fixed a theoretical case where the cell placement algorithm could get stuck in an infinite loop
Fixed the delete hotkey not working in the cell body plan editor
Fixed clicking on evolutionary tree nodes when there are missing generations in the historical data
Fixed the game being able to pause during the loading screen
Fixed parent species references getting stale in auto-evo when applying results
Fixed incorrect math for slime jet score in auto-evo
Fixed the auto-evo logic for prey channel inhibitor
Fixed a pulling cilia calculation problem in auto-evo
Fixed a slight disconnect between auto-evo and gameplay in engulf size math
Fixed channel inhibitor calculation being the opposite than it should have been in auto-evo
Fixed auto-evo incorrectly checking required enzyme for the smallest cell in multicellular prey
Changed cell facade missing from active list to not be an error any more
Fixed entering an editor scene with a console command not remembering that that is a cheated state if a save is made afterwards
Fixed a missing period in the microbe editor tutorial text
The game now forces an unpause upon selecting a new patch on patch extinction, this should fix a softlock
Added validation against special names in cell type names and a few other constraints that ensure the game shouldn't break no matter what is entered as a name by the player
Fixed debug entity labels causing errors on mass removal
Added creature skin textures for the macroscopic prototype
Added a metaball rotation tool to the macroscopic editor
Changed the visuals of the society stage buildings and added separate visuals for the factory
Made some macroscopic / aware stage menus close when going to the editor to prevent the scene switch from destroying them permanently
Added an achievement for reaching the macroscopic stage
Fixed cell type layout shifts causing errors when undoing actions in the macroscopic editor. This is the same fix as multicellular editor received a while ago.
Applied missing specialization in auto-evo calculations
Refactored and cleaned up some auto-evo code to be more manageable
Fixed a minor code clarity problem in auto-evo prey speed calculation
Removed unnecessary HP offset in auto-evo
Replaced LINQ in nominal capacity counting for a slight efficiency improvement for auto-evo
Optimized random mutation selection in auto-evo a little bit
Optimized random X taking algorithm in auto-evo
Optimized remove organelle placement check in auto-evo
Optimized auto-evo population calculation step a bit by reusing cache memory
Optimized auto-evo initial compounds calculation by it only happening on succeeding candidate species
Cleaned up patch preparation, scoring, and accumulation code in auto-evo
Unified auto-evo code doing layout cloning
Added a correctness change to auto-evo organelle removal in cell cell types that shouldn't have an effect on real game functionality
Added a temporary auto-evo optimization regarding checking storage capacity. The checks now skip special storage but in the future we hope to take that into account properly.
Added a regression test for species data cache in auto-evo
Refactored chunk compound scoring in auto-evo and added tests to ensure the behaviour of the code is the same as before
Fixed auto-evo calculating toxin score from an unused cell type
Fixed auto-evo state variables not being fully accurate whether a run was in progress or not
Improved auto-evo code in miche population writing
Improved safety of the code handling starting of auto-evo run and publishing the background operation results
Added average run time to auto-evo exploring tool
Added loading of existing worlds from saves to the auto-evo exploring tool
Added a debug check to ensure there's no gaps in the multicellular gameplay layout
Extracted the editor auto-evo prediction panel as a separate component
Added cloud renderer prototype code phase 2
Added OpenGL compatibility to the prototype cloud renderer code
Modified the included free view camera debug tool to use our custom input system and keybindings
Added a modular shader builder for later usage
Added catching of background task errors when the main thread waits for them
Improved safety in our task executor system in case some task items failed
Optimized a hex operation in debug builds
Fixed some terrain chunks using the wrong cull mode and thus drawing more geometry than intended
Updated code review settings to ignore other languages than English
Added some more caveats to our style guide related to British English
Updated outdated info in our style guide on method order
Updated style guide in relation to precomputed values and some other things
Updated git settings to specify a few file types to always use LF file endings. This should help with some persistent files changed problems on Windows.
The Thrive development scripts now recognize "godot-mono" as the primary name of the Godot executable but still accept plain godot as a fallback
Created a procedure document on how to most easily fix translation conflicts
Adjusted code review tool locale file paths
Increased Godot-using unit test connect timeout to try to make them more reliable in CI
Fixed a problem in organelle removal tests
Added new automated brace style checks
Updated code analysis tools
Updated code checking tools
Updated unit test libraries
Updated code submodules
Updated AngleSharp from 1.7.2 to 1.8.5
Updated System.IO.Hashing from 10.0.11 to 10.0.13
Updated other dependencies including Sugiyama to 0.15.1
