In Thrive, you take control of an organism on an alien planet, beginning with the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Your goal is to survive in the environment, adapt your species by adding mutations, and thrive. Other species will emerge to compete with yours. They will evolve via a population dynamics driven simulation with random mutations - you must improve and spread your species to surpass them. The success of your species depends both on your skill in surviving as an individual cell and the changes you make in the editor.
In the Microbe Stage, you control a single microbe or a colony of microbes bound together. You swim through a watery environment to find the resources your cell needs to stay alive and to reproduce. Once you have reproduced, you enter the editor, where you can review how well your species and others are surviving, move to new biomes, and modify your species. Add new organelles, change your membrane, and change your cell's visuals. Your goal is to become a more complex lifeform by first evolving the nucleus to become a eukaryote, then using binding agents to form cell colonies, the precursor to the first multicellular lifeforms.
The major goals of Thrive are to create engaging, compelling gameplay that respects our players’ intelligence, and remain as accurate as possible in our depiction of known scientific theory without compromising the former. Thrive is an open-source project, and anyone with game development skill is welcome to join our team. The game uses the open-source Godot engine with the C# programming language.
If you don't have game development skills, you are still welcome to join our fan community. We would love to have you along for the long ride!
1.To download, click the button on the right, and you will be redirected to the download page.
2.Click 'Download' on the download page and wait for the download to complete.
3.When Thrive has finished downloading, you can right-click on the .rar file and select 'Extract to current folder'.(If you run into any errors during the extraction, you'll need to use WinRAR or 7-zip.)
4.Double click into the unzipped folder, find the .exe file and run it. (If there's a _readme.txt file in the folder, it's probably worth checking out.)
5.Enjoy your game experience! If you encounter any missing .dll errors, please look for a 'Redist' or '_CommonRedist' folder and install all the programs contained within.