About
Spore is a 2008 life-simulation game from Maxis in which players guide a species from a single microscopic organism through multicellular life, intelligence, and eventually interstellar civilization, with heavy use of player-generated content shared via the online Sporepedia. Thrive is an open-source evolution simulation in which players guide a species from a single-celled organism, starting as the Last Universal Common Ancestor, through mutation and natural selection while competing against other species that evolve via a population-dynamics simulation. It's built with the Godot Engine in C#, distributed on Steam and itch.io, and partly funded through Patreon. Currently only the Microbe Stage is complete, with an in-development Multicellular Stage and further prototype-level stages.
How it differs from the original
Unlike Spore, Thrive frames its species-building around real biological concepts such as organelles, membranes, and mutations, and only its early Microbe Stage is fully complete — later stages of the intended full life-cycle scope are still in development or exist only as prototypes.
Getting started
Thrive is available on Steam and itch.io and includes a light interactive tutorial for its Microbe Stage; it supports Steam Workshop for community-made content. Building it from source requires the Godot Engine and the setup steps documented in the repository.
Known limitations
- gameplay: Multicellular-specific gameplay is still somewhat limited despite the stage being quite developed.