Ecosystem News

Let’s try and get you up to speed on the fascinating oddity that is simulation game Ecosystem, on the off chance that Nate's coverage of it hasn't stuck with you like an unwelcome brain parasite you’re nonetheless unwilling to get removed for fear of the lingering emptiness it might cause (he once described an eel as “a quaver with erectile dysfunction”). Broadly speaking, this game is Spore’s evolutionary-biology-degree-having cousin. It’s been in early access for about three years now, but with the latest "Crustacean" update, it’s just hit 1.0. Once again, carcinization has come for all things.

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The day has finally arrived! Crustaceans have come to your ecosystems, bringing the game version up to 1.0!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It's been a long journey from our initial early access release back in March 2021!

Since our initial early access launch we have had 12 major update alongside smaller bug fixing patches:

• Information Update
  
• Plant Progression Update
  
• Aquarium Update
  
• Steam Workshop Update
  
• Terraforming Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Update
  
• Camera Mode Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Expanded Update
  
• Creature Head Update
  
• Combat Update
  
• Behaviour Update
  
• and then now, finally the big one - the Crustacean Update!
  

We've also had new languages added in that time with the following languages now available in Ecosystem:

• English
  
• German
  
• French
  
• Japanese
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Traditional Chinese
  

All this wouldn't have been possible without you, the community, supporting the project from day one. Special thanks also goes out to Stobz, the Lead Community Scientist for Ecosystem and passionate Discord mod. His support on the Discord and the Steam community forums has been really helpful to our tiny team.

Massive thanks again to everyone who's been along on this journey with us!

Ecosystem 1.0 Patch Notes

FEATURES

• Added crustaceans: these long-awaited creatures evolve to crawl around on the seafloor, evolving locomotion strategies completely different from the fish swimming above them.
  
• Substantial changes to improve long term evolution: the game now splits off subspecies to protect interesting new mutations and give them time to develop before being put into direct competition with more established peers, resulting in much more change in species over longer timeframes.
  
• Rework creature physics to allow much more complex creature body shapes with more articulated joints: previously these types were likely to run into trouble in the physics simulation and die out, which unfortunately often meant killing off some of the most interesting physiologies.
  

CHANGES

• Make whale-sized creatures better at surviving and less weird-looking.
  
• Corals and other misc food items burst into tiny pieces when eaten like the plants, instead of fading away like dead creatures.
  
• Instead of instantly dying, immature creatures try to flee when attacked by predators.
  
• Rework creature photos in the phylogenetic tree.
  
• Allow for 4x timescales.
  
• Allow click-to-select while the interact menu is up if none of the toggles are selected.
  
• Adjust the chase camera so that it handles the surface correctly, even when a creature is leaping out.
  
• Add Chinese language support.
  
• Performance: deactivate softbody effects if creatures are far from the camera.
  
• Lower plankton spread to be more in line with other plants.
  
• Performance: substantially optimize plankton rendering.
  
• When reviving deceased ancestors in order to keep the minimum hard cap valid, select based on how successful they were.
  
• Rework tutorial for brevity and to highlight a few core features.
  
• Make the stored 'Flatland' terrain be perfectly flat.
  
• Add a warning if you have made changes in the evo panel and not applied them.
  
• Clicking 'force combat' on two creatures who are already fighting will now stop the fight.
  
• Warnings such as the one advising that baby carp remain in an immature state now only display once in a playthrough instead of every time you click on them.
  
• Hide options in the editor if they haven't been unlocked yet (eg predator, apex predator, and crustacean).
  
• 
  

FIXES

• Fix: limbs can appear detached from their parent body parts.
  
• Fix: bloom effect is too strong in some environments.
  
• Fix: after spawning a stored creature, it was possible to get flashes where all creatures' skins would change to a new color and then change back.
  
• Fix: plants carried by creatures as gifts to others were frequently in the wrong position, floating outside the mouth.
  
• Fix: gift plants sometimes seemed to gradually get pulled deeper into the creature's mouth.
  
• Fix: tooltips disappear if you move even a pixel.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, newly added parts can end up in the right positions but connected to the wrong parent parts, resulting in very glitchy looking bodies.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, unlinking a part can actually delete the part or move it to an incorrect position.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, if you undo, the clipboard is cleared, but the game doesn't tell you this so the paste operation just fails silently.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, its possible to create more parts than there are selection boxes for.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, pasted parts can sometimes have an unintuitive or even self-intersecting orientation.
  
• Fix: creature editor seems to report self-intersections when they aren't there.
  
• Fix: creatures that were recently edited in the editor sometimes die soon after.
  
• Fix: cap the default fps target to handle cases where the monitor reports an erroneous refresh rate.
  
• Fix: a carried plant could end up incorrectly affecting the physics of a creature or carrion.
  
• Fix: incorrect current values caused by rare divide-by-zero in fluid sim.
  
• Fix: scores temporarily display as zero when you drag.
  
• Fix: rare situation where a single creature can get stuck without ever maturing, aging, or dying.
  
• Fix: 'ghost' creatures would blip in incorrect locations for just one frame.
  
• Fix: creatures could erroneously end up in combat with nothing.
  
• Fix: when over 200 creatures are present you don't always get an energy display when you click on a creature.
  
• Fix: camera smoothing values need to be re-entered on each new playthrough.
  
• Fix: if you have no internet, the game freezes when you interact with Steam features.
  
• Fix: the photo taken when sharing terrain can catch some UI elements in frame.
  
• Fix: creatures sometimes swim around with zzz's still coming out of their heads.
  
• Fix: small errors could occur processing plant-mouth collisions.
  
• Fix: plankton vision calculation would always behave as though it were sitting in darkness.
  
• Fix: we sometimes process targeting, including pathfinding, before creatures were born.
  
• Fix: trying to spawn a small number (~5) of creatures frequently fails outright.
  
• Fix: changes made in the species panel do not update the evolutionary parameters or interact panel and vice versa.
  
• Fix: if you spawn a stored species when the game is paused, it looks like nothing at all happens until you unpause.
  
• Fix: you can zoom too far in or out in chase camera.
  
• Fix: sometimes no nodes are onscreen when you open the phylogenetic tree.
  
• Fix: viewing older sections in the phylogenetic tree resets the horizontal offset so that it is hard to tell what links to what.
  
• Fix: the message about a population being nonviable can pop up erroneously on exit.
  
• Fix: typing numbers in the evolutionary parameters input boxes also affects the interact panel.
  

Hi everyone!

We’re back for an October community update and, you might already know, we have some major news to share this month! Let’s jump right in!


[h3]1.0 Full Release Incoming![/h3]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
After 4 years in early access, Ecosystem is finally getting our 1.0 full release on November 8th! Crustaceans will be crawling out of hiding to join this brutal struggle for survival. Alongside the seafloor dwellers we are also adding a myriad of improvements and fixes to the game. See here for the full change log and learn what’s coming to the depths!

[h3]Award Nomination[/h3]

The good news just keeps coming. We have been nominated for the Creative Gaming Awards by PLAY Creative Gaming Festival! Creativity is a core part of our game and we aim to grant players maximum freedom in designing their creatures and the environment. We are honored to be selected alongside some truly amazing titles, which also allow players to display their creativity in so many different forms!

[h3]Animal Week[/h3]

At the start of October, we were part of the Animal Week Steam event. Organised by Games Incubator in support of WWF Poland, we get to celebrate wild life and help out a great cause!


That’s a wrap for this month, and now back to preparing for the big day! Be sure to follow us on Twitter, TikTok and YouTube for more news on our full release on November 8th!

Let's just get straight into it with the shiny new trailer revealing the game release date:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you don't have time to watch the trailer then the tldr is that Ecosystem 1.0 launches November 8th!

Alongside this announcement we've also given the Ecosystem demo an overhaul to bring it more in line with the polish of the full game. Below you can see the full patch notes for the Ecosystem Demo.

DEMO PATCH NOTES
The previous version of the demo was based on the full release version 0.71. This update brings it up to parity with the latest version of the full game. This list of patch notes includes all large-scale changes from 0.71 to today, including those already part of the main game:

FEATURES
Increased creature autonomy: after learning first to swim and then to seek out targets, creatures enter a life stage in which they are more autonomous in their decision-making, attempting to fulfill their individual needs. The following new behaviors are now available to creatures: finding shelter and resting, building nests, feeding on insects on the water surface, gathering food to bring to their offspring, playing and socializing, chasing each other or knocking stones around, swimming in schools, bioluminescence, and singing.
Reworked creature fertility and energy so that the odds of survival and number of offspring is less influenced by random factors.
Creatures now remember the locations of food seen while exploring.
Enabled the terraform and water color brushes in the Terrain Menu for use in the demo.
Updated the tutorial text for brevity and to better focus on key aspects of the game.

PERFORMANCE
Rework all Coral and some Misc food source level-of-detail meshes.
Rework the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment.

BUGS
Fix: Changing the diet on the evolutionary parameters menu prior to spawning a stored or online creature does not actually change the diet.
Fix: Some text overlaps in graphics menu in English and German.
Improved line-of-sight checks before creatures resort to pathfinding to prevent cases where creatures swim far up because their target is behind a small bump.
Fixed some errors with line of sight checks that could result in creatures not seeing food/mates that actually should have been visible.
Fixed error where color comparisons could be incorrect when checking how well a creature blends in with its environment.
Fix error that could cause some saves to fail to load.
Fix: boosting a creature creates offspring that are not initialized properly.
Fix error that can occur when a creature is recovering from a staggered state and actively targeted by another predator.
Fix: On rare occasions, creature models can freeze and end up floating permanently in the water.
Fix: On rare occasions, plant models can freeze and be unremovable by the player.
Fix: messages about species maturation and nonviability remain on the screen while the game closes down after exiting
Fix minor errors that could occur when the plankton cursor was outside of the game region and when displaying traits for certain creatures, which could impact performance.

Greetings everyone! Ecosystem was in some wonderful events during the month so you can say our September was... eventful. *Cough* Bad puns aside, let us get right into today’s monthly update!


One Special Day


We got to participate in One Special Day 2024, organised by Special Effect, to help level the playing field for physically disabled gamers. Gamers were getting more than just games in this event – they were also helping a great cause! Speaking of two birds with one stone!



Tokyo Game Show 2024 Steam Event


Another exciting event we took part in! We're honoured to be featured on the Tokyo Game Show 2024 Steam page alongside many other amazing titles!



And that's all for now! Be sure to check out our Twitter, TikTok and YouTube for the latest updates of Ecosystem!