Ecosystem News

Hi everyone! [h3][/h3]


November has been such an incredible month! On November 8th, Ecosystem finally entered full release with the arrival of our crustaceans. We’d like to thank each and every one of you for your continued support – for playing our game, providing feedback and suggestions, or supporting us on our social media. Every bit of support means the world to us as a solo dev and a small publishing team, and we could not have done it without you. It is our greatest pleasure to see all your creations thriving in the depths of Ecosystem. You can find the full patch notes of our 1.0 update here.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Launch Live Stream![/h3]

To celebrate 1.0, we had a launch livestream on Slug Disco’s channel! Hei Man and Mike from Slug Disco were joined by Tom, mastermind and solo developer behind the creation of Ecosystem, to showcase the gameplay and a slightly more in-depth discussion on the unique evolution mechanics of Ecosystem. You can catch up on YouTube if you didn't catch it live!


[h3]Steam Autumn Sale[/h3]



We are deep into the autumn season, and the Steam Autumn Sale has begun! Ecosystem is now at 30% off until December 4th, and this is the perfect time to grab our game, either for building your own virtual aquarium or as an early Christmas gift for friends!


[h3]Steam Awards Nominations[/h3]


The Steam Autumn Sale also marks the start of the Steam Awards nominations, and Ecosystem is aiming for the Most Innovative Gameplay category. We believe Ecosystem has some truly unique evolution features, and we hope you feel the same. Your support and recognition mean a lot to us, and we’d really appreciate it if you could give Ecosystem a nomination and a positive review on Steam.


[h3]Community Creations[/h3]

With the crustaceans now crawling all over the seafloor of Ecosystem, let’s check out the creations by our community. Here are some fun crustacean designs by Turkey on our Discord channel:


Look at these cute crustaceans. And yes, crustaceans can definitely swim! If you wish to talk about evolutionary matters and share your own creations, do join us on Discord!



On that note, we shall end this community update here. We hope you are all having fun with our 1.0 release and creating the most unique ecosystems out there. Follow us on Twitter, TikTok and YouTube for any new Ecosystem updates! Once again, thank you all so much for playing and supporting Ecosystem throughout our journey.

Greetings everyone!

Thank you so much to everyone who has played Ecosystem, whether you have been here since early access or just joined us recently. We are very delighted that Ecosystem’s 1.0 full release has been met with such positive response from the community. Now the Steam Awards 2024 is around the corner and we hope you could consider nominating us for this year’s Most Innovative Gameplay Award.



In Ecosystem, creatures evolve and learn all on their own to adapt to their surroundings. During early access, we’ve had 11 major updates to flesh out the aquatic world of Ecosystem, allowing players to craft unique environments for their species to thrive, as well as introducing numerous evolution options that creatures can organically adopt:

• 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
  

On November 8th, the crustaceans arrived with our 1.0 full release as the 12th major update. We love seeing everyone having such a great time with the new shellfish creatures, and we could not have done it without all of your support over this long journey of development.

https://youtu.be/LPVd926QMe4?si=2EpcbbREyUgnZg3Y

The Most Innovative Gameplay award has some intense competition, and it’d mean the world to us if you could nominate us with the button on top and leave us a positive review. Thank you!

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.

Read more

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!