Ecosystem News

Hey all, welcome to Development Update #07, as you know from our roadmap the next update will be the Aquarium Update. I'll let Tom talk more about how the update is progressing below, we will follow up with another community screenshot round up at the end too!



[h2]A Note From Tom[/h2]

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the seventh development update!

This month I've been working on adding an aquarium to the game. This special map serves as a showcase for the best creatures that have evolved over the course of your playthroughs of the main game or creative mode.

Every time you save a creature in those game modes, it automatically spawns in your aquarium, where there is no fighting, no feeding, no aging, and no evolution. The aquarium will also support multiple different environments; I am currently testing whether it is preferable to have a single large aquarium map with, for example, a reef room, a lake room, a deep sea room, etc., or whether it is preferable to have each environment be a small separate map. (Let me know your ideas/thoughts below!)

Since the main function of the aquarium is to serve as a display, most of the features in this game mode are geared toward this. Plants do not spread and cannot be eaten, but you can place them yourself and customize the terrain as usual. I've also been experimenting with allowing for the ability to place artificial lights in the aquarium to allow for highlighting specific spots.

In this mode, the spawn option adds in a single fully-grown saved fish instead of an entire species, and you can cull creatures from the aquarium without impacting the ability to spawn them in the other game modes.

Lastly, this update will also include another round of bugfixes, especially with the info view, which still had several kinks to work out.

Thank you for reading!
Tom Johnson

[h2]Community Screenshot Roundup[/h2]

Below I have collated some of the great shots the community have shared recently!

DJEHMLI on Steam submitted this beautiful shot!

FARMER JENKINS shared The Abyss over on Discord

FIRE TURKEY ONE created a four finned fish and shared it over on Discord

Last but not least ST0BZ has been back modding, and share the cube paint brush they got working!

Hi all, today we are releasing the next update for Ecosystem, which is a minor one and brings the game up to v0.20 - to get an idea for the updates that will be coming in the future, why not take a look at our previous roadmap reveal.

PATCH NOTES
v0.20

CHANGES
Reduce plankton density.
Add button to phylogenetic tree to allow viewing older sections in the tree that have scrolled off the bottom of the initial view.
Rework time sampling in birth, diet, and cause-of-death graphs so that they are not so jagged.
Reduce seed rate for inedible plants if they make up too large a percent of the total plant population.

FIXES
Fix issue where during long uninterrupted game sessions, it was possible to get into a state where new creatures could not be born (either via direct spawning or creature reproduction).
Fix issue where info displays remained visible if you opened the creature editor, chase camera, neural view, or save creature menu while it was open.
Fix some of the cases where panels could display in incorrect positions on some resolutions.
Fix issue where clicking some entries in the minimap legend would warp you to the wrong creatures.

Hey everyone - hope you're well?

I'm back this week to talk about what's next for Ecosystem and a provide a rough outline of the next few updates.

Today's update will cover:

• The roadmap
  
• Community screenshots
  

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[h2]Roadmap[/h2]

Up until now we've been a little quiet in regard to what's next for Ecosystem as after we launched our main priority was bug fixing (which fortunately wasn't as horrific as you might think!) and then addressing the initial concerns that players had regarding a lack of information to see a high level overview of their Ecosystem.

Since launch we've been gathering all of the feedback to help influence the next steps and I'll go through the next updates below - whilst there's no dates against these updates they are in the order in which they'll be coming out.

We're open to feedback (that's the point of Early Access right?) so if you have any thoughts about these updates let us know below in the comments.



[h3]Research Re-balancing - Minor Update[/h3]

We've had a lot of feedback relating to how plant research works and how it doesn't take long to get everything unlocked. Tom's taking a look into slowing the progression of unlocking new plants down to make it more meaningful when you actually get enough life points together to get that next plant.

This will also allow players to get to know how each plant behaves/spreads properly, as currently it's tempting to unlock everything and throw it all down and watch it spread.

[h3]Aquarium Update - Minor Update[/h3]

Following on from the research rebalancing, we are looking to introduce an "Aquarium Mode" - this will be a mode similar to creative but where nothing changes unless you place it (no plant spreading, no evolution, no fighting).

The way we envision this working, is that you create your Ecosystem as usual and when you have evolved the perfect fish, then you can save the creature, and put it into your "aquarium". Almost like a trophy room of all the best creatures you have taken the time to cultivate.

I keep putting "aquarium" in quotes because it won't be an actual aquarium, you won't see any glass etc, though we are debating introducing ornaments to be placed in the aquarium mode, it would be great to hear if you'd like a little pirate ship to place in the "aquarium" map or not.

[h3]Steam Workshop Support - Minor Update[/h3]

As mentioned in a previous development update, it's been great to see users sharing maps and fish with one another outside of the game and going to places like Nexus Mods to do so. We really want to encourage the sharing of creatures with one another, especially with the planned aquarium update. With this update we will aim to include full workshop support for both maps and creatures so the sharing process is a lot easier!

[h3]Evolution Sandbox - Major Update[/h3]

This will be the second major update to the game and is still in the planning stages. The main purpose of this update will be to put more control of the evolution into players hands, we're talking toggles, switchers and sliders!

We know it's a little frustrating sometimes that you think you're doing all the right things to encourage a creature to be even better so the goal of this update is to alleviate that. We'd love to hear what exactly you'd love more control over.

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Following on from the Evolution Sandbox update we have more plans for the game but we'll save those for another day - and if you have any ideas for updates not included here do let us know!

We have previously spoken about a Crustacean Update and we still want to do that but there's a lot of issues to solve to make that workable so that's more long term. You can read more about our plans for crustaceans here.

Now onto some screenshots!

[h2]Community Screenshots[/h2]

This shot from PtarmiganCashier on Steam rivals our promo shots for the game!

Farmer Jenkins over on our Discord sharing this Chunky Monkey

Arleas on Steam showed off their successful Ecosystem through the new charts!

Serafine over on Discord showed off this alien looking landscape they created!

Last but not least, Kip Reigns on Steam shared what they dubbed a "hand fish!"

Hey everyone - we have a small update to share with you today, patch notes are below. The game version is now v0.20.

PATCH NOTES
v0.20

CHANGES
Reduce plankton density.
Add button to phylogenetic tree to allow viewing older sections in the tree that have scrolled off the bottom of the initial view.
Rework time sampling in birth, diet, and cause-of-death graphs so that they are not so jagged.
Reduce seed rate for inedible plants if they make up too large a percent of the total plant population.

FIXES
Fix issue where during long uninterrupted game sessions, it was possible to get into a state where new creatures could not be born (either via direct spawning or creature reproduction).
Fix issue where info displays remained visible if you opened the creature editor, chase camera, neural view, or save creature menu while it was open.
Fix issue where info displays would not always fit on the screen in lower resolutions.
Fix issue where clicking some entries in the minimap legend would warp you to the wrong creatures.

Hey everyone, just a quick patch to address some issues players were seeing when spawning in saved creatures, plus a few other minor tweaks. This brings the game to v0.19.

PATCH NOTES
v0.19

BUGS
Fix severe bug affecting stored creatures.
Fix bug that could cause subtrees of the phylogenetic tree to overlap .
Fix bug that could prevent some connections in the phylogenetic tree from highlighting correctly.

CHANGES
Add a button to the creature info panel in the phylogenetic tree that lets you warp to the creature if it is currently alive.
Buttons for diet, cause of death, births and population on the species view now highlight when you mouseover them.