The Sapling News

* Improved animal sitting positions on branches
* Animals no longer die when sitting in a tree that dies
* Fixed glitches resulting from animals growing up in a tree
* Fixed glitches resulting from animals getting out of a tree because of an instinct
* Prevented eating animations in trees
* Discovered and fixed a whole category of 'impossible creatures' (creatures that had two bodyparts of the same type, where one is single on top and the other double, like the primitive photoreceptor eye AND the compound eye)
* Changed how roots work for larger plants, so larger plants with a lot of branches are more likely to succeed
* Set a maximum temperature for the greenhouse scenario, so it's a bit easier to complete
* Cleaned up how energy bars visualize really small and really high numbers
* Polished icon positions in the attack and weight visualizations in the animal editor
* Fixed the white square bug in the 'new unlocked bodypart' alert in the animal editor
* Fixed mouth colors when a beak AND another mouth is used

* Added extra 'reintroduce' menu item for both plants and animals
* In the greenhouse level, there are extra help messages to nudge the player in the right direction
* Sound settings are now saved in between play sessions
* 75% speedup of the system that makes animals animatable, decreasing load times and increasing FPS
* The system that makes animals animatable now only needs 2% of the memory it used before
* 90% speedup of the system that specializes generic animations onto a specific animal, decreasing load times and increasing FPS
* Fixed flying animals sitting still in the air just before dying
* Prevented eat and idle animations in the air
* Fixed objective list view showing the 'not met' icon while actual number was even higher than the minimum required in the greenhouse and disaster level
* Fixed mouths facing the wrong way during the cry animation
* Fixed the proto beak facing the wrong way during all animations
* Fixed mutated animals sometimes having incorrect statistics and abilities
* Fixed animals climbing in growing trees and growing themselves along with the tree
* Fixed organisms being visualized at the wrong side of the river for the disaster level
* Lock camera rotation after clicking the 'roots' button in the plant editor, preventing weird camera glitches

* Made random mutations for animals less random and more realistic
* The game now detects high RAM usage and attempts to fix it
* Reintroduced idle animations for primitive animals (now fixed)
* Added extra idle animations: moving legs (primitive animals only), shaking head
* Polished/cleaned eating animation
* Added subtle screen shake when placing large organisms
* Added subtle alternative click sound when changing traits in the organism
* Fixed randomly mutated animals sometimes standing still when they should be walking
* Fixed randomly mutated animals not always showing their new mutations
* Fixed flying animals hovering in place for some time once they ascend from the ground
* Fixed animal sometimes floating face down in crowded areas
* Fixed glitchy camera controls in the disaster level

* Made leaf models with even fewer polygons, which should greatly increase the frames per second (= a smoother experience)
* Removed a lot of invisible polygons from the sandbox terrain, which should greatly increase the frames per second
* Changed the prebuilt organism library to somewhere which is always outside the camera frustrum, so it's not 'considered' for drawing and animating, which should greatly increase the frames per second
* The game now reuses procedural materials whenever possible, so the GPU has less work to do (more FPS) and the game needs less RAM
* Added various question mark tooltips to the editors
* Fixed the render distance for babies
* Fixed crash/glitches after loading savegames with instincts
* Fixed 'feel' instincts being saved incorrectly in a savegame file
* Fixed scenario redirection after loading and then winning a scenario
* Player edited soil and family relations are now also stored in a savegame file
* Stopped optimization technique that fakes models that are not ready yet from also being used in the desert level
* Toned down the sun shaft eye candy during some times in the day night cycle
* Recolored the 'eats meat' icon
* Small improvements to where plants can grow for the sandbox and flower level

* Choosing savegames!
* Autosaving
* Camera improvement: it's much harder to go underground
* Camera improvement: rotating around a moving animal no longer leads to glitches
* Added animal temperature panel during placement
* Flying and climbing animals can now eat at any height
* Fixed procedural walking glitches for bird feet
* Got rid of ugly white edges in habitat textures
* Small fix for temperature resistance calculations for plants in the editor
* Fixed hand edited sandbox soil textures; you can now also see them immediately after coming out of an editor
* Fixed lots of new unlocked body parts overflowing the alert box in the editors