The Sapling News

• Made it possible for fungi to disperse via water
  
• Made it more likely for new land animals to lose unused fins
  
• Made the emergence of sexual reproduction more likely
  
• Made the emergence of other sexes more likely
  
• Made the evolution of land plants more likely on a planet with seasons
  
• Meteorites block a way larger percentage of sunlight
  
• When the sunlight is blocked after a meteorite, no new plants can get born, so more plant species get extinct
  

• Nerfed all eyes so increasing scale is unattractive during the day
  
• Buffed the pinhole eye, so it's no longer inferior to the compound eye
  
• Balancing statistics for the primitive leaves, fern and needles to prevent bottlenecks
  

• Redesigned two most primitive ears
  
• Fixed ears on top flipping backwards during animations
  
• Fixed the 'looking sideways' eye having white eyelids
  
• Fixed 'obligate night vision' eye's brow being reflective
  

• Fixed the species detail view button (the 'i') sometimes not working when focusing on an organism
  
• Fixed organisms not appearing when loading from the second page of the archive
  
• Decreased font sizes for leaf stats in the plant editor
  

• The liquid storing abdomen when filled (thanks Not Original!)
  
• When animals tried to climb trees that for optimization reasons only had a billboard
  
• Meteorites removing plants that only had a billboard
  

• Fixed fungus caps being forgotten sometimes (thanks TaterTot!)
  
• Fixed messing up versioning in the species archive functionality
  

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

• Storing fixed family relations
  
• Storing fungi death causes
  

• Greatly increased chances that land animals will emerge
  
• Changed animal color mutation system to much smaller changes, but much more frequently (thanks BananasGoMoo!)
  
• Cleaned up a lot of unused code for mutating animals at random, making it slightly more efficient
  

• In the species list view, you can left click an organism type to 'solo' it, showing only that type (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  
• Removed grammatical errors from tooltips (thanks Jordan Moxie!)
  
• Improved hitboxes of filter icons in the save/load menu (thanks Jordan Moxie!)
  
• Fixed white line above the manual save file filter icon (thanks Jordan Moxie!)
  

• If you have another view open, esc will first close that instead showing the esc menu
  
• Esc menu will pause the game (thanks Chared!)
  

• Fixed another cause for the time stopping bug: plants dying from fire (thanks SeedlessWatermelon!)
  
• When changing the ocean level, cells that were underwater previously will have maximum moisture
  
• Removed fire particle effect when billboards are reused on another location
  

• Various changes for an upcoming stream mode, to be used in a Twitch livestream
  

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

• Turned off a prebuilding system that once saved FPS, but since the new optimizations took more time figuring out which organisms to prebuild; should be make the daily lag spikes less intense
  
• For instincts, the game now looking around an animal for trigger if the trigger is 'feeling', speeding up the simulation when there are a lot of animals with feel instincts
  

• Made the emergence of useful instincts for carnivores more likely
  
• Added old meat as a food type to 'aquatic pointy teeth'
  

• Species categorization now also takes into account the parent species: if two identical organisms emerge in different lineages, they will be considered different species. Note: this information is not saved correctly yet.
  
• In the species list view, below species it now shows the time since the birth year instead of the time alive, better matching player expectations
  
• Fixed forgotten family relations when an alga evolves into a plant
  
• Fixed forgotten family relations when a single plants evolves into grass or vice versa
  

• Removed subslots below the animal, preventing another cause of the plant duplication bug (thanks Griffvador!)
  

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

• The color of the juvenile stage of an animal is now always linked to the adult stage unless you actively change it (so no more accidental brown children)
  
• If you add a bodypart in a place where the juvenile stage already has something, and you the remove that thing the juvenile stage has, the result will not be an empty space (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  

• Fixed a timestopping bug when a fallback 3D model for animals is of the wrong sex
  
• If an animal loses a sex because of random mutations, but IS the sex that it loses, change sex
  
• In the species detail view, when cycling through sexes, the rotating example animal will now show the correct sex (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  
• Changed how random mutations of the mating system work, to making the emergence of sexual reproduction more likely
  
• Finally implemented that calling and making noise make an animal more attractive
  

• Fixed the animation system not being able to handle blowholes (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  
• Prevented animals that can not make noise from making noise, even if they retain the instinct from their ancestors (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  

• Improved rotation of all abdomens
  
• Slightly adjusted models for the top and side versions of all abdomens, to better connect to the torso
  
• Fixed positioning of electric fins during swimming
  

• The extermination confirmation modal no longer shows text in front of it
  
• The extermination confirmation modal now closes if you close the species detail view, prevent various UI glitches (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  

I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].

Fixed ears on top causing the plant duplication bug, a problem introduced in yesterday's patch (thanks AnomalousBytes!)