The Sapling News

• Made the evolution of land animals more likely
  
• Animals with aquatic eggs that can only walk very slowly are now considered land animals if they also swim very slowly
  
• If there are only very few land species, subspecies branch off into their own species earlier
  
• Visualization: only reuse a model for an existing species if the subspecies has the same limbs. If not, a more accurate model will be used, but it will be recolored to match the original species color so you can quickly spot what animals are what species.
  

• Animals no longer reproduce if they have a lot of neighbors, preventing extremely crowded simulations
  
• Fixed a grass mutation bug that could cause green areas without a visible grass (thanks, Azul1462!)
  

• The simulation in the background now pauses if you open the cladogram, and resumes again if you close it
  
• If you click when hovering a species, you will now be taken to the species detail view
  
• Parent species for plants are now saved correctly, so algae and plants show up in the same cladogram
  

• Fixed plant size buttons always leading to the grass size (thanks, Benjamin Santiago, Mazus, Lopai, Amargarrex, SethMMX, mayr777, Felipe, leofunsit, Ethan Cameron, Insects india, BAK, CRJ, Zoekunce!)
  
• Fixed a workflow that could cause an illegal fruit (thanks, Svelyrai!)
  

• Fixed animal problem tooltip showing up on top of instinct list view (thanks, Jordan P, insects india, Kaanaykas!)
  
• Fixed the attractiveness statistic for mouths and limbs not showing up (thanks, Warlord-Vir!)
  

• Prevented various planet editor buttons becoming unresponsive when using them in manual stats mode (Thanks, TheOwlManBranch!)
  

[h3]I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].[/h3]

• Added a habitat map for the plant and animal editors, so you can quickly see where in your world this planet will survive
  
• Moved the 'this organism has a problem' message out of the editor side bar for editors, so it has more space for a more detailed explanation
  
• For the plant editor, merged the energy usage and energy profit bars into a single colored energy bar
  
• For the plant editor, made the 'amount of offspring' visualization textual
  
• For the planet editor, changed the season and ring toggles in the planet editor to have icons
  
• Added stretched arrow buttons to tutorial
  

• The alga and fungus editors now also have a discard button
  
• Moved the 'discard' buttons next to the ready button for every editor
  
• The 'ready' buttons are now recolored to fit the style of each individual editor
  

• Root species are now ignored if they are extinct and have no decendants (thanks, Ultraneongodpet and UnitedKibbles31!)
  
• Fixed the color of 'exclude extinct' button when hovered
  
• Prevented the cladogram glitching out when there are not root species
  
• Fixed missing lines for species that went extinct but were reintroduced
  

• Prevented floating leaves or seeds in the editor when using the CTRL button (thanks, Chared!)
  
• In the 'skipping time' view, made sure the 'recent mutations' label was readable also on smaller screens
  

[h3]I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].[/h3]

I've replaced the old cladogram view, because playtesting quite consistently showed that nobody was using it. The game is now using a completely new chronogram approach as can be seen in both Species ALRE and The Bibites. It should give a much better 'zoomed out' overview of which species branched off from which one at what point in time. Even though previous changes to speciation drastically reduced the number of species, the trees in this new cladogram/chronogram can grow quite large, so this view has been heavily optimized.

Perhaps surprisingly, by far the hardest part were the resizable scrollbars that allow you to navigate large trees. I believe most issues have been fixed, but they sometimes still revert (making the view go left instead of right) for reasons I do not understand yet.

• Fixed the animal mutation view no longer always showing the nr of plant species as 25 (thanks, Jotbe!)
  
• When selecting mutation rates, the UI now shows the correct max value of 35% (thanks, generaldisbelief, JupiterHater!)
  
• When closing and reopening the mutation chance pickers, they now continue showing the correct value
  

• Fixed body stance not being saved correctly for juveniles and sex B-F (thanks, AncientRelic!)
  
• Fixed speciation threshold not being saved correctly, which caused saving+loading to delay speciation
  

• Made the heart icon to indicate mating less frequent at high timespeed (thanks, Jupiter Hater!)
  
• In the planet editor, switching to the rotating planet and back to the map now only shows the drawing circle when needed (thanks, TheSpaceCore69!)
  

[h3]I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].[/h3]

If an animal is in a location that contains food, it will no longer leave that location until all food is gone (except plankton, which requires swimming through). This makes it a lot easier to keep various animals alive, addressing a recurring complaint... but also leads to crowded environment (and, following that, possibly low FPS) more quickly.

Thanks Luka159, Generaldisblief, Wind_kaffee!

• When placing down organisms, a minimalist version of the requirements panel is shown floating near your cursor
  
• Took the 'will survive here' text out of the requirements panel
  
• Set the maximum mutation rate to 35%, as higher mutations only cause a lot of small new subspecies that never gain enough traction to become full species
  
• The time jump view now shows mutation events, so you know evolution is happening even when there are no new species
  
• Food types icons now have a tooltip, explaining what they are and how they work
  
• Added various tooltips to the animal editor
  
• Redesign the underwater speed stats in the animal editor to be easier to understand at a glance
  
• Sessile animals no longer show potential (but unused) movement statistics, which was confusing to players (thanks UltraNeonGodPet, Slurp!)
  

• Only show the egg laying animation when the animal is actually laying the egg, not already when it wants to
  
• To prevent aquatic animals floating perfectly frozen sometimes, immediately start showing the aquatic idle animation when it's not playing any other
  

• Season changes no longer cause terrain to becomes a single color (thanks Cody_beaver!)
  
• The planet editor no longer forgets to highlight continents after doing it once
  
• In the planet editor, when editing seasons and THEN drawing more land, this new land is no longer incorrectly made part of previous continent
  

• Lowered fungus speciation threshold (thanks, Jotbe83!)
  
• Newly added animal models now get a random rotation, so they're not all facing the same way
  

[h3]I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].[/h3]

Building procedural 3D models on the fly is expensive; on most modern hardware, showing an accurate model for each plant and animal in realtime is not feasbile. Therefore, as an optimization mechanic, until now only populous species got their own models, which was an acceptable approximation for some time. However, ever since I made a change to how speciation works a few years back, causing many more species, a lot of players noticed this optimization mechanism partly ruined the gameplay experience for them. The revised speciation patch two weeks ago, which significantly decreases the number of species, was already a first phase to fix this problem. This week, I take it a step further and introduce a revision to the mechanism itself.

In this new approach, the game will still prebuild the most populous species; the main difference is what happens if the species model is NOT available. Before, it would default to the most used species. Now, instead, it will use a so-called 'library profile', which is a summary of the most important bodyparts. For animals, this entails which eyes, mouth and limb the animal has. If an animal with a similar profile is available, it will be used. Otherwise, the game will quickly create it from scratch and store it for later.

• Made the threshold for animal speciation more dynamic, so it happens earlier when there are fewer species (thank you, Flyer24, SethMMX, CommonRaccoon, AntRuler13, Ewumd68, Liam, QuaLITyCli!)
  
• Fixed a problem where in some cases animal mutations happened so often that subspecies never got populous enough to form a new species
  

• Lowered the energy cost for animal babies for larger species
  
• Lowered the energy buffer size when giving birth (extra required energy, so the mother does not immediately starve afterwards), in particular for older animals
  

• Revised the tooltips for the sandbox panel buttons and made them show up earlier (from 2 seconds to 3/4 second)
  
• Added various new and more detailed tooltips to the planet editor
  
• Added various new and more detailed tooltips to the plant editor
  

• Limited the egg laying animation to walking animals
  
• Fixed an animal editor bug that occurred when adding a sessile foot to upright juveniles (thanks, DJ_999!)
  

[h3]I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or [email protected].[/h3]