Removed expected age: now, as long as there is detritus in a location, a fungus has a 90% chance of staying alive. This means they can become very old.
Fungi now live in cycles of 60 days, only showing themselves the last 20 days of the cycle. This prevents every world being full of mushrooms all the time.
Made larger fungi less likely by decreasing temperature and wind resistance with size
Fixed inverted temperature resistance statistics when hovering a cap in the editor
Added a LOD mechanism to mushrooms, so they dissappear when you zoom out, to save performance
Grass changes
Made short grass better in low temperatures and long grass better in high temperatures, and vice versa
Tiles with grass now always have detritus, as it represents a constant cycle of grass plants dying (and being replaced)
Fixed plant behavior when dropping grass in a place that already had a plant: it no longer becomes transparent, and no longer moves a bit as if replaced
Improving random mutations
Added leaf scaling to the random mutations system
Fixed potential illegal state that could be achieved by mutating some fin types in subslots
Fixed mutating carapaces (turtle shells)
Fixed plants with detached roots
Found and fixed another reason that caused animals to incorrectly show plants as their ancestor
Balancing leaf stats
Added more variation and intuitive statistics to minimum and maximum temperature
Buffed moisture resistance, to open up a larger part of the leaf tree to wet planets
UI fixes
Shortened top row button tooltip delay
Fixed 'millenNia' typo that has been there for 5+ years :(
Better error message when trying to create an animal that fertilizes eggs externally, but doesn't lay eggs asexually
Plant view fixes
Fixed position of large leaves when moving in the wind
Fixed plants far away from the camera continuing to move fast when the player switches to normal time speed
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 thesaplinggame@gmail.com. [ 2025-02-01 13:25:55 CET ][ Original post ]
The Sapling is a short simulation game where you design your own plants and animals, and put them in a world together. Or you turn on random mutations, and see what evolution does to your ecosystem!
Features
Design plants and animals.
Fast-forward time to and watch the ecosystem work like a charm or slowly fall apart (probably the latter :) ).
A sandbox mode where you can skip time and turn on random mutation, allowing true evolution.
An instinct system where you can specify what an animal should do when it hears or sees something.
A procedural animation system so any animal can perform any animation.
Procedural music mixed on the fly.
Everything set up to be easily extended by players.
This looks just like Spore!
Wessel Stoop has wanted to play a simulation game where you can build your own plants and animals, put them in a world, and see what happens since 2002. You can imagine his excitement when Will Wright, the father of simulation games, demoed his latest game Spore to an enthusiastic crowd. When Spore turned out to be all game genres except simulation, Wessel decided he wanted to try to make the game by himself. The Sapling is the result of that attempt.
MINIMAL SETUP
OS: Ubuntu 16 or newer
Processor: A processor with SSE2 instruction set supportMemory: 4 GB RAM
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities.