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
Balancing
Made the emergence of useful instincts for carnivores more likely
Added old meat as a food type to 'aquatic pointy teeth'
Revised species definition
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
Other
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 thesaplinggame@gmail.com. [ 2025-03-02 07:10:41 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.