Save format version 11

Storing fixed family relations
Storing fungi death causes

Improvements for the animal mutation system

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

Small UI fixes

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!)

Change esc menu behavior

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

Fixes for natural disasters

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

Other

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 thesaplinggame@gmail.com.

[ 2025-03-08 11:27:39 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 SETUPOS: 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.
Storage: 150 MB available space
RECOMMENDED SETUPMemory: 16 GB RAM

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