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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.
The Sapling
Wessel StoopDeveloper
Wessel StoopPublisher
2019-12-12Release
🎹🖱️ Keyboard + Mouse
Very Positive (1652 reviews)
Public Linux Depots:
  • The Sapling Linux [149.82 M]
Patch v12.81

As I\'ve focused on the livestream and a new upcoming big update, it\'s been quite a while since I\'ve released a patch of bugfixes. In the mean time, I have continued to process bug reports, though, and also made improvements to keep the livestream running. As the next batch of videos in September will undoubtedly bring a bunch of new (and returning) players, it\'s time this work gets released. Apart from some potential hotfixes for problems caused by this patch, this should be the last patch before the next big update!\n\n

Fixed a huge memory leak

\n\n
    \n
  • Removing old unused information related to alga spores, seeds, eggs, carrion, nests and fungi from memory\n
  • No longer save old unused information about fungi to the save file, making save files for very long simulations up to 70% smaller\n
\n\n

Optimization for situations with a lot of species

\n\n
    \n
  • Removed color from classifier, slightly decreasing the number of species generated\n
  • Saving takes a smaller bite out of your memory usage\n
  • Various smaller optimizations to handle large amounts of species better\n
\n\n

Improved optimization

\n\n
    \n
  • Further optimized how existing animal in a crowded map are loaded in, avoiding unnessary model builds from scratch\n
  • Fixed problem where some animals loaded in later not going invisible when the camera moves away, which caused very low FPS\n
  • Made mechanism for removing large animals and fungi in the distance more strict, highly increasing FPS when there are lots of those\n
\n\n

Tweaking the mutation mechanics

\n\n
    \n
  • Fixed egg types never changing (thanks Corbett Collins!)\n
  • Stricter definition of land animals: should have land only eggs OR walk (instead of dragging)\n
  • Made the evolution of land animals more likely \n
\n\n

Fixed illegal animals causing the plant duplication

\n\n
    \n
  • Fixed the tully mouth and an extra mouth on top (thanks Patrick Pattinson!)\n
  • Fixed problem when adding a blowhole (thanks Shemariguess!)\n
  • Fixed problem with overlapping mouths (thanks Gruisman!)\n
\n\n

Balancing

\n\n
    \n
  • Moved the YAML files where players can edit stats to `the_sapling_Data\\StreamingAssets\\BodyPartStats`, so it will actually work this time (thanks Gruisman!)\n
  • Nerfed the temperature protection of shells\n
  • Nerfed how much weight long bird legs can carry\n
  • Nerfed underwater drag of long bird legs\n
\n\n

Other

\n\n
    \n
  • Fixed exterminating plankton from the species list view (thanks SeedlessWatermelon!)\n
  • Whenever a savefile gets corrupt, instead of hanging, the game now closes itself and creates a log file\n
  • Fixed an error that occurred when an animal with sex B (or C, D etc) causes a new species\n
  • Turned off hanging babies for now, as they were giving too much errors\n
\n\nI 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.

[ 2025-08-24 10:22:23 CET ] [Original Post]

Minimum 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.
  • Storage: 150 MB available space
  • Memory: 16 GB RAM
  • Recommended Setup

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