Patch v11.23

The Sapling

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!

This patch is focused on improving the 'late game' experience, adding things requested by the more experienced players. New performance related settings: * Alga, plant and animal caps! * A setting to limit how many species are prebuilt when loading a world: fewer means faster loading, more means more accurate plant and animal models (less reusing other species' models) Optimizations: * Removed unused box colliders for plant body parts, adding ~10FPS in situations with many plants * Simplified check if a growing plant reached its target size, adding ~2FPS in situations with many plants * Skip checking for gliding and flying animations if the animal cannot glide or fly, adding ~2FPS in situations with many animals * Added a low poly variant of the stilt root, with the smaller parts disappearing if the camera moves away, adding ~5FPS in situations with many stilt roots * Preload the stilt root object instead of building it from scratch for each individual plant, adding ~2FPS in situations with many stilt roots Simple balancing: * The 'grasshopper' mouth now gets way less energy out of soft plant tissue * Plankton spreads twice as fast now, so filter feeders don't immediately exhaust their food source * Blood can only be eaten from animals larger than the predator Changes to time jumps: * Redesigned the time jump view, adding a progress bar * Added an interrupt button (useful for long jumps) * Added basic information on the number of species, so you have something to keep an eye on during the jump * Added 15000 and 20000 (that is, longer) duration options Added rudimentary support for player generated body parts! See https://thesaplinggame.com/ugc Fixes for animal sounds: * Made animal calls audible from much further away * In the instinct editor, disabled the option to 'call' if available mouth cannot make a sound Improvements for lighting and post processing effects: * Decreased bottom lighting in the sandbox (mainly used for lighting to rock part of scenario maps), removing a weird nighttime glow on brighter plants and animals * Removed sun shaft effect at night, also removing a weird glow on brighter plants and animals * Decreased bloom effect slightly Misc: * Fixed sitting in trees 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.