Balancing mutation mechanics for more interesting simulations

• Made it possible for fungi to disperse via water
  
• Made it more likely for new land animals to lose unused fins
  
• Made the emergence of sexual reproduction more likely
  
• Made the emergence of other sexes more likely
  
• Made the evolution of land plants more likely on a planet with seasons
  
• Meteorites block a way larger percentage of sunlight
  
• When the sunlight is blocked after a meteorite, no new plants can get born, so more plant species get extinct
  

Balancing body parts

• Nerfed all eyes so increasing scale is unattractive during the day
  
• Buffed the pinhole eye, so it's no longer inferior to the compound eye
  
• Balancing statistics for the primitive leaves, fern and needles to prevent bottlenecks
  

Redoing the appearance of some ears and eyes

• Redesigned two most primitive ears
  
• Fixed ears on top flipping backwards during animations
  
• Fixed the 'looking sideways' eye having white eyelids
  
• Fixed 'obligate night vision' eye's brow being reflective
  

Small UI fixes

• Fixed the species detail view button (the 'i') sometimes not working when focusing on an organism
  
• Fixed organisms not appearing when loading from the second page of the archive
  
• Decreased font sizes for leaf stats in the plant editor
  

Fixed various causes of the time stopping bug

• The liquid storing abdomen when filled (thanks Not Original!)
  
• When animals tried to climb trees that for optimization reasons only had a billboard
  
• Meteorites removing plants that only had a billboard
  

Other

• Fixed fungus caps being forgotten sometimes (thanks TaterTot!)
  
• Fixed messing up versioning in the species archive functionality
  

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
  

Optimizations

• 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!)
  

Changes to the animal juvenile stage

• The color of the juvenile stage of an animal is now always linked to the adult stage unless you actively change it (so no more accidental brown children)
  
• If you add a bodypart in a place where the juvenile stage already has something, and you the remove that thing the juvenile stage has, the result will not be an empty space (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  

Fixes for problems related to sexes and sexual reproduction

• Fixed a timestopping bug when a fallback 3D model for animals is of the wrong sex
  
• If an animal loses a sex because of random mutations, but IS the sex that it loses, change sex
  
• In the species detail view, when cycling through sexes, the rotating example animal will now show the correct sex (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  
• Changed how random mutations of the mating system work, to making the emergence of sexual reproduction more likely
  
• Finally implemented that calling and making noise make an animal more attractive
  

Other fixes for timestopping bugs

• Fixed the animation system not being able to handle blowholes (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  
• Prevented animals that can not make noise from making noise, even if they retain the instinct from their ancestors (thanks Connor McCreesh!)
  

Fix bodypart positions

• Improved rotation of all abdomens
  
• Slightly adjusted models for the top and side versions of all abdomens, to better connect to the torso
  
• Fixed positioning of electric fins during swimming
  

UI fixes

• The extermination confirmation modal no longer shows text in front of it
  
• The extermination confirmation modal now closes if you close the species detail view, prevent various UI glitches (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  

Camera changes

• Completely overhauld camera rotation. It feels much smoother now, in particular for smaller mouse movements (thanks Neptun!)
  
• In the cinematic camera panel, you now have much more finegrained control over the slower region of the camera speed slider (in exchange for less control over the faster region).
  
• There's now a button in the cinematic camera to export the camera path between the first two camera presets. It's stored as a JSON file in the game's save folder.
  
• The camera no longer glitches out when rotating besides the terrain (thanks Knimek99, Amora Feray and Kazandaki!)
  

Fixes for timestopping and plant duplication problems

• Fixed a problem with procedural animation system getting confused about single eyes/horns on the back of an animal, causing the plant duplication symptom (thank Hope Crazy!)
  
• Fix for a situation where animal models were cleaned before they existed, fixing the timestopping bug (thanks seagullman87!)
  

Fixes for incorrect population sizes

• Bandaid: all population sizes are now quicly recounted before opening the species list view
  
• Fix: when grass dies because of a temperature or ocean level change, the population sizes are now correctly updated (thanks Krzysztof Michalik!)
  

UI fixes

• The species list view now remembers the chosen organism type filters (thanks Izaiah Bradford!)
  
• Fixed accidental camera movement and clicking organisms when the species detail view was opened after focusing on an animal (thanks Akleughuglouh!)
  
• Fixed the game not resuming after hitting ESC in the notification list view (thanks Akleughuglouh!)
  

Other changes

• You can no longer click on the volcano button in the sandbox if you don't have volcanoes. (thank Izaiah Bradford!)
  

Mouth balancing

• Made the mouths 'aquatic generalist with external parts' and 'ballistic' water/air hybrids
  
• Tweaked energy collected from eating meat, so eating meat is always a better choice than eggs or live prey, making carnivores more viable long term *
  
• Made egg eating less effective and old meat more effective for 'obligate aquatic meat eater' and 'sword'
  
• Made 'meat eating mouth on stalk' more powerful
  
• Added blood as food source to the 'meat and blood feeder' (thanks Nefilol Seflll!)
  

Decreased embryo development times

• Halved all embryo development times for mouths
  
• Halved all embryo development times above 1 for attractive body parts
  
• Set maximum extra embryo development for limbs to 1
  

Fixes for plant appearance

• Fixed large leaf appearing to be huge in the list view
  
• Fixed some leaves floating besides the plants instead of scaling
  
• Fixed deep roots sometimes appearing besides the plant
  

Balancing the random mutations system

• Added animal body part scaling to mutation system
  
• Fixed glitch when the system tried to mutate leaf scale for a plant that has no leaves
  
• Decreased the change of losing torso parts, to decrease the chance of bipedalism
  
• Added a new mutation: duplicating torso parts, to increase the chance of gaining limbs
  
• Added the option for attractive body parts to be copied to other locations (on top of the animal, on the back)
  

Extended the species detail view

• If an animal species has sexes, the game will now show arrow buttons to rotate through them
  
• Made species 'eating' and 'eaten by' clickable, so you can jump to the species and learn more about them
  

UI fixes

• Increased statistic dot size for mouth stats
  
• Fixed typo 'animal' in daily challenge
  
• In the animal detail view, correctly name the 'hide' instinct (thanks al!)
  

Other fixes

• Larger animals now have better cold resistance (was already the case for fatter animals)
  
• Fixed negative species caused by overwriting plants of the same species (thank Xander Winans!)
  
• The aquatic generalist mouth with external parts is now unlocked by default in the greenhouse scenario
  

Fungus changes

• 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