Hello, all! We've been working hard on a pretty major set of updates for Patch 1.10. Official patch notes will be posted when it goes live, but here's a preview of some of our major changes:
Your predators may now fail hunts! Well, technically the poor little prey animal might be clever and get away, but this makes things much more fair and realistic.
We now have an interface to show you the meat points on a carcass that can be eaten by another predator, and how that converts into detritus if it is not eaten before the carcass decays away.
Territories can now cross-breed. Before, when you got down to 1 animal in a territory and it popped up that "Can't reproduce," you basically just started wishing for it to die so you could put something else there. Now, if there is another territory of the same species nearby, they will reproduce with each other!
Major art update, as our team has re-touched pretty much everything in our three older biomes (Desert, Grassland, Rainforest) to make the art style more consistent with our painted/bright style - you may have noticed before some looked cartoon-like and some rather realistic. No more!
Options menu redesigned; should reduce accidentally hitting the wrong button!
Many more smaller tweaks and bug fixes that will be in the full patch notes
We were hoping to release today, but we found ourselves with one last giant issue that popped out after fixing a relatively minor bug yesterday:
All the new or baby animals begin to fly up into the sky on placement. Until they think sad thoughts and fall down, to their deaths.
Final update coming as soon as we clean this up!
Hotfix 1.9.1
Hi friends! As many of you have noticed, 1.9 introduced some really cool stuff, but along with it some really, really uncool stuff. The observations of players shared in the forums were the only reason we could figure out what was going on, so big thanks to you all communicating with us over the last two weeks.
Below are the notes for the hotfix. Happy building!
Hotfix:
- Fixed heliconias ability to reproduce (they reproduce now, promise!)
- Fixed Acai Palm's double stasis period bug
- Herbivores no longer prioritize mushrooms when out of sight of the player
- Herbivores are no longer likely starve after eating all the mushrooms when out of sight of the player
- Fixed the issue of jumbled notifications caused by negative time value
Patch 1.9 Going Live!
Hello, all!
Patch 1.9 is going live! Thanks for those of you who tested and gave us feedback. We're excited to spread the new changes to everyone else.
1.9 Changelist:
Take it Week by Week:
Time in your biodome no longer pass a day at time but a week at a time instead. This change allows the game to move 7x faster than before, therefore reproduction happens much sooner as territories grow, split, and even die. Players may want to consider putting carnivores earlier in their ecosystems' development.
Here are some variables that changed:
Hunger starvation rates of all animals increased
Some animals brood sizes were reduced
Leaf points and Fruit points increased
Players now receive coins every month instead of every week.
Don't worry this is actually more frequent than it was before this patch.
Users may now skip between 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
We've also made your first load into each of your domes not skip anytime to prevent players ecosystems from collapsing as it skips up to a year. You're welcome. ;)
Plant Grouping
All year reproducing plants (Galleta Grass, Blue Grama Grass, Buffalo grass, Blue Poppy, Himalayan Fairy Grass) now increase their own max leaf count as a group when reproducing up until a max. When a plant field reaches maximum plant capacity, it creates a new plant field instead of increasing it's own max leaf count. In this way, it acts more like the animal territories now.
If a plant field fails to find enough room to grow, it will not grow another plant. This plant field system allows for heavy performance optimizations in saving, loading, and general gameplay. Unfortunately, these changes aren't retroactive meaning that newly placed plants will experience these optimizations.
Minor Features or Tweaks:
Herbivores and Insectivores have a more randomized eating algorithm.
Hopefully less decomposers and pollinators will find their way to the notification list.
Mushrooms now prompt notifications on a lower number.
We reset everyone's saves to "no time passed" so that users don't come back to destroyed ecosystems.
Increased swarm population numbers - mushrooms, pollinators.
Mushrooms notification have been fixed.
Minor Bug Fixes:
3 digit notification numbers now fit in the notification badge now.
Dead animals no longer play a sfx when clicked on.
Agave plants no longer reproduce as babies.
Fixed a bug where animals territories we're splitting off inside the tower.
Biodex biome selection text is now fitted properly.
Trimmed off names that have a space at the front or end of a name.
Patch 1.9 Beta Available: HUGE Timing Changes!
Hello, all!
After the pacing discussions that we've had with you all over the last couple months since the game launched, we decided we needed to speed things up. This is one of the most major changes we've done to the game, so we really wanted to put the beta out to our community to hear feedback before finalizing the new pacing.
Here's the details on the 1.9 Beta updates:
Take it Week by Week:
Time in your biodome no longer pass a day at time but a week at a time instead. This change allows the game to move 7x faster than before, therefore reproduction happens much sooner as territories grow, split, and even die. Players may want to consider putting carnivores earlier in their ecosystems' development.
Here are some variables that changed:
Hunger starvation rates of all animals increased
Some animals brood sizes were reduced
Leaf points and Fruit points increased
Players now receive coins every month instead of every week.
Don't worry this is actually more frequent than it was before this patch.
Users may now skip between 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year.
We've also made your first load into each of your domes not skip anytime to prevent players ecosystems from collapsing as it skips up to a year. You're welcome. ;)
Plant Grouping
All year reproducing plants (Galleta Grass, Blue Grama Grass, Buffalo grass, Blue Poppy, Himalayan Fairy Grass) now increase their own max leaf count as a group when reproducing up until a max. When a plant field reaches maximum plant capacity, it creates a new plant field instead of increasing it's own max leaf count. In this way, it acts more like the animal territories now.
If a plant field fails to find enough room to grow, it will not grow another plant. This plant field system allows for heavy performance optimizations in saving, loading, and general gameplay. Unfortunately, these changes aren't retroactive meaning that newly placed plants will experience these optimizations.
Minor Features or Tweaks:
Herbivores and Insectivores have a more randomized eating algorithm.
Hopefully less decomposers and pollinators will find their way to the notification list.
Mushrooms now prompt notifications on a lower number.
We reset everyone's saves to "no time passed" so that users don't come back to destroyed ecosystems.
Minor Bug Fixes:
3 digit notification numbers now fit in the notification badge now.
Dead animals no longer play a sfx when clicked on.
Agave plants no longer reproduce as babies.
Fixed a bug where animals territories we're splitting off inside the tower.
Biodex biome selection text is now fitted properly.
Trimmed off names that have a space at the front or end of a name.
Go to Betas and enter this beta code: 0RkAX2GYlSxJuALd
Select 1.9.0 from the drop down options to opt into the beta.
If you want to leave, change that to NONE.
We are looking forward to hearing your input before making any final decisions and going live with this. Thank you!
Patch 1.8 (The Plant Update) is Now Live!
Hello, there!
Patch Notes for 1.8 (The Plant Update)
Optimized plants on the programming side so that they are being counted as one draw call graphically and greatly improved performance; this should not impact the user experience.
Juvenile animals now have countdowns to sexual maturity in the same way that juvenile plants do.
Blue poppies have been nerfed. (We gave them a sexual maturity time so that they don’t grow so exponentially).
Increased Impact Point regen by 40%.
Some species’ Impact Point costs were reduced.
Decreased the Tyto Coin cost to unlock some earlier species, to improve early user experience.
Changed the default graphics settings to be higher on load in.
Changed the loading message “nesting birds” to “hiding birds” to better reflect the game. (Yes, we’re trolling a bit here.)
Collared Peccaries are now omnivores.
Users are now able to grab the scroll bar for biome types during Biodome Creation.
Fixed the data tool representation of territory radii in Himalayas, which were not aligned correctly.
Fixed a reported error for one user who could not unlock zones despite having enough coins.
Fixed reported errors to Consistent Gardener and Bicentennial Achievements.
Data Tool optimized to load quicker on initial open.
Cleaned up some LODs for plants.
Fixed Heliconia being able to overlap on placement.
Fixed a loading crash.
Increased spawn radius for vegetative reproduction.
Made the “Replenish Fish” button not green unless there are fish that need to be replenished.
Known Issues:
“Stupidly long load times” (as we put it in our issue reports) for entering back into your biodome or skipping time when in the game if you have a very very high amount of species. If you have a lot of plants especially, we’re having limitations due to simply having the game have to read and process the thousands and thousands of placements in the game. Normally these would be baked into a level, which isn’t possible when everything is dynamic. We are working on solutions for optimizing this more for a patch update. Thanks for bearing with us!
When selecting plants, the shadows of that type of plant go lower-quality.
Occasionally decomposers will leave their mesh up for a duration even after death.
Occasionally after an animal spawn placement, a false hunger notification will be prompted.
Occasionally territories with a low population can trigger a hunger notification despite being fine.
One user has fog that won’t disappear appropriately in their unlocked zones.
Patch 1.7 Hotfix Now Live!
We've had a lot of reports of control issues and especially mouse lag with the new 1.7 Patch and we've been working as quickly as we can, and we have a hotfix available now!
Thank you all so much for your patience -- we only have all of our personal computers to test with, so sometimes none of us experience issues that are then revealed once we go out to all of you. We know it sucks, but we're doing our best to fix things as quickly as possible when it happens. So thank you all for the feedback and support.
The hotfix includes the following changes:
Addresses camera lag issues that have been reported.
Fixed the most common crashes we've been seeing.
Reduced reproduction of "always flowering" plants like grasses and small flowers to every 3 months instead of monthly.
Made it so that plants no longer spawn in water. Note: your current plants growing in water have become waterlogged, and have died.
Your animal territories will no longer split and locate on top of water.
Green Hawk Moth is animated again.
Updated some Biodex entries.
Changed "Rotate Left" + "Rotate Right" in the options to "Move Left" +
Move Right" since we realized our wording wasn't updated with the camera controller changes.
If your performance is dropping low because of a super full biodome and a lot going on, your camera performance may still drop some. We're working on some massive optimizations for 1.8 that we believe will address the remaining performance issues for a vast majority of users.
Mac users please note: windowed mode will no longer lock your cursor inside the window. We had to remove that as part of the mouse optimizations as it greatly reduced performance with the mouse, and are looking into getting it back, but wanted to get this fix out quickly. If you like to use edge bumping, you'll want to play in full screen mode right now.
Also, this is what our tech cofounder, Sam, looked like with all these issues (this is the picture that pops up in our Slack every time someone says the word "broken"):
Steam Patch 1.7 + Himalayas DLC
Himalayas DLC Supported!
One of the main tasks for us this patch was to prepare everything needed for the ability to add Himalayas DLC into the game. Biodex, Data Tool Maps, Biodome Creation Screen, and tons of balance and polish to make sure it would all work and be awesome for you.
Himalayas has launched!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/479230/
Plant Grouping for Performance Improvements
The other main change we implemented was additional plant grouping. Previously we did this with grass to help with performance issues. Basically: every plant in the game was calculating its own leaf regeneration, health, etc., when animals searched for food they were processing across many objects, and on your graphics card, each plant was a separate draw call.
Now, when you place a group of plants down (like 7 grass or 3 bamboo) they will all count as one single object and share their leaf count. This greatly reduces calculations needed on both your processor, and your graphics card as these are all now just one draw call together. We were able to keep them randomized so that they will still be placed in unique groupings, so we’re really happy with this solution and the performance improvements it led to. Please note this will only apply to NEW plants placed since this patch. Your old ones will still operate as they have been.
(We were able to make the Himalayas biodome 25% bigger because of these gains! Important when you have Elephants and Rhinos and so many large animals!)
Additional Changes:
You are now able to move the camera while you are placing species.
The camera can now get closer to the ground (improves pictures for small animals).
When you use “G” to take a photo, the territory markers will be excluded for a cleaner image.
Changed the fox from a carnivore to omnivore for our categorizations.
Plants placed will now rotate up to 360 degrees when you spawn them so that there is more variation visually instead of them all positioned in the same direction.
Entries in the Data Tool under “All” are now alphabetized together.
Added an additional song to our background music soundtrack.
Sound options now have sliders instead of “on/off” toggles.
Added fading in and out to our music tracks.
Improved normalization for sound levels for effects and songs.
Added Biodex Facts to the Load Screen since you see that a lot more with the time skipping feature now!
If a territory is down to 1 in population, its reproduction will say, “Cannot Reproduce.” This is something we’re looking at changing in future patches, but right now they cannot reproduce so we wanted to add clarification.
Your scroll wheel in Add Life will no longer accidentally zoom your camera when you reach the end.
Changed the Grassland starting tutorial plant to Milk Vetch.
Fixed an occasional problem with double notifications for a low population notifications.
Expanded the range for camera speed options so that low speed is slower and high speed is even faster, to cover a broader range of preferences.
Renamed biodome options to Mojave Desert, Amazon Rainforest, and Great Plains, to better reflect a more specific ecosystem selection process.
Lowered brightness on the selection shader.
Implemented a leave game confirmation dialogue.
Fixed a bug where sometimes after alt+tabbing out of the game, the game resolution would change.
Fixed territory health of mushrooms being incorrect as they are populating on placement.
In the Data Tool, clicking on animal territories will now have a higher priority than clicking on a plant to make them easier to select in busy domes.
We are working on additional art updates to make the original Tyto Ecology ecosystems as beautiful as the new Himalayas one. Looking forward to hearing your feedback on all the updates and the new ecosystem!
DLC Announcement: Our first DLC ecosystem is...
The Himalayas!
This incredible region is home to red pandas, snow leopards, bengal tigers, Asian elephants, one-horned rhinos, pangolins, Asian black bears, dholes, marmots, and more!
(Yes, the GIF on our last post was a secret hint!)
World Environment Day + Social Impact
We are launching this Friday in celebration of World Environment Day which is Sunday. The theme this year is Go Wild for Life, the fight against illegal trade of wildlife. As we learned about the many incredible and endangered species in the Himalayas, we decided we wanted to feature the ecosystem and help spread awareness.
We will be donating $1 from each Himalayas DLC sold to the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that does impactful sustainability work in the Himalayas. Each DLC will be $3.99 and we’ll also be offering a bundle with the base game + DLC for new players.
Website & Refer-a-Friend
See more on the website (still being updated for launch), including lists of all the species in the DLC and information about the endangered real life animals behind them: tytoecology.com
Tomorrow we'll be sharing renders of all the plants in the Himalayas DLC right here on Steam.
We’ll be also running a Refer-A-Friend campaign where you can get a free Save the Himalayas T-Shirt, with more details on that closer to launch. Still coding the system and waiting on our awesome commissioned T-Shirt design to come in. :)
Improved Art Style
You may also notice that we took it up a notch on our art this time, and our exhausted singular concept/texture artist Kelly did a phenomenal job painting everything in this new biodome.
We are now revisiting the base ecosystems to update them, as well! It will not be done by Friday with this launch, but we’ll be rolling those out as soon as we can, as part of the regular free updates.
Details We Care About (but you may not)
(1) We're renaming the biomes to now be specific ecosystems instead. Previously, we called the Mojave Desert just Desert, Amazon Rainforest just Rainforest, and the Great Plains just Grassland. Biomes refers to the major types of climate/geography, and there are just ~10 major ones in the world. But ecosystems within similar biomes -- like our Great Plains Grassland vs. the Savannah, which is also a Grassland -- can vary greatly!
So we've realized as we expand we're going to want to be more specific. Also, technically the Himalayas covers Alpine and multiple types of Forest Biomes in different areas, so... ecosystem names vs. Biomes it is now! Just in case you cared a lot about that differentiation.
(2) We know the most requested biomes were Dinosaurs, Oceans, and Savannah! Those will take a bit of an AI rework and we wanted to get this first one out quickly, in time for World Environment Day. We’ll determine if we can afford to keep making more (and more complicated!) DLC based on the sales from this promotion and those have been the top three most requested.
Patch 1.6 Now Live!
Thanks to everyone who played Patch 1.6 on the beta branch and gave us feedback. The team couldn't wait to get 1.6 out of Beta and into everyone's hands! Patch 1.6 represents a huge shift from our original assumptions regarding camera, controls, and feedback systems.
We hope it's obvious the changes were inspired by user feedback.
COMPLETELY REWORKED: New God-Mode Camera Controller
Play the updated tutorial to learn the new controls or look in the options panel for the keybindings.
Removed Owlbot view and Camera view. Added a keybinding to take pictures with ‘G’ for screenshots without UI, or you can still use ‘F12’ to take a picture with the UI.
Pictures now save to Steam library rather than a user’s photo library for easy sharing on the Steam Community Hub.
NEW FEATURE: Skipping Time
You can now skip 1 week, 1 month, or 3 months at a time at the expense of Tyto coins.
Price increases every consecutive use up to 3x; this multiplier goes down every 3 in game days until it returns to the original cost.
Inflation is biodome specific meaning that every biodome has it’s own separate inflation cooldown.
NEW FEATURE: Indicators added to Territory Markers
Territory markers now have territory health colors associated with them, as a border for quick visibility of territory health.
Added a notification alert icon over territories in need of attention*. This will be prompted after a notification until the problem related is resolved and is intended to help users quickly find the territory with a problem.
NEW FEATURE: Key Rebinding added to Options
UPDATED: General Resource Balancing Changes
Adjusted the Tyto Coin formula, so new users can earn more in the beginning, but not as much later. Also adjusted for the new skip time mechanic!
Adjusted Tyto Coin price of animals and plants for a better spread.
Adjusted Coins earned for achievements.
Additional Changelist:
Reorganized the options menu and added new camera options for the updated camera controller.
Updated the sky in the world with a beautiful painted version.
Randomized sound effects can now be heard in the biodome based on the species currently in the dome.
Fish can now be seen jumping in and out of the water occasionally.
Usability Updates:
Add Life UI now has arrows to move left and right without mouse edging being activated while grabbing the previous scroll bar that we removed.
Added in an announcement snippet that appears one time to inform users of important updates and changes.
Improved territory marker rotation for the the new god-mode controls.
Weekly income UI can now support up to 4 digit quantities.
Increased territory marker view distance.
Crash + Bug Fixes:
Fixed an issue where sometimes herbivores didn’t eat the food available to them, causing them to starve.
Fixed a bug where animals could load or walk outside of the zone walls.
Fixed a bug where insectivores didn’t eat insects sometimes.
Fixed a bug where players were receiving the “Babies!!!” Achievement before they actually had babies.
Continuing optimization and fixing of crash reports as submitted from the users.
Known Issue
Territory health average of mushrooms are inaccurate as they are populating (their health ticks down).
Reported instances of some duplicated low population notifications.
We hope these changes make Tyto Ecology a more enjoyable experience.
First DLC Announcement Coming Soon
Also, we'll be making our official announcement of our first DLC Biome Expansion on Monday. For now, all we can tell you is that we’re working really, really hard to make it awesome!
Patch 1.6 Beta Has Arrived!
Since release, we have listened to all the feedback and planned how to incorporate as much of it as possible. With Patch 1.6, we think you're going to be very happy. The single largest change is the camera controller. Owlbot has been decommissions and replaced with a floating camera controller that gives you more of the movement options requested. We hope you love it.
If you want to check it out and help test it, here's the beta code: KaGJFEjCPtZEvcSx . To get to it: right click Tyto ecology in your Steam library > properties > betas > enter the code: KaGJFEjCPtZEvcSx > select the Patch 6 beta from the drop down > wait for it to update and show the beta [like this] next to the Tyto ecology name in your library!
**IMPORTANT** It is highly recommended you do not use your existing Biodomes. If you do, any changes are not reversable. It is suggested you start new domes instead to test the changes.
Here are the patch notes:
Here are some of the more user noticeable changes:
*New Camera Controller *
Right click to rotate
WASD or Mouse Edging to move around the world
Q and E to move up and down on the world (assuming free float on)
*Skip time feature: 1 week, 1 month, 3 months*
Price increases every consecutive use up to 3x.
Multiplier goes down every 3 in game days (This inflation is biodome specific and does not carry over to your other Biodomes)
*New notification alert icon over territories in need of attention*
*Updated Options + Rebindable keys*
*General resource balancing changes*
Adjusted the Tyto Coin formula, so new users can earn more in the beginning, but not as much later. Also adjusted for the new skip time mechanic!
Adjusted Tyto Coin price of animals and plants for a better spread.
Adjusted Coins earned for achievements.
Fixed an issue where sometimes herbivores don't eat the food available to them causing them to starve
General crash/improved stability
Randomized SFX can now be heard in your biodome while you're looking around. Nature +1
Fish now jump from the water surface into the air and back into the water.
Some Known Issues worth mentioning:
Plants may spawn inside water
Window selection (Graphics Options) on Mac is flickering.
Owlbot icon is not working on Windows bottom bar unless you pin it.
Arrow keys are not working on Windows until you click in the game.
In full biodomes, an error can occur when placing down plants where the plant model will not have a red decal applied to it when you are not able to place it down.See Screenshot.
Alt+tabbing out of the game seems to change aspect ratio
Animals, plants and decomposers sometimes float above the ground instead of being flush against the landscape.
We hope this patch addresses some major concerns and has the fixes you wanted. Don't forget to use the discussion boards to give us feedback. We'll be watching. =)
