The Sapling
Wessel Stoop Developer
Wessel Stoop Publisher
2019-12-12 Release
🎹🖱️Keyboard + Mouse
Very Positive
(1357 reviews)
Public Linux Depots:- The Sapling Linux [149.82 M]
Patch v12.46Balancing 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
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.
[ 2025-03-22 06:47:43 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 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
RECOMMENDED SETUP
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