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.
Patch v13.27 (beta only)
Introducing save file format 13
\n\n- \n
- Includes steepness of the terrain\n
- Remembers manual mode in the soil statistics view\n
- Updated the loading view explanation (which formats are supported)\n
Working on flight with insect wings
\n\n- \n
- Animals with insect wings no longer stop moving when flying at normal time speeds\n
- Actually play the fluttery flight animation in the game\n
- Added aerial idle animations for rapid and fluttery flight styles\n
- Cleaned up buzzing noise, made it loopable, and start and stop it together with the flight animation\n
- Regular noise and flight noise are no longer mixed up\n
- Made the buzzing noise you hear (as example) in the editor much shorter\n
- No longer visualize movement noise with a growing sphere (like how calls and generic noise are visualized)\n
Fixes for sessile animals
\n\n- \n
- Upright bodies no longer become thin at the base when there are sessile feet (thanks Cody Beaver!)\n
- Made \'sessile foot\' limb connect to the torso seamlessly \n
- Putting the ballistic mouth on top no longer crashes the game\n
Working on limb body parts
\n\n- \n
- Fixed labels of small and large bas bags, and added the latter to the statistics file\n
- Fixed the membrane positions for \'thin membrane for gliding\', \'membrane from long finger for flying\', \'small gas bag\' and \'large gas bag\' during animation\n
- Added animation weights to \'adhesive\' and \'sprawling foot with long toes\' limb types\n
- Improved animation weights for \'attractive vestigial wing\' and \'cartilage fin\'\n
- Revised the \'venomous spines\' model, so it works with animation this time\n
Small fixes for the legend when looking at soil statistics mid simulation
\n\n- \n
- Centered it\n
- Also show one for steepness\n
- Remove it for climate zones\n
Cleanin up other UI
\n\n- \n
- The top row button animations is now way faster, so you don\'t have to wait for (thanks Julenissen!)\n
- The new soil statistic view no longer mixes overlaps with other views\n
I often forget to read comments below release notes, so if you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, feel free to reach out via the Steam forums or thesaplinggame@gmail.com.
[ 2025-12-06 05:44:40 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
Recommended Setup
GAMEBILLET
[ 6416 ]
FANATICAL
[ 5771 ]
GAMERSGATE
[ 1967 ]
MacGameStore
[ 2356 ]
INDIEGALA
[ 713 ]
LOADED
[ 1040 ]
ENEBA
[ 32814 ]
Green Man Gaming Deals
[ 859 ]
FANATICAL BUNDLES
GMG BUNDLES
HUMBLE BUNDLES
INDIEGALA BUNDLES
by buying games/dlcs from affiliate links you are supporting tuxDB


















