Video Game / The Sapling

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The Sapling is an evolution Simulation Game developed by Wessel Stoop that is currently in early access. Inspired by games such as Spore, it allows players to create algae, plants, animals, and fungi that inhabit a virtual ecosystem. There are three gameplay modes:

• In scenarios, the player must create organisms that meet certain requirements to complete objectives, and each milestone unlocks more complex organism parts.
• In sandbox mode, the player has access to all the parts in the organism editors from the start, and can turn on random mutations to watch the ecosystem evolve on its own.
• In daily challenge mode, players are given a single chance once per day to complete a randomized scenario. Every single part is available for use, though they have to be unlocked through mutations.

The Sapling has an official website and YouTube channel, and is available on Steam and Itch.io.

This game contains examples of:

• Alien Sky: Planets in sandbox mode can be given a ring, which will lower the ambient temperature along the equator.
• Amazing Technicolour Wildlife: Your creations can come in any colour from the visible light spectrum and beyond; you get an achievement for colouring an animal infrared or ultraviolet.
• Amazing Technicolor World: The Sea & Sandbox Update allows you to customize plant colours as well, and in sandbox mode, you can customize which colours will be able to photosynthesise on your planet.
• Animals Lack Attributes: Animals can be given teats or udders to provide milk to their offspring, but they otherwise lack any genitalia or anuses.
• Artifact Name: It's lampshaded in devlog 4-2 that the shallow groundwater statistic has greatly shifted in purpose since its original implementation and had instead come to represent the overall humidity of the area instead of just the water table, leading to it being renamed as "moisture" in the Scary & Sexy Update.
• Artistic License – Biology: Wessel has admitted in the devlogs that he simplified parts of biology in order to make the game easier to understand. For example, whether an animal can breathe on land or water depends on its mouth, even though not all animals breathe through their mouths.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Several of the abdomens added as part of the Scary & Sexy Update add attack to the animal including two stingers (one resembling stinging insects and one scorpion tail) and one that acid spraying one that resembles certain species of ant.
• Binomium ridiculus: Starting with the Sea & Sandbox Update, default species names are generated from a series of roughly 300 vaguely Latin sounding suffixes with another syllable thrown on the front. Descendant species have a 60% chance of keeping the suffix of their parent species.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The Flower Update added the ability to have glowing flowers as well as bioluminescent body parts. With certain instincts, they can serve a purpose beyond just looking cool.
• Bizarre Alien Sexes: Animals can be given up to six different sexes that are not all strictly required for reproduction. Since they can also be born at different ratios and change gender based on different factors, it allows the player to recreate phenomenons like eusocial castes, bulking up for cold seasons, or grasshopper to locust like transformations.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: The only rule for animals with multiple sexes is that they all need to have the same basic torso shape. Beyond that, literally everything else about them from their size, to the number of limbs, to their behavior can be wildly different.
• Bloodless Carnage: While carnivory does exist in multiple forms, the only way you'll see anything resembling blood is when a hemovore with a secondary stomach (which shows consumed liquids) feeds.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic: The game has a very hands off approach to breeding given the fact that it's supposed to be simulating entire ecosystems. All species are asexual by default with the option for random mutations in sandbox mode, but both plants and animals have their own forms of sexual reproduction that can produce hybrids.
  • The Flower Update added the ability for plants to crossbreed if they had the same type of flower and one pollinated the other.
  • The Scary and Sexy Update introduced proper breeding for animals with the option for multiple genders along with internal and external fertilization. Similarly to plants, crossbreeding is possible, though in this case it's limited to species that are direct genetic ancestors or descendants.
• Dire Beast: Animals (and plants) have four different body sizes that they can evolve between, with larger ones having more health and greater lifespans at the cost of longer reproduction times and requiring a lot more energy to survive. In earlier versions of the game, species that grew via random mutation would get the name "Greater [X]" rather than generating a brand new one.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Fungi made two brief cameos in devlog 4-1 as a food type for a mouth and a listed editor in Blender's menu before being officially confirmed at the end of devlog 4-4.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first update was simply called the Flower Update, in contrast to all future ones that followed an alliterative "X & Y Update" pattern (at least until the pattern was broken by the Movement Update).
• Everything Fades: Plants and algae disappear right after death. Animals on the other hand simulate decomposition by turning into meat and then old meat after a period of time before vanishing.
• Eye on a Stalk: As of the Sea & Sandbox update there are no less than five different types of stalked eyes.
• Fantastic Fruits and Vegetables: As part of the Food & Fire Update's seed overhaul, plants can evolve fruits of various shapes, sizes, colors, and toxicity. There are even fruits that float upwards with internal gasbags to make themselves more readily available to flying seed dispersers.
• Fungi Are Plants: Averted. Fungi have their own dedicated editor and are considered to be entirely separate from plants.
• Fungus Humongous: Fungi can be made in four different sizes, meaning that the player is fully capable of designing mushrooms as big as trees if they so choose.
• The Great Fire: The Food & Fire adds the possibility of wildfires spreading in regions that are hot and dry. Certain plants can also evolve to interact with this by developing fireproof bark or seeds that begin germinating after the blaze to take advantage of the new empty space.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a dedicated day-night cycle, complete with diurnal/nocturnal/cathemeral animals and increased/decreased visibility depending on eye type, with the player even being able to directly control how long a full day and individual sections (morning, noon, evening, night) last in sandbox mode. Prior to the release of the Scary & Sexy Update, it had no effect beyond causing bioluminescent plants to glow and it lasted a lot longer (roughly six minutes real world time or 100~ years in-universe).
• Lamprey Mouth: The Food & Fire Update added these to go along with the introduction of blood as a food source (though they're also capable of eating live prey if it's small enough.)
• Living Gasbag: Downplayed. Plants can evolve fruits with gas pockets in them that hang upwards to entice flying creatures since they have the greatest range of all animals (and thus are the most effective seed dispersers).
• Long Neck: As shown in the game's logo, players are fully capable of making animals with giraffe-like necks to more easily reach high up leaves on plants that have evolved bark. In fact, it's entirely possible for a species to have a neck that makes up 5/7 of its body length.
• Luring in Prey: This sort of behavior can exist if predators have an attribute that their prey happens to have an instinct to approach like a glowing organ or a specific call pitch. There's even an anglerfish style lure for players who want to deliberately achieve the look.
• Man-Eating Plant: Plants can evolve carnivorous body parts for surviving in areas with poor soil nutrition in a variety of different shapes like the snap traps, mucilage, and pitchers. Given the fact that the game lacks truly tiny animals, all of their prey would be at least the size of a small dog.
• Meteorite of Doom:
  • One scenario's objective is to create an ecosystem that will be able to survive after an asteroid impact occurs.
  • The Food & Fire Update adds the option for the player to trigger a meteorite impact, which will cause a wildfire in the area surrounding the impact and kick up enough dust to reduce the amount of sunlight plants and algae can take in for a period of time.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: A lot of body parts are directly inspired by real life animals. So if you want to make something with a shark's snout, bat wings, duck feet, eye stalks, and covered in fur, go right ahead.
• More Predators Than Prey: Averted. Predators will never outnumber prey unless players do so deliberately, and the population will eventually stabilize to more realistic levels once left to its own devices.
• Necessary Drawback: More complex parts and larger body sizes give species more tools to survive, with the tradeoff being that they reproduce at a slower rate. Because of this, it can often be advantageous to lose things that aren't required to survive.
• No Such Thing as Dehydration: Downplayed. Plants need the appropriate level of groundwater to survive and will die if placed somewhere that is either too dry or too wet. Animals on the other hand only require food.
• Nobody Poops: The game doesn't track waste disposal in any way. This results in a major change to how seeds that are designed to be eaten will be dispersed in comparison to real life, as they will only sprout after the animal that ate them dies.
• Noisy Nature: Following the release of the Sea & Sandbox update, animals with mouths based off of air breathing vertebrates will make random ambient noises so long as they aren't underwater. This is in addition to the fact that instincts can be set to make a species perform a call in response to stimuli.
• Pregnant Reptile: Both this and Whale Eggs are completely possible starting with the Fight & Flight Update as how an animal gestates is independent of almost all other factors (save for the animal's size and body parts determining how long until birth).
• Procedural Generation: When random mutations are turned on in sandbox mode, the game adds pre-existing parts in logical locations onto pre-existing species. Also, the background music during gameplay is made of various parts that play depending on what's happening.
• Protection from the Elements: Temperature plays a big role in what species can survive where. There are a variety of body parts to assist in specialization, along with several behaviors for riding out more extreme seasons like hibernation/abscission or delaying the next generation from hatching/sprouting until temperatures are more favorable.
• Quantity vs. Quality: The game has a simplified version of r/K selection. While all animals only produce a single offspring at a time, pregnancy/hatching time is derived from a species' size and the amount of complex body parts it has. As a result, more powerful species tend to have much smaller populations because they simply can't reproduces as fast as weaker ones. Later updates would also add more K type parenting options like nest building and carrying young, though just like everything else they increase the time until the offspring are born.
• Recurring Riff: The music mainly consists of ambience interspersed with variations of the same 12-note riff.
• Rule of Perception: Wessel has stated in several devlogs that he tries to avoid invisible systems as much as possible to cut down on player frustration, which leads to quite a few cases of Artistic Licence – Biology, like how camouflage is based off of human vision or fungi being solely represented by mushrooms instead of their underground mycelium networks
• Shout-Out:
  • According to a devlog, the triple tube-shaped eyes added in the Sea & Sandbox Update are a reference to Alien Biospheres.
  • One of the eggs is specifically based off of the ones laid by Xeomorphs.
• The Sleepless: Earlier versions of the game lacked any sort of sleep system for animals. It was only with the release of the Scary & Sexy Update and the day/night cycle overhaul that animals would need to account for sleep (with the player being able to choose if they're diurnal, nocturnal, or cathemeral). Even after then, animals with the smallest body size do not require sleep as the skewed time scale means that they'll live out their entire lifespan before a full day has passed.
• Speculative Biology: The game is about creating plants and animals that have to survive in certain environmental conditions. The player can edit their creations, or let the game randomly mutate them in sandbox mode.
• Stock Beehive: Enclosed wax nests bear a passing resemblance to these due to the low poly nature of the graphics.
• Studded Shell: One of the shells is covered in spikes, specifically modeled after the shells of alligator snapping turtles.
• Super Not-Drowning Skills: Justified. An air breathing animal's ability to remain underwater (or vice versa for water breathers) is determined by their mouth type. Should they have a particularly well suited mouth (or better yet, evolve a blow hole), then an air breather can hold their breath for stretches of time long enough to effectively compete with water breathers for underwater niches. That said, they will eventually need to come up for air, no matter how powerful their lungs are.
• Swallowed Whole: In earlier versions of the game, predators would simply eat their prey in a single bite. After the Fight & Flight update introduced body sizes, this only applies if there is a significant size difference between them, with all other kills resulting in the dropping of carrion.
• Too Dumb to Live: Random mutations effect instincts as well as physiology, so it's entirely possible for animal to develop downright suicidal behaviors like actively traveling towards hostile environments or avoiding food sources. Any species that does so without other traits to help compensate for it will very quickly find themselves going extinct. The player can also do this themselves if they really want to.
• Too Many Mouths: Animals can be given multiple mouth types to allow them to eat different food sources, though with the the Fight & Flight Update adding variable pregnancy times based on the number of and complexity of body parts this is Awesome, but Impractical at best.
• Universal Poison: Averted. Plants, animals, and fungi can all evolve poison (fungi can freely develop it while both plants and animals require specific body parts), but each individual species can only have one of three types of poison with varying levels of potency. Animals can also develop resistance to up to two different poisons, though the higher resistance they have the less energy they'll get from it as a food source.
• Vegetarian Carnivore: All plankton in the game are classified as algae, meaning that every single filter feeder mouth is classified as at least partially herbivorous even if their real world counterpart was a carnivore.
• Weird Weather: Seasonal weather patterns in sandbox mode are determined by the player, so it is entirely possible to cause this yourself. You can adjust the temperature, moisture, wind speed, and sea level.