Species 0.14.0.Ex has been pushed up to the experimental branch. You can get it by right-clicking on Species in Steam, going to Properties, selecting Betas and opting into the experimental branch.
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https://speciesdevblog.wordpress.com/2022/08/14/0-14-0-released-to-experimental-branch/
Features!
Eggs and Pregnancy Improvements
Creatures have two new genes, Egg length and Pregnancy length, the greater of which determines if they will lay eggs or give birth to live young. Eggs can be broken and eaten (though doing so will risk the wrath of the parent), and serve as a kind of ‘gateway food’ to carnivory.
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Reproduction is now much harsher, requiring a fair chunk of calories to be spent, and creatures have the option to postpone it if they don’t have energy they’ll need for it. Creatures can evolve a shorter and less costly pregnancy, but they do so at the expense of their offspring.
These reproductive changes seem to have had some good effects on the long term survivability of clades, making one species outcompeting the rest a less likely occurrence in this build.
Diet
Instead of diet being a simple binary spectrum between herbivory and carnivory, creatures can now specialize to feed on ground cover, foliage, fruit, eggs or meat specifically.
Temperature and Fatigue
Temperature is now a much harsher mistress, requiring creatures to seek shelter if they start burning or freezing. Creatures will also attempt to seek shelter before sleeping, as sleeping makes them even more vulnerable to these effects.
Ambient Soundscapes
I added biome-specific ambient soundscapes, plus a few for things like water and altitude, to fill the void of sound in between music tracks a bit.
Procedurally Generated Fur
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Fluffy!
It won’t look quite like this in-game: I’ve yet to implement fur length or floofiness genes, so I had to crop it short. But a floofiness gene has now become vitally important to the games future development. Honestly, I don’t know how we’ve gotten this far without one.
Stability Improvements and Bug fixes
So many bugs. So many. Their cries still haunt my nightmares, and yet I continue, for the work is not yet completed. I have become less man than monster, but I swear to you truly: it was for the greater good.
The greater good.
BTW, aquatic animals are properly viable again.
Other bits and pieces!
Regrowth based population control. You can now set the Automatic Population Control to affect plant regrowth instead of food efficiency. I’ve not made this the default because it’s less responsive, resulting in more extreme population explosions and crashes.
Thought Log.
Press ‘T’ to show the thought log. This was only ever intended as debug functionality, but it’s cute and it gives the creatures a way to voice the incredibly messed up reasoning behind their incredibly stupid decisions.
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Background tweaks
There have been a metric ton of these. Everything from speed calculations to fatigue energy delta’s to how buoyant creatures feed on underwater plants has been tweaked, adjusted and/or re-built.
Technical Changes
The usual disclaimers apply about this being a first-release beta (aka. an unstable and bug ridden mess), but I will note that a great many issues in the 0.13 releases have been fixed. Expect a whole new ecosystem of bugs!
Seriously though, while I have fixed as many of the existing issues as I could reach, 0.14.0 is built on a completely different foundation than 0.13. Monogame 3.8 has significantly changed under the hood from previous versions, and I fully expect that to cause problems, particularly with the Linux and Mac builds that I was unable to test before now.
This background change will also cause it to take up a fair bit more hard drive space than before: the current release clocks in at 687 MB, and I may have to increase that further to ensure the cross-platform builds have all the files they need to run and that nobody will be asked to manually download .Net Core.
Please send me an email or contact me on the unofficial discord channel, or just the Steam forums, if you experience any crashes or just , so I can get them fixed prior to pushing anything to the stable branch.
Cheers!
Quasar