GamePatchNote Digest
The Sapling News — May 16, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
Balancing and fixes for animals
- Various legs besides the body now have special requirements for the animal to have more than 1 set of limbs, to make them look more natural (already in the previous patch logs, but now it's working)
- Sessile animals with moving juveniles now actually move to the ocean floor and stop moving as adults (thanks, Cody Beaver, Cringus Ringus, Spectator, Acarlis, mic biology!)
- Idem for ocean floor walkers (thanks, Ancient Relic!)
- Optimized species population size tracker in situations with many species
Balancing and fixes for plants
- Grass is now removed from a cell when eaten (thanks, esportfrank!)
- Wildfire now removes grass, and grass won't be able to grow there for a while
- Plant subspecies will now always have the same color as their parent species, to make it easier to identify which plant is which species
- Tweaked the chance of algae evolving into plants
Working on the weight system
- Made max weights for flying and in particular gliding higher, so development of flight is more likely
- Weight now increases with body size, making giant flying things less likely (thanks, Warlor-vir!)
- Individual torso segments now have less influence on the final weight to compensate for the above
- Now the 'halve weight' icons are used everywhere, so you can see the weight in more detail
- Removed ugly floating points that could sometimes pop oup in the UI
Introduced savefile format 16
- Memory/savefile optimization: the game now prunes extinct subspecies that the player couldn't see anyway
- Added support for automatic continental drift
- When loading, fixed the explainer text about which formats are supported
Various little editor fixes
- Adding seasons and then hitting 'randomize all' no longer messes up the planet tilt (thanks, SethMMX!)
- Plus and minus keys now also control zoom in the alga and fungus editors (thanks, Daruka!)
- When dragging the 'slow moving tube feet' and 'sessile foot' body parts, they now have the correct color instead of white
Misc
- Clicking a species in the cladogram view now shows a subtree starting from that species, making it easy to study part of very large trees