Patch v13.44 — The Sapling Steam update #23003

Overhauled optimization mechanism that decides which 3D models to show Building procedural 3D models on the fly is expensive; on most modern hardware, showing an accurate model for each plant and animal in realtime is not feasbile. Therefore, as an optimization mechanic, until now only populous species got their own models, which was an acceptable approximation for some time. However, ever since I made a change to how speciation works a few years back, causing many more species, a lot of players noticed this optimization mechanism partly ruined the gameplay experience for them. The revised speciation patch two weeks ago, which significantly decreases the number of species, was already a first phase to fix this problem. This week, I take it a step further and introduce a revision to the mechanism itself. In this new approach, the game will still prebuild the most populous species; the mai...