Patch v13.41 — The Sapling Steam update #23004

Completely overhauled how species are detected So far, species classification was based on the features of an organism. Simply put, if a plant evolved a new type of leaf, or an animal evolved a new type of fin, the game decided this was a new species, without giving it further thought. For longer simulations, this resulted in hundreds of thousands of species (99% of which only had 1 organism before going extinct), eating up RAM and disk space. Now, instead, the game only considers a subpopulation of a species a new separate species if it's large enough. This solves many of the tech problems and seems to be more intuitive to players, but also brings new challenges. Most notably, large species might have one or more subspecies that are different from the main species in one way or another, but not large enough to justify branching it off; think of a single stemmed plant having a grass subs...