How’s everyone doing? We hope you all had an amazing Christmas! We’re at the end of 2024 now, and this has surely been a year to remember for Ecosystem, especially with our 1.0 full release. Let’s quickly recap what we have achieved during this wonderful year.


On November 8, after 4 years of early access, Ecosystem finally moved into 1.0 full release with the crustaceans unleashed upon the seafloor. With new body parts and movement mechanics, the shellfish now dwells at the bottom of the oceans and hungrily feed on aquatic plants around them.

And don’t forget about the Behavior Update earlier this year, which focused on increasing creature autonomy and expanding their range of behaviors. Creatures were able to further emulate natural life forms with more autonomous decision-making and fulfill their individual needs with new behaviors.

Over the years, Ecosystem has gone through many major updates as well as numerous optimizations and fixes. It’s been a long and remarkable journey, and we would like to take this chance to thank you, our incredible community, for supporting Ecosystem since day one. Your continuous feedback and support have been great inspirations for us to shape Ecosystem into the immersive evolution simulator it is today. It is our utmost pleasure to see your imagination run wild, pushing our game to its limits to craft the most uniquely outlandish ecosystems. Also, special thanks to Stobz, our amazing Lead Community Scientist and Discord mod, for all their dedication to helping our team and community.


With the 1.0 update, we had an influx of new fans curious to discover the possibilities of evolution. For those who just picked up our game and would like some pointers, here’s a YouTube playlist of our quick guide videos on our YouTube channel that cover the basics of Ecosystem. Hopefully, they can help you kickstart your very own marine life system!


While Ecosystem focuses on a virtual ocean, we believe the real ocean also needs our attention. That's why we have taken part in various events in 2024 to promote wildlife conservation. During the Games for Waves Steam event, a Steam event for World Ocean Day, part of our proceedings went to the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, to support their work on protecting marine animals. Other events include the Earth Appreciation Festival and Animal Week, both aimed at bringing attention to protecting the environment.

As of the time of this post, Steam’s Winter Sale is still ongoing, and Ecosystem is now at 30% off! If you haven’t got the game yet and want to start your new year by designing a new species, or give someone else the chance to do so, this is the perfect time! The sale will continue until January 2 so be sure to grab Ecosystem before it ends!


Of course, we can’t have a community update without showcasing some interesting creations from our Discord channel[discord.gg]:

A prospering habitat created by Alaska. You can see various species thriving under sunlight.

A curious creature from Plismarian. Little guy looks very happy!


That is all for our round-up today. Once again, thank you for making 2024 such an unforgettable year for Ecosystem. Our indie evolution sim could not have made it this far without you, and we are absolutely thrilled to bring Ecosystem to you in its full 1.0 glory. If you enjoy our game, please do consider leaving a positive Steam review. Every encouragement means the world to us.

2024 has been an amazing year for us, and we hope it is equally, if not more, amazing for you and your creatures. We wish everyone had a rewarding 2024, and a bountiful 2025 to come.

PATCH NOTES
Ecosystem 1.01

Improvements to the 'force bilateral symmetry' option in the evolutionary parameters panel:
Fix: several bugs in mutation code that could result in a loss of symmetry even if 'forced symmetry' is enabled.
Fix: limbs on the back or belly can be offset from the center, and twisted into asymmetrical positions.
Fix: paired limbs on the end segment of the body can result in flesh to be dragged towards one of those two limbs.
Fix: symmetrical limbs can interact with the body differently, eg with one limb being a fin while the other remains thick, etc.

Fix: error in soft cap computation could in rare cases cause large spikes in population when specific well-fed creatures died.
Fix: gifts can float outside the creature's mouth as a result of physics instability in its body.
Fix: errors can occur in procedural materials when savegames are loaded in quick succession.
Fix: null reference error that could occur when the game corrects a physics calculation that has blown up.
Fix: subspecies notification can overlap the explainer text for subspecies.
Fix: rare error could prevent the 'finish editing' button in the editor from functioning.

Hi everyone!
November has been such an incredible month! On November 8th, Ecosystem finally entered full release with the arrival of our crustaceans. We’d like to thank each and every one of you for your continued support – for playing our game, providing feedback and suggestions, or supporting us on our social media. Every bit of support means the world to us as a solo dev and a small publishing team, and we could not have done it without you. It is our greatest pleasure to see all your creations thriving in the depths of Ecosystem. You can find the full patch notes of our 1.0 update here.


To celebrate 1.0, we had a launch livestream on Slug Disco’s channel! Hei Man and Mike from Slug Disco were joined by Tom, mastermind and solo developer behind the creation of Ecosystem, to showcase the gameplay and a slightly more in-depth discussion on the unique evolution mechanics of Ecosystem. You can catch up on YouTube if you didn't catch it live!



We are deep into the autumn season, and the Steam Autumn Sale has begun! Ecosystem is now at 30% off until December 4th, and this is the perfect time to grab our game, either for building your own virtual aquarium or as an early Christmas gift for friends!



The Steam Autumn Sale also marks the start of the Steam Awards nominations, and Ecosystem is aiming for the Most Innovative Gameplay category. We believe Ecosystem has some truly unique evolution features, and we hope you feel the same. Your support and recognition mean a lot to us, and we’d really appreciate it if you could give Ecosystem a nomination and a positive review on Steam.



With the crustaceans now crawling all over the seafloor of Ecosystem, let’s check out the creations by our community. Here are some fun crustacean designs by Turkey on our Discord channel[discord.gg]:

Look at these cute crustaceans. And yes, crustaceans can definitely swim! If you wish to talk about evolutionary matters and share your own creations, do join us on Discord!



On that note, we shall end this community update here. We hope you are all having fun with our 1.0 release and creating the most unique ecosystems out there. Follow us on Twitter[x.com], TikTok[www.tiktok.com] and YouTube[www.youtube.com] for any new Ecosystem updates! Once again, thank you all so much for playing and supporting Ecosystem throughout our journey.

Greetings everyone!

Thank you so much to everyone who has played Ecosystem, whether you have been here since early access or just joined us recently. We are very delighted that Ecosystem’s 1.0 full release has been met with such positive response from the community. Now the Steam Awards 2024 is around the corner and we hope you could consider nominating us for this year’s Most Innovative Gameplay Award.

In Ecosystem, creatures evolve and learn all on their own to adapt to their surroundings. During early access, we’ve had 11 major updates to flesh out the aquatic world of Ecosystem, allowing players to craft unique environments for their species to thrive, as well as introducing numerous evolution options that creatures can organically adopt:

• Information Update
  
• Plant Progression Update
  
• Aquarium Update
  
• Steam Workshop Update
  
• Terraforming Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Update
  
• Camera Mode Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Expanded Update
  
• Creature Head Update
  
• Combat Update
  
• Behaviour Update

On November 8th, the crustaceans arrived with our 1.0 full release as the 12th major update. We love seeing everyone having such a great time with the new shellfish creatures, and we could not have done it without all of your support over this long journey of development.

https://youtu.be/LPVd926QMe4?si=2EpcbbREyUgnZg3Y

The Most Innovative Gameplay award has some intense competition, and it’d mean the world to us if you could nominate us with the button on top and leave us a positive review. Thank you!

The day has finally arrived! Crustaceans have come to your ecosystems, bringing the game version up to 1.0!

It's been a long journey from our initial early access release back in March 2021!

Since our initial early access launch we have had 12 major update alongside smaller bug fixing patches:

• Information Update
  
• Plant Progression Update
  
• Aquarium Update
  
• Steam Workshop Update
  
• Terraforming Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Update
  
• Camera Mode Update
  
• Evolution Sandbox Expanded Update
  
• Creature Head Update
  
• Combat Update
  
• Behaviour Update
  
• and then now, finally the big one - the Crustacean Update!

We've also had new languages added in that time with the following languages now available in Ecosystem:

• English
  
• German
  
• French
  
• Japanese
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Traditional Chinese

All this wouldn't have been possible without you, the community, supporting the project from day one. Special thanks also goes out to Stobz, the Lead Community Scientist for Ecosystem and passionate Discord mod. His support on the Discord and the Steam community forums has been really helpful to our tiny team.

Massive thanks again to everyone who's been along on this journey with us!

Ecosystem 1.0 Patch Notes

FEATURES

• Added crustaceans: these long-awaited creatures evolve to crawl around on the seafloor, evolving locomotion strategies completely different from the fish swimming above them.
  
• Substantial changes to improve long term evolution: the game now splits off subspecies to protect interesting new mutations and give them time to develop before being put into direct competition with more established peers, resulting in much more change in species over longer timeframes.
  
• Rework creature physics to allow much more complex creature body shapes with more articulated joints: previously these types were likely to run into trouble in the physics simulation and die out, which unfortunately often meant killing off some of the most interesting physiologies.

CHANGES

• Make whale-sized creatures better at surviving and less weird-looking.
  
• Corals and other misc food items burst into tiny pieces when eaten like the plants, instead of fading away like dead creatures.
  
• Instead of instantly dying, immature creatures try to flee when attacked by predators.
  
• Rework creature photos in the phylogenetic tree.
  
• Allow for 4x timescales.
  
• Allow click-to-select while the interact menu is up if none of the toggles are selected.
  
• Adjust the chase camera so that it handles the surface correctly, even when a creature is leaping out.
  
• Add Chinese language support.
  
• Performance: deactivate softbody effects if creatures are far from the camera.
  
• Lower plankton spread to be more in line with other plants.
  
• Performance: substantially optimize plankton rendering.
  
• When reviving deceased ancestors in order to keep the minimum hard cap valid, select based on how successful they were.
  
• Rework tutorial for brevity and to highlight a few core features.
  
• Make the stored 'Flatland' terrain be perfectly flat.
  
• Add a warning if you have made changes in the evo panel and not applied them.
  
• Clicking 'force combat' on two creatures who are already fighting will now stop the fight.
  
• Warnings such as the one advising that baby carp remain in an immature state now only display once in a playthrough instead of every time you click on them.
  
• Hide options in the editor if they haven't been unlocked yet (eg predator, apex predator, and crustacean).
  

FIXES

• Fix: limbs can appear detached from their parent body parts.
  
• Fix: bloom effect is too strong in some environments.
  
• Fix: after spawning a stored creature, it was possible to get flashes where all creatures' skins would change to a new color and then change back.
  
• Fix: plants carried by creatures as gifts to others were frequently in the wrong position, floating outside the mouth.
  
• Fix: gift plants sometimes seemed to gradually get pulled deeper into the creature's mouth.
  
• Fix: tooltips disappear if you move even a pixel.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, newly added parts can end up in the right positions but connected to the wrong parent parts, resulting in very glitchy looking bodies.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, unlinking a part can actually delete the part or move it to an incorrect position.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, if you undo, the clipboard is cleared, but the game doesn't tell you this so the paste operation just fails silently.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, its possible to create more parts than there are selection boxes for.
  
• Fix: in the creature editor, pasted parts can sometimes have an unintuitive or even self-intersecting orientation.
  
• Fix: creature editor seems to report self-intersections when they aren't there.
  
• Fix: creatures that were recently edited in the editor sometimes die soon after.
  
• Fix: cap the default fps target to handle cases where the monitor reports an erroneous refresh rate.
  
• Fix: a carried plant could end up incorrectly affecting the physics of a creature or carrion.
  
• Fix: incorrect current values caused by rare divide-by-zero in fluid sim.
  
• Fix: scores temporarily display as zero when you drag.
  
• Fix: rare situation where a single creature can get stuck without ever maturing, aging, or dying.
  
• Fix: 'ghost' creatures would blip in incorrect locations for just one frame.
  
• Fix: creatures could erroneously end up in combat with nothing.
  
• Fix: when over 200 creatures are present you don't always get an energy display when you click on a creature.
  
• Fix: camera smoothing values need to be re-entered on each new playthrough.
  
• Fix: if you have no internet, the game freezes when you interact with Steam features.
  
• Fix: the photo taken when sharing terrain can catch some UI elements in frame.
  
• Fix: creatures sometimes swim around with zzz's still coming out of their heads.
  
• Fix: small errors could occur processing plant-mouth collisions.
  
• Fix: plankton vision calculation would always behave as though it were sitting in darkness.
  
• Fix: we sometimes process targeting, including pathfinding, before creatures were born.
  
• Fix: trying to spawn a small number (~5) of creatures frequently fails outright.
  
• Fix: changes made in the species panel do not update the evolutionary parameters or interact panel and vice versa.
  
• Fix: if you spawn a stored species when the game is paused, it looks like nothing at all happens until you unpause.
  
• Fix: you can zoom too far in or out in chase camera.
  
• Fix: sometimes no nodes are onscreen when you open the phylogenetic tree.
  
• Fix: viewing older sections in the phylogenetic tree resets the horizontal offset so that it is hard to tell what links to what.
  
• Fix: the message about a population being nonviable can pop up erroneously on exit.
  
• Fix: typing numbers in the evolutionary parameters input boxes also affects the interact panel.

Hi everyone!

We’re back for an October community update and, you might already know, we have some major news to share this month! Let’s jump right in!


After 4 years in early access, Ecosystem is finally getting our 1.0 full release on November 8th! Crustaceans will be crawling out of hiding to join this brutal struggle for survival. Alongside the seafloor dwellers we are also adding a myriad of improvements and fixes to the game. See here for the full change log and learn what’s coming to the depths!

The good news just keeps coming. We have been nominated for the Creative Gaming Awards[www.playfestival.de] by PLAY Creative Gaming Festival[www.playfestival.de]! Creativity is a core part of our game and we aim to grant players maximum freedom in designing their creatures and the environment. We are honored to be selected alongside some truly amazing titles, which also allow players to display their creativity in so many different forms!

At the start of October, we were part of the Animal Week Steam event. Organised by Games Incubator[x.com] in support of WWF Poland[x.com], we get to celebrate wild life and help out a great cause!


That’s a wrap for this month, and now back to preparing for the big day! Be sure to follow us on Twitter[x.com], TikTok[www.tiktok.com] and YouTube[www.youtube.com] for more news on our full release on November 8th!

Greetings everyone! Ecosystem was in some wonderful events during the month so you can say our September was... eventful. *Cough* Bad puns aside, let us get right into today’s monthly update!


One Special Day

We got to participate in One Special Day 2024, organised by Special Effect[www.specialeffect.org.uk], to help level the playing field for physically disabled gamers. Gamers were getting more than just games in this event – they were also helping a great cause! Speaking of two birds with one stone!



Tokyo Game Show 2024 Steam Event

Another exciting event we took part in! We're honoured to be featured on the Tokyo Game Show 2024 Steam page alongside many other amazing titles!



And that's all for now! Be sure to check out our Twitter[x.com], TikTok[www.tiktok.com] and YouTube for the latest updates of Ecosystem!

Hey everyone!
We're at the end of August and summer is almost over already? Where did all the time go? And it's time for another monthly update already!


Back to School Celebrations
When summer ends, school begins. To get everyone up to speed for their biology class, we are taking part in the Back to School Games Celebrations organised by Spirit City Lofi[x.com]. The event is still ongoing at the time of posting this community update so do go ahead and check out all the amazing educational games!


Community Screenshot
Here’s a screenshot of feldspar from our Discord[discord.gg] community showcasing a “minor” population growth, when the foragers didn’t have any predators to keep their numbers in check. Luckily feldspar managed to create an excellent apex predator called Banana Mantis (guess which one is it) and the overpopulation crisis was successfully averted.


That’s a wrap for the month and now back to the grind on the 1.0 update. Don't forget to check out our socials on Twitter[x.com], TikTok[www.tiktok.com] and YouTube for the latest news!

Hi everyone!
The first half of 2024 really went by in a blink of an eye and July is already almost over. In this monthly round-up, we have some exciting news to share!

New Models
Yes, crustaceans are coming! You might have caught a glimpse of them on our Twitter[x.com] or TikTok[www.tiktok.com], and here’s another display of the crustacean head models from different angles. They will be part of our 1.0 release and details will be announced at a later date. Please look forward to more news on our socials!


Community Screenshot
An amazing screenshot from the community, this time from ipoopsometimes from Discord[discord.gg]! Interesting username aside, I think we can all agree that this is a beautifully layered reef, almost as if the coral is glowing under the depths!


On that note, we shall end this community update here. We’ll be sharing more news about Ecosystem and the 1.0 full release on our socials so be sure to follow us on Twitter[x.com], TikTok[www.tiktok.com] and YouTube! See you again next month!