What's New

Predation, Mating, and Habitat Balance

This release tightens the food web and long-run balance, with clearer predator labels, visual bite contact, feeding intent, mate matching, juvenile vulnerability, swimmer movement, and more tunable habitat-calibrated food flow.

• Predator labels now lean on attack capability: live-prey mouth fit, bite damage, body access, jaw pressure, kill size, and enough meat digestion to make animal tissue worthwhile.
• Live-prey bite contact now follows the same progressive mouth geometry shown on the creature, so strong predator jaws contact through the visible mouth shape.
• Foraging now keeps an explicit feeding intent for plant food, carcasses, or live prey, so creatures bite the meal their brain is actually pursuing.
• Mate signals now form clearer matched targets through mating intent, with compatible-mate inspection filtering and matches that can persist after the original call fades.
• Juvenile defence now scales soft-body toughness with growth, making young creatures meaningfully more vulnerable even when their adult body plan is tough.
• Water movement now accounts for glide carry, mass, adult-body slowdown floors for juveniles, and lateral grip for streamlined swimmers.
• Food settings now separate Food, Genetics, and Performance tabs, with per-surface land/water food size ranges, Colour Mix, Size Mix, and energy-aware Auto Food that accounts for larger pellets.
• Speciation follows biological trait groups, so a strong shift in diet, appendages, body form, or another functional area can define a branch without being diluted by unrelated genes. Body colour can still adapt to food, but colour alone does not split a species.
• Species can carry distinct allele variants for the same gene, while the run allele pool distinguishes newly observed provisional variants from ones seen more than once.
• Emerging branches establish after building a balanced adult breeding population and producing a litter within their own species. Their first qualifying litter is recorded on the timeline.
• Species Tree profiles show the portraits and traits that represent a lineage when it establishes, with specialization markers and an expandable population view showing the percentage of sampled adults with each trait.
• Life history and reproduction tuning now uses clearer pregnancy energy, costlier wide mate signals, and lifespan rules with fewer direct cognition or armour bonuses.
• Creature inspection now exposes richer mating intent, matched mate, memory, feeding, predation, and defensive-size details for debugging evolved behaviour.
• Scavenger, hunter, opportunistic predator, and apex predator labels now separate carrion use from live-prey dominance more clearly.

Carcasses, Scavenging, and Bite-Based Hunting

This release makes the food web more alive: creatures can leave carcasses, scavengers can emerge through tiny carrion nibbles, and hunting now depends on bites, jaws, body size, and shell defence.

• Creatures that die outside predation can now leave temporary carcasses behind. Weak meat digestion starts as tiny nibbles, while stronger scavengers get more useful energy before carcasses decay.
• Live hunting now happens through repeated bites instead of instant eating. Mouth size handles physical gape, mouth type steers plant-feeding/scavenging/hunting specialisation, and stronger jaws make bites more dangerous.
• Shells now protect through durability and clear trade-offs. Weak jaws can be blocked, strong predators can wear defences down, and armoured prey pay movement and energy costs.
• Creature inspection and visual cues now make carcasses, scavengers, damaged defences, and stronger predator teeth easier to spot.
• Physics and evolution tuning have shifted, so older saved simulations may play out differently than before. For the cleanest look at the new balance, try starting a fresh run with Primitive and watching the lineage evolve.

Edit Habitats During a Simulation

This release adds Habitat Edit Mode, a Phaser-native way to reshape island layouts while a simulation is already running.

• You can now enter Habitat Edit Mode from the simulation HUD to add, delete, move, and resize islands without restarting the run.
• The simulation pauses while editing and returns to its previous pause state when you apply or cancel the habitat changes.
• A dedicated edit overlay replaces the normal HUD while editing, with tools for island editing, creature visibility, and apply/cancel controls.
• Creature visibility can be toggled while editing, making it easier to reshape terrain around active populations or inspect where lineages are stranded.
• Existing food and creatures stay in the world when the layout is applied, so experiments can create new land bridges, isolate populations, open migration routes, or stress-test survival after habitat disruption.

Choose a Starting Habitat

This release lets each new simulation begin from a chosen habitat type, making land, water, island, and barrier experiments easier to set up intentionally.

• New simulations now start with a habitat choice instead of always using the same random island setup.
• Habitat options include archipelago, single island, fragmented islands, mainland with satellites, open water, and barrier islands.
• Each habitat creates a different evolutionary pressure, from isolated island populations and divergence experiments to open-water specialists and shoreline barriers.
• Simulation-start timeline events now name the selected habitat in natural language, while older or invalid saved habitat values fall back safely.
• The Info page now explains the habitat types and how each one can shape evolution.

Chromosome-Level Species Experiments

This release makes species building more flexible and more biological, with chromosome-level gene editing for exploring sex-linked traits.

• Species creation now lets you view and edit genes by function or by chromosome, including X, Y, and autosomes.
• Karyotype templates are now optional starting points, including a new sex-linked reproductive strategy template for breeding experiments.
• God Mode can now adjust chromosome and gene values for individual spawned creatures without changing the saved species template.
• Creature details now separate genotype, gene summary, and phenotype views so inherited chromosomes and expressed traits are easier to review.
• Speciation now considers chromosome structure and expressed traits, helping species boundaries feel more natural as lineages diverge.

Maturity Timing Now Emerges From Body and Brain

This release makes life-history evolution feel more believable, with larger and more cognitively advanced species tending to mature later unless they evolve a faster developmental pace.

• Sexual maturity is now derived from body size and brain complexity instead of coming from a single direct age gene.
• A new maturation tempo gene lets species evolve faster or slower development relative to that derived baseline.
• Lifespan now follows that derived maturity timing more closely, so larger and smarter lineages usually pair longer juvenile development with a longer total life.
• God Mode now lets you temporarily edit a saved species' spawn genes so you can run what-if experiments, add unusual individuals to the gene pool, and explore how new traits affect a lineage without changing that species' saved default genes.
• Info pages and creature details now explain the new maturation model more clearly, including how larger and smarter lineages trade earlier reproduction for longer juvenile development.

Species Adaptations Now Evolve More Clearly

This release makes species change feel easier to follow, with clearer timeline milestones and species traits that update as a lineage evolves.

• Timeline history now distinguishes between traits and specializations that are emerging in a species and ones that have become dominant.
• Species traits and specializations now update over time as the species evolves, instead of staying fixed to its original default profile.

Juvenile Growth, Predator Contact, and Richer Run History

This release deepens the life cycle and ecosystem story in Tidepool, with growing juveniles, more physical predation, and clearer simulation history.

• Juvenile creatures now grow over time before reaching adulthood.
• A new brood-size gene adds more variation to how many offspring a creature can have.
• Predators now need proper mouth contact with prey, making hunting feel more physical and position-dependent.
• Milestone tracking surfaces notable moments as a run evolves.
• Population history now includes cause-of-death tracking so you can better understand what is shaping the ecosystem.

Timeline History, Specializations, and Local Saved Runs

This release made Tidepool much easier to revisit and interpret, with local saved simulations, timeline history, and clearer species-level analysis tools.

• Local saved runs now support autosave and reload, with up to 3 browser-based simulation slots.
• Timeline history and milestone events make it easier to see what happened over the course of a run.
• Species specializations and traits are surfaced more clearly in the UI and analysis views.
• New and improved graphs make population and mutation trends easier to follow over time.
• Saved-run loading and restore flow were improved so returning to a simulation feels more reliable.