Lots of work on plant composition. Metabolism, size, soil/water preferences, all derive from specific organs now, and there's a "tech/evolution tree" of sorts for each slot, going from simple to specialized types. Here's some UI panels that try to summarize all this new info:

Testing grip and physical impacts - losing footing turns an entity into an active ragdoll, basically. The physical model is really simple but has a proper inertia tensor that gives some fun real-worldish results - compact bodies tumble less and tend to survive falls more often.

A new tool for poking and tossing stuff around. Just...try not to overcharge it.

Some UI theme experiments. I've built it with CSS variables, so designing and switching them at runtime is pretty easy, everything depends on 10 or so color variables. I always assumed it'd be a dark-themed UI, but light looks pretty cool too?

Making my game UI in Angular like some crazy person just to spite Unity

Doing some work on terraforming tools and god powers. Here's a fun one - a core sampler for checking what the terrain composition is like.

Timelapse of all the geological sim features working together on bare bedrock - avalanches, rock crumbling, sand and soil creation and so on. Seems okay - I can let players start out with all sorts of weird terrains and trust that it'll become something plausible over time.

Big refactor for particles, it's now alpha-blended with depth-aware upscaling. The dust plumes on cliffs when I add sand there are something new - avalanches. Basically, when granular material slips from a slope, it makes everything nearby also likely to slip and that propagates.

Managed to solve an old issue with water compositing, now it can run the edge-detection pass properly like other objects. Hard to show on a gif, but it gets this interesting almost kuwahara filter look at midrange.

Rubble and gravel fields are done. These also inhibit fertility, giving these areas a half-barren look. I'm pretty happy with this feature, not only does it simulate proper scree at base of cliffs, but also shows at a glance where and how much erosion is happening.

Fallen boulders and rocks have meshes now. I needed a generic rule based prop spawner anyway, so this was a good reason to write one. Looks pretty good already, but I still need to work on gravel and better particle effects.

Trying out some stability mechanics for cliffs. Collapse creates boulders, which fall downhill and will then slowly crumble into rocks, gravel and finally sand. Those circles on the ground visualize this aggregate, but I'm gonna try to spawn some actual 3d rocks there.

Large, long-living trees vs. small ones. Big ones are having trouble spreading, since their seedlings don't get a chance to grow. And their generations are also slow, so they adapt to changing conditions a lot slower. Occasional forest fires would probably help them a lot.

Playing around with an accumulating wetness map on terrain. This has multiple uses - it emphasises small transient streams that don't have enough data resolution otherwise, and also suppresses vegetation growth in riverbeds over time.

Following a really hungry bear around for a while. Predators aren't all that good at hunting yet since everyone moves at the exact same speed.

Beaver Simulator 2025

Added a harsh but necessary system to deal with occasional overconfident animals

Improved animal pathing a bit - their main steering algorithm only has local knowledge of obstacles, and it doesn't deal well with complex terrain and distant goals. So I added an incremental A* solver so that stuck entities can "think" for a bit and get a smarter path.

That's my stress test - 150k entities simulated at 64x real time. That used to barely keep a stable 60 FPS. And now that frame's just kinda...empty? Modern CPUs are ridiculous.