New creatures: Vorticella and Rotifer

Vorticella

• Appears when fungal aggregates start to form

• Stays attached to the outer walls

• Creates currents that push you around

• Eats bacteria only for now

• More spawn if it is well fed

• Shy, hides when non-food creatures touch its mouth

• Will relocate if forced to hide too often

Rotifer

• Similar vortex mechanic as Vorticella but much more powerful

• Eats most other creatures including you

• Feeding can be interrupted by booping its foot

• Appears first as an egg when habitat is very well developed

• Lays an egg after eating enough, which hatches into another rotifer

New UI Feature: End Run

You can now pause the game and press “End Run” to quit your current run without leaving the game. Unlike the old “Quit to Menu” button this will now trigger the game over sequence, and saves your score if it qualifies for the high score page.

Other Updates

• Ciliate predators now have prey-based spawning rules

• Stylo no longer prefers other creatures besides the player and will hunt the closest target

  • The earlier mechanic was intended as a way to cause Stylo to give up on chasing you by distracting it with other creatures, but it made Stylo almost never chase the player. There is a new mechanic that will cause it to give up on a difficult chase instead. This is still a work in progress.

• Colpoda and Stylonychia now both have starvation timers and will die if they don’t eat enough

• Reduced overall bacteria spawning

  • Now you have to try a little harder to stay fed and food related events like frenzies are more meaningful

  • Difficulty settings will be added later, bacteria availability is planned to be part of that

• All soil clusters can now drop small amounts of items when hit

  • Use this in emergencies if food is hard to find

  • Hits must be hard enough to cause meaningful damage

  • Possible drops include bacteria, fungal spores, and viruses.

• Reduced fungal aggregate attachment capacity and added a maximum habitat score to prevent aggregates from getting too big and causing performance issues

• Cinetochilum now eats bacteria

• The orange biofilm effect should be stronger now

• Cyclidium and Cinetochilum now fill Stylo’s food vacuoles correctly

• Fixed some issues with Stylo’s navigation and chasing behaviour

• Fixed NPC starvation bacteria spawning at the wrong time