The Himalayas!
This incredible region is home to red pandas, snow leopards, bengal tigers, Asian elephants, one-horned rhinos, pangolins, Asian black bears, dholes, marmots, and more!
(Yes, the GIF on our last post was a secret hint!)
World Environment Day + Social Impact
We are launching this Friday in celebration of World Environment Day which is Sunday. The theme this year is Go Wild for Life, the fight against illegal trade of wildlife. As we learned about the many incredible and endangered species in the Himalayas, we decided we wanted to feature the ecosystem and help spread awareness.
We will be donating $1 from each Himalayas DLC sold to the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that does impactful sustainability work in the Himalayas. Each DLC will be $3.99 and we’ll also be offering a bundle with the base game + DLC for new players.
Website & Refer-a-Friend
See more on the website (still being updated for launch), including lists of all the species in the DLC and information about the endangered real life animals behind them: tytoecology.com
Tomorrow we'll be sharing renders of all the plants in the Himalayas DLC right here on Steam.
We’ll be also running a Refer-A-Friend campaign where you can get a free Save the Himalayas T-Shirt, with more details on that closer to launch. Still coding the system and waiting on our awesome commissioned T-Shirt design to come in. :)
Improved Art Style
You may also notice that we took it up a notch on our art this time, and our exhausted singular concept/texture artist Kelly did a phenomenal job painting everything in this new biodome.
We are now revisiting the base ecosystems to update them, as well! It will not be done by Friday with this launch, but we’ll be rolling those out as soon as we can, as part of the regular free updates.
Details We Care About (but you may not)
(1) We're renaming the biomes to now be specific ecosystems instead. Previously, we called the Mojave Desert just Desert, Amazon Rainforest just Rainforest, and the Great Plains just Grassland. Biomes refers to the major types of climate/geography, and there are just ~10 major ones in the world. But ecosystems within similar biomes -- like our Great Plains Grassland vs. the Savannah, which is also a Grassland -- can vary greatly!
So we've realized as we expand we're going to want to be more specific. Also, technically the Himalayas covers Alpine and multiple types of Forest Biomes in different areas, so... ecosystem names vs. Biomes it is now! Just in case you cared a lot about that differentiation.
(2) We know the most requested biomes were Dinosaurs, Oceans, and Savannah! Those will take a bit of an AI rework and we wanted to get this first one out quickly, in time for World Environment Day. We’ll determine if we can afford to keep making more (and more complicated!) DLC based on the sales from this promotion and those have been the top three most requested.