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@@joeburnover4110 it’s not something I’ve thought about yet. We are still a long way from something that’s finished so cross that bridge when we come to it 😃
@@Karnivor-0us yeah it’s a good point. It might also be that getting to full maturity more quickly is more valuable with animals because plants could start to fruit and animals could help disperse the seeds, etc.
@@EightLittleBearstrampling by large animals, defenses against (specific) herbivores and the presence of nutrients as a result of dead animals and feces could lead to interesting effects too.
Honestly, what I liked most was seeing the plants completely cover the colder enges, hibernate when the winter came, and then just keep going, flashing between green and brown.
@@samueltrusik3251 the interesting part about that which I forgot to mention in the video is that going brown actually indicates that the plant is struggling to remain hydrated (as opposed to explicit hibernation). The fact that extreme latitudes which have volatile seasons caused this to happen en masse and in unison wasn’t explicitly designed.. it is closer to (although not exactly) an emergent behaviour in the overall environment (I.e. I didn’t design hibernation, but the plants evolved it anyway).
It's always fun to see thatQ even at such simple and small scales, complex interactions and chaos can arise! It'd be interesting to see how different types of seeds would effect the germination system? Like smaller seeds get fewer chances to germinate, but more can be made, and they can travel farther. While large nut-like seeds get more chances to germinate but can't travel as far, and the parent plant must use more resources to produce them!
Yeah I agree! Plus birds and stuff can carry the smaller seeds around so it can introduce some interesting interactions when animals come back into it!
It's likely going to be very difficult to simulate properly the biodiversity of rainforests without having to zoom in to focus on a specific location & then creating 3D renditions to accommodate the various plants at ground-level, in the canopy, & everywhere in between. While trees in rainforest biomes are numerous, their general strategies for success are quite similar. What's interesting is that the simulation chose to prioritize growth in the desert, but that might have something to do with their proximity to water. Something I've noticed is that while plant growth near water, particularly rivers & river mouths, isn't necessarily diverse, you will see a slight uptick diversity in trees, algae, & moss, specifically. I don't know if there's proper research to back any of what I'm saying up, but I am a nature nerd who grew up on documentaries, so it's just some observations I've noticed.
@@MildlyOCD interesting points. I have been thinking about how to visualise the diversity of ground-level plants in rainforests but haven’t come up with a solution yet.. I’m sure one will come! It’s a good point about the similar strategies of trees in rainforests as well. That isn’t something I thought of!
@@EightLittleBears Maybe you could do some sort of parasite plants like vines that abuse taller plants for easier access resources like sunlight in dense areas.
the plants evolve longer lifespans (and size) because the additional time to mature isn't enough to dissuade them. Throw in periodic fires (idk maybe once every few decades) that have a probability to kill each plant in the tile, with a bias so that larger and older plants have a higher chance to burn. That should give you enough selection pressure against huge ancient trees. you'll also want to implement fire resistant seeds
I heard someone say that comments don't affect the algorithm anymore, just watchtime and likes and subscriptions (and presumably super thanks and channel joins too). But I don't have any sources for that to back it up.
Not sure if you already considered it, but it might be an interesting idea to make the temperature tolerance a variable too, with higher tolerances allowing for viability in a larger range of environments (or in more extreme seasons). Not sure what the tradeoff for this generalism should be, perhaps an overall lowered germination chance so they have better chances in varied environments (since other plants wouldn't be able to germinate half of the time at all), but worse chances in stable environments.
Yeah that is something I am considering but, like you say, the trade-off is the tricky part.. It will probably be something along the lines of specialists being generally better at everything as long as they are in their environment.
@@EightLittleBears My first idea is to make them more sensitive to overcrowding than specialists, both when trying to germinate and while growing. The only problem is that if they can't get a foothold early, they may not be able to at all. My other idea is to separate the temperature tolerances for germination and growth and allowing them to mutate separately. If they drift apart, these plants can germinate during seasons beyond their tolerance then grow when conditions are more favorable. However, they'll probably need shorter sapling stages and lifespans to capitalize on this in environments where this difference is big enough. They also risk their two tolerances drifting too far apart, making them have less viable environments due to there not being enough change. At least, that's my theory.
@@strcmdrbookwyrm great theory. I think separating the seed’s evolutionary story from the plant itself is particularly interesting and the code could probably be re-used for things like chrysalis stages in insects!
@@EightLittleBears What about plants with less enviromental diversity get an overall improvement on many stats, but the more adaptable the plant becomes, it gets a gradually lower bonus until it may become an actual hinderance.
I am curious how the build would be affected by different seed distribution methods. For example how some trees only spread seeds after a fire where nutrients the the plant life used get added back into the soil
I want to see more competition between the plants, maybe soil fertility that is drained to promote size, and fertility goes up from death? And perhaps seed dispersal distance vs time, maybe separate optional conditions for germination?
Thanks for the comment! And agreed these are all good ideas. The update I’m currently working on includes animals carrying seeds, so it’s a start on the dispersal point!
I've been watching for a while now, and this is amazing to see how far its come and where its going! I can't wait to see how the creatures adapt to this!
This simulation perfectly demonstrates successional ecosystems, which start with smaller grass like organisms and generally morph into larger tree like organisms over time.
On earth, Savannahs and Tallgrass Prairies are the second most diverse terrestrial ecosystems. So that your simulation has them as the most diverse actually makes a lot of sense.
i just genuinely love these videos and i hope eventually your programs and programs like this can be used to fully show the development of terrestrial life on other planets from specific adaptations and unique evolutionary developments. like "spore" but rather than a human creating a random funny monstrosity its a ai system using already pre documented evolutionary adaptations mixed with potential x factor adaptations to create and simulate new creature. i also want these types of simulations to be implemented into games like rpg's where after a while if you aren't carefull either you will end up devastating an ecosystem due to over hunting/fishing/ resource gathering etc or there will be a species that adapts to better kill the player
Another really strong video! This is one of my favorite projects being documented right now. Keep up the great work and can't wait to see how creature dynamics are bidirectionally influenced with plant dynamics.
Amazing video! I've always been fascinated with the thought of simulating evolutionary processes and it's really interesting to see how you implemented it. Great work!
Amazing video as always! I am excited to see what adaptations develop when the plants evolve alongside creatures. I'm also excited for your shift in focus towards TH-cam content. Your videos are always educational, entertaining, and visually stunning.
Hello! Loved the video and this project! I am about to start a similar project for myself. I think a few others already mentioned this in the comments but I believe an important reason your populations trended towards long lifetime was lack of disturbance regimes. Plant ecosystems are heavily influenced by disturbance regimes, which promotes a gradient of adaptations across two different general strategies: R-selected (short-lived, adaptable, fast reproductive cycles) or K-selected (long-lived, stable, long reproductive cycles). K-selected features are more common in stable areas (with very long time between disturbances, for exampe coastal temperate forests of the Pacific North West a.k.a. redwoods) vs R-selected being common in dynamic areas (for example, alders, willows, etc, in floodplains). There is also a tremendous amount of diversity and trade-offs in different reproductive styles (wind vs animal polinated, wind vs animal dispersed, hypogeal vs epigeal seeds, etc etc). But I think adding in disturbance regimes would be the biggest first step if you wanted to refine the simulation. I would consider how each disturbance regime affects certain organism types. For example: Low-severity but high frequency fire typically kills many smaller plant species (though most are adapted to regenerate vigorously) but only rarely kills larger, mature trees. High-severity, low frequency fire kills most of what it touches, but is typically patchy on the landscape (doesn't affect 100% of the forest). Windthrough hits most tall organisms in a relatively small patch. Insects typically kill only mature trees. You could have disturbance goverend by a few factors: (1) severity-mortality, (2) severity-size, (3) frequency, (4) what features it selects for (young, old, tall, etc). Also, what software and language are you creating this in? For my project I am planning to learn Godot but I am curious what you used :) thanks for the awesome content!
That’s for the detailed comment! I am planning on adding disturbances at some point, and I like the breakdown you have summarised as low-sev/hig-freq and vice versa! I use Unity for the bulk of the development and I draw all the art on an iPad using an app called Procreate. I suspect Gadot would be fine as well but I like Unity as a product (even if its leadership has been “rocky” lol).
I look forward to what shenanigans ensue with different types of seeds and 'seed packaging' and giving herbivorous animals different wants for those seeds and fruits and such
Loving the new stuff and how much care you put into calculating each factor as thoroughly as you can reasonably expect. Very excited to see what's next!
I love this sm, evolution is always interesting just to watch but your va really adds a lot. I do wish there was a Key next to the map for the biomes, i quickly forget what means what but that might just be a me problem lol
@@Solitario9475 sounds like a great idea! I think there is something similar by another TH-cam dev called Germanunkol. Some very cool evolving monsters there!
Too much calculation and effort that goes into something that's not the primary gameplay loop. Additionally, probably a huge amount of backlog data needed to be kept to rationalise how the world has reached its current state. Newer players would have an increasingly massive data dump to deal with. On the gameplay design side, it would also be hard to design gameplay elements and mechanics around a world that keeps changing.
@ No it doesn’t. The world doesn’t actively evolve like that. It has a bunch of made up monsters that spawn randomly. No actual evolution just a false sense of it. So my question still stands. Also you sound like you’ve never played spore so definitely go try it out but you’ll find I’m correct. You can even just look at videos and you’ll see the same creatures that ver and over except the ones the player actually develops.
@@matthewchinmingwei6721 There’s always a way to strip useless data since you don’t need to remember the old evolutions only the ones happening now, you can also simplify the evolution stats, you could have the game run off of a server instead of the players computer meaning you could have multiplayer as a main mechanic and you can dramatically slow the process down so it uses less power and has the world feel natural instead of rapidly changing every five minutes. It could be a game where you have to play on the same server/world over and over to see the effects.
You also need to factor in seed germination type. For example some seeds are spread by wind, some by animals, some do not grow unless heated by a wild fire. There is some research on the walnut trees and how they will overproduce seed every couple years to ensure new trees and underproduce to cull the scavengers from eating all their seeds from the birth booms after a overproduce year.
found you just now, loved everything and good luck with stuff! also, maybe consider a different approach to the member stuff idk how much youtube takes from that, but something like ko-fi (not patreon because it seems they take way too much) could be better in a way that you get a higher % again, idk the numbers but consider that! the best for you!
@@sundown456brick thanks so much for the comment and the advice! I’ll check out ko-fi for sure. One thing I like about youtube is that it keeps everyone together and I thought that might be beneficial for live premieres etc.
@EightLittleBears That's a good point, though I'm not sure wether if it would prejudicial, but you're the only one who can decide that Glad to help if anything! Have a great day and I hope to see more
I do! Though I’ll admit I had to look back at what your comments were… sorry I only have a mediocre at best memory 😅. Natural disasters are still in the plan!
Brilliant video, it’s super impressive what you’ve done. One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is the feedback loop between biology and environment. You’ve started out with some base geographies. How interested are you at allowing each tiles biome type change based on precipitation, elevation and the plants growing in it?
Thanks for the comment! I am quite interested in changing environments. The current geographies are calculated based on temp and precipitation (which by proxy is impacted by things like altitude and latitude), but they are only calculated once at the start. In the future I want to add things like plate tectonics and atmosphere which will cause the environment itself to evolve over time.
Im super excited for this project. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time and seeing what you’ve put together is pretty amazing, keep up the incredible work!
It sucks that you made them compete so much because it’s actually a myth that taller trees with more leaf coverage steal resources from ones they overshadow, but we learned recently that because the roots are all intermingled, the big ones share the excess they get with the little ones they ever shadow. Unless the plants are like weeds, they usually share resources via their root system, and they’ll share other information and help. I don’t remember all of it but look it up. It’s really cool
Very interessting Video. You gained a new sub:). I love EvoSims but have almost no knowledge of them. I got a few questions about this sim tho. What was the parameter that the plants evolved towards? Were the plant categories pre selected (trees, shrubs etc)? Or were there any categories, it seemed like it was because of the Art. Did the plants have to make a tradeoff while evolving? And how did the plants procreate?
I was thinking about creating a very similar tile-based simulation. With sometimes lava coming up from under the ground and then these new mountains would emit water from under the ground as well later, and the different altitude would make the water flow. Creating it for a game where you have to survive, figure out laws of this nature and taking advantage of them and such.
Very interesting sim. I know its impossible to account for every natural phenom in a simulation.... Even though some try. My personal favorite things to add into parts of this would be. The fungus that connect trees in the soil. It acts as a syphen / distribution network. If there's a dead tree it takes nutrents + water from one and brings it to a more healthy tree. + Allows trees with an overabundance of water / energy to distribute that energy to others around it. The thing about this fungus is it doesn't interact with plants that arnt tree sized as far as I know. This specific adaptation allows large trees to sustain larger groves more efficiently. + Predation from animals. So much of the evolution on earth is directly related to animals+ plants in an arms race. I figure its basically impossible to implement this in any sort of complete way. However. Setting up 3 different predators for plants that have specific continually adapting factors might be possible. 1 to go after trees. They trim the tree tops. Giraffe essentially. Over a specific hight at first they can't hit.. but the longer the sim goes the higher they can trim. 1 for grasses ( where it actually helps the grass through fertilizer+ ) Look at the new wave of cattle ranch practices where cattle are moving through an area rather then simply eating all the grass in a given point. Then brush. Something like the goat. That eats almost anything but especially likes brush or midlvl plants. ( Plants eaten by this animal get a seed boosted in energy. )😅 1 for mid lvl / rocky plants. Give the plants a taste that the grass eater + tree eater doesn't like but. This third does.. Provides fertilizer, + seeds eaten by this specific animal get a boost for germination.. These changes together i expect would alter the simulation to be more aligned to what one would expect. A forest area. Savannah with a predominant base grass type plant.. + Brush types of plant in the dryer areas that aren't quite dessert..
Very interesting and detailed comment! I am actually working on getting plants and creatures to interact now! Currently looking at a digestion system that will allow seeds to be dispersed through animals and better energy exchanges depending on diet type! I think some of your other ideas are interesting too! Deffo want to have height play a role and fertilisation be a thing, which can also pave the way for fungi, but they are probably for a later update I think!
@EightLittleBears First great vid and that's for the response. The point with the specific fungi I am referring to is. mycorrhizae The reason I brought it up is that it doesn't act much like other fungi in the ecosystem. It specifically works with trees. So most of the issues working with other aspects of fungal life would be unneeded. The point of adding in this specific fugal effect is that it promotes groups of trees to form. If you don't want groves to form on the map. Probably not worth it. As to simulating animal plant interactions. 1 fruits, or the lure for animals to eat the seeds are an interesting byproduct here. / More energy is put into a seed then strictly nessary to lure animals to eat / transport the seeds. 2 seeds need to be produced quickly to be available for consumption. Hay grasses have quick up and germination times to allow for grazing animals to have a chance to eat them. So speed to seed and shorter growing size and time seems weighted here. 3 fertilizer. Eating seeds and giving them a bonus to germination.... Isn't the only use of excrement. It typically boosts soil health and minerals as well. How to model this though.... Smaller plants..... Usually use a bonus to growth after an area is disturbed. Quick ground cover. Larger ones come in later over time. + Tower over them. Fertilizer could give a boost to bounce back from predation. + Boost growth in a given area for a time. Not a lot but enough to break the math but enough to be boosted right after the animal moved through. I don't know how to account for better overtime soil quality. Usually that can't be directly attributed to animals anyway. As flooding, minerals, activity keeping herbivores moving all play a roll. Anyway these are ideas. Use as you see fit. You know your systems limitations much better then I do.
When the world got too busy the plant life started adapting for all the other plant life around it, affecting the way it grew, does this mean if we control the environment enough, more specifically where the trees grow and how much life is around them and when, could we evolve trees in unique ways?
I think there are a few conditions you could change here to get results closer to the real world. Max height, max age, plus a kind of correlation between height and age, and finally a differing absorbency rate between different types of ground. Also for your map you would need to address that one of the key aspects of a rainforest is temperature, same with other biomes. Rainforest doesn't simply mean huge rainfall or there would be several in new york state where there are none instead, the other key aspects are the temperature and absorbency of the soil (for example new york state doesn't have rainforests because the soil layer is too thin after the ice age scraped it away so the rainwater doesn't retain well enough to support a rainforest)
Interesting - the simulation uses temperature and precipitation to determine biomes based on the Whittaker Biome System. But it doesn’t (yet) take into account things like soil quality which is something I’d like to tackle in the future! Thanks for the comment!
Longer lifespan means more time between reproductions, meaning less mutations per unit of time. In real life less specialized r-strategists are often the ones to first swoop in after a big dieoff, being faster to mutate to fill newly-open niches than the longer-lived K-strategists and becoming the ancestors of dominant taxa. Perhaps in a more dynamic environment, where conditions change and more factors are in play, meaning there's more adaptation to do, faster mutations will give an edge?
@@ozirmokion7358 that’s a great observation, and actually the desert specialists were in an area where temperature fluctuations were severe across seasons, so that is one piece of evidence which supports your theory!
One problem, maybe already mentioned, is that plants also consume nutrients from soil, not just water. And diferent plants consume diferent nutrients, ergo crop rotation.
I feel like surface water should evaporate relative to temperature and elevation, also how "full" of water a tile can be should be based on neighbor tiles too, for example, if it rained a lot next to a river, it would top it up but realistically it's already very well hydrated as it's lost less, and can share less, but in a desert X rainfall on one tile would be spread amongst surrounding tiles quite quickly and also evaporate faster.
Two things I think could be interesting, but probably wouldn't change much (They are kind linked too): One, I feel like there should be a penalty for having too much above ground mass verses root mass, especially as a plant gets bigger. I don't think it should bother short plants much, but if a plant gets taller it should need more root mass to keep it from falling over. It's a bit of a balancing act though, as if it's too severe it will stop tall plants from forming. Two, I think that the amount of water in the ground should effect how hard it is for plants to grow their roots. My idea is that it costs plants more energy for plants to grow bigger roots in areas where there's less water because the soil is harder. It could also be linked for how long it takes a plant to grow, with slower speeds being effected by this penalty less. I think it would lead to more plant diversity based on environment, but at the same time I'm not sure if it would make much of a difference overall.
Both interesting ideas. To some extent, larger plants already require larger roots because, without them, they would struggle to collect enough water, but I haven’t thought about it from the “falling over” perspective. That might be even more interesting when large animals are added to the equation!
I think you should make fruits that fruit eating animals can transport further. You should also make nuts that specialist animals have better access to. Maybe even an arms race where the plant makes harder nuts and the animals has harder teeth for example. You should make arboreal animals that get tree resources like fruits leave and nuts faster. Also smaller herbivores might favor small plants and larger ones large plants. You could even make a smaller animal that needs very few resources and can sustain a population on a single tile like incects. You could also do a flying animal. It could be like those that favor fruits in trees become arboreal, then if they become even more arboreal they become a parrot or some bird. Then maybe that opens a whole new pathway where they can pre predators. Also wetlands would be cool. Like wetland plants and animals to live there.
All good ideas! I think in the next phase where I bring animals and plants together I will be trying to implement some similar things (or at least seeds that animals can transport around and different seeds/nuts etc. thanks for the comment!
Hi! Wonderful simulation, it could be very interesting to see what happens in case of a general increase (global warming) or decrease (ice age) of temperature during generations
I think that that puting all complexity of fight for resources into one level of congesitivity is too big simplification and it should be replaced with nutrition Also to make it work you should add cycle of matter Mabye if speed of cycle would be dependent from temperature that would bring more complex compositon of life form into rainforest Other thing that animals could be useful to put more evolutionary pressure and decrease life spawn of smaller plants because they are more vulnerable to be eaten by animal And i know that my english is really bad but this simulation is so intresting that i couldn t resist to help make it better
How about adding occasional natural disasters like earthquake, typhoons, floods, or wildfire? Because in natural selection even if some traits are very useful for a thriving population, most get wiped out because of disasters. Then, the ones with traits that let them survive the disaster remain, despite the fact that the trait is detrimental against their competition. It's just an interesting addition for me, and I predict it would make weird mutations later. In real research we see a lot of "useless" body parts in animals(or even humans), but we just have to wonder why did they remain despite having no uses? It's possible they were useful in ancient times and they just mutated to the point that it became redundant, or maybe it's a weird disaster saving trait.
Maybe this is overkill, but you could create 2 levels of underground water (in addition with the surface water, so a total of 3 levels) and only the plants with the biggest roots can access the deeper level? At the same time, maximum root depth should follow a ratio with respect to plant height, to allow trees to access the deepest waters and coexist with shrubs without competing to the death
With so much data about all of the kinds of plants an their chances of survival given their current world status, imagine using machine learning to predict the chance of survival for any kind of plant depending on the current (and predicted) world status
"I'm not a biologist." Neither are people who study plants. Botanists and Arborists do. Love watching videos about simulating evolution. First I've seen about plants though.
A bit late, but I want to try and give my 2 cents about why lifespan increased so drastically despite the lower time to reproduce. I think it boild down to 2 factors: 1. Resources being too bountiful and 2. Inability to compete. Point 1 refers to that fact that it doesn't seem like any resource other than space actually depletes. Water is infinite (although the amount differs based on the tile), CO2 never decreases, and soil quality/nutrients aren't a factor in this simulation. On the last idea, actually, I do think they should be included since, although the process of photosynthesis does lead to the creation of carbohydrates, it doesn't lead to ATP; there's one more process inbetween where molecules break and recombine where ATP is actually produced (I think 5-6 times more than in photosynthesis), and this cycle as it's called uses other nutrients that you can only obtain from the soil, like Magnesium or Nitrogen etc. Having a soil quality factor that slowly depletes over time as it's used but replenishes once dead plants "decompose" (could just be once they die) would inherently lead to a lot more diversity. You should look into succession for even more factors/how soil quality could be balanced! Back on topic of infinite resources though, since there's nothing to compete for, there's very little competition between individuals, meaning that there's nothing to actually kill off the plants once the simulation more or less hits equilibrium. It's like humans in real life: we have so many easily accessible resources and medications now that there's little to no reason to compete, so our lifespans continue to increase. Now onto Point 2. I might be wrong since you did mention you gave the plants ways to compete, but since you weren't very clear on what they were, I can only assume those ways to compete are root size and mass. The issue is, however, like I said above: there's no reason to compete over water because, as far as I can tell, there's no limit to it. The only actual resource they're competing for is space. And here is where things get interesting. Since, as far as I can tell, there's no way for plants to kill each other, that means that they are incapable of competing for space once that space is already occupied. Since being overfilled on a tile is damaging to ALL plants on that tile, they try to avoid it because there's no incentive. But if you are incapable of competing for space once that space is taken, how do you get the space? Simple: you never let go of that space. By growing to live longer lives, the plants are effectively killing any and all other plants before they can even germinate by occupying the space for longer and longer. All a plant needs is 1 descendant that will keep passing down its genes, so the slow reproduction rate isn't an issue here. And I think those "random trees" are the culmination of this process: the seedling stage takes so long because you don't want other plants to take it once you die, and the adult stage is so short because you want the best chance for your seeds to take your space once you die. And then the cycle repeats itself. There's 3 ways you could solve this issue: 1. Make more finite resources (like water, CO2, and soil quality/nutrients) 2. Add more ways for plants to compete (maybe some release chemicals that kills other plants around them, or they strangle and sap the nutrients from a different plant etc.) 3. Add more ways for plants to die or factors to worry about (like wind resistance, soil hardness/softness, rain and intense weather etc.) The Sapling is a really in-depth evolution sim with very advanced plant evolution. Your simulation doesn't have to have all of these factors at once, of course, and I'd argue looking at only a few factors at a time can be even more interesting than 30 factors you can hardly keep track of at times, but if you want to see how others have dealth with plant evolution, this is the game I'd highly recommend!
@@ceawithac4095 wow thanks for the detailed comment! So, water is finite on the tiles but it replenishes (around 10% of total tile capacity) every turn. Bigger roots allow plants to take a bigger share of the available water every turn. That said, I think that, because so many of the plant became small and grew very slowly, the amount of water on tiles was easily enough to sustain them so it was sort of “infinite adjacent” lol. Solar energy is also kind of limited in a different way. There is a max amount plants can get from a given tile based on their overground mass (and indirectly through other stats) but this doesn’t deplete at all. That said plants compete through height and overground mass because bigger/taller plants have better access to light in a congested environment. Soil/nutrient quality and atmospheric effects are all things I want to look into! In terms of “more ways to die”, there should be some of this in the next update when animals come into the equation (and natural disasters at some point). Also, I’ve not played the Sapling but I’ve been watching the videos for years and love them!
It's funny being recommended this video, watching it, and thinking, "wow, it'd be cool if he could do animals, too" only to discover that animals were the focus! I'd be really curious what happens if you got a feedback between CO2 and O2 needs between animals and plants, along with biomass of the plants with carbon as a limited resource. After all, an explosion of hyper successful plants could cause a mass extinction, like, a real one: ancient non-tree, tree-analogs once used up all the carbon and caused an ice age that resulted in one of the big five extinctions in Earth's history. I feel like that would be unfortunate to see as the sim probably couldn't recover (or maybe it could if you don't do the green house effect and have ice ages), but it would also be cool if one time you ran the simulation you reproduced one of Earth's major geologic events.
Agreed! Atmospheric change and balance is on my list of things I want. Realistically I want the world itself to evolve rather than just the world’s inhabitants.
@@zane_sadauskis haha - this made me smile. On a realistic note, hopefully next year, but the next goal is to merge the animal and plant systems together so it depends how long that takes, along with a couple of environmental changes to get lakes and stuff.
Nice love your videos. Something that most genetic simulations don't consider, is that our DNA evolves to be redundant as a way to be more resistant to mutation. I'm curious how a mutation resistance gene, would affect the simulation.
@@EbonyWolf. that is an interesting idea and a few people have mentioned similar things. I can set mutation levels manually so it would probably be quite easy to allow “mutation chance” and “mutation amount” to mutate itself (and lowering would be roughly equivalent to developing a resistance to mutation). I’m probably going to do a specific video on that!
I had a thought about using the world model of earth as a control value, same Continental locations, same regional environmental factors such as heat and cold, how much water, how much it rains and more, even similar solar rotations around sun that makes up year is similar, idea is to see how close you can get to earths ecosystem while do similar natural random state of growth. Maybe even environmental disasters such as hurricanes, Earth quakes and volcano eruptions and etc?
@@demian_csomic_winters9484 it’s an interesting concept. Think I still have quite a way to go before I could attempt something like that! That said atmosphere and natural disasters and so on are all things I want to add at some stage (essentially an evolving world rather than just evolving things in a world). Thanks for the comment, and please feel free to join the discord! 😀
@@EightLittleBears for now could make flat map of earth and general idea for different regions and so on, like where median line and artic poles are, more complex stuff like spherical world, disasters and so could come later, something like this could probably make in similar manner to game making but with more sandbox style, and you could "update" or make "dlcs" to alter your scenario game of sorts. Like making a program where you can edit the solar system such as how many stars, what type of stars, how many and types planets how do they all move and so on, down to smallest details though how much depth you can control can be improved over time, and as its more of tool then genuine game balance for players isn't really required to worry about as for testing but who knows maybe in future others could use such useful tool too. Even adding ability to design both real and fake plans and test them in scenarios, like what if world tree of elf's as really and had genuine capabilities as they are shown what would real world look like with such a tree and with right settings and programming you can see how they could naturally work in a IRL world if real. And the great thing about this idea is you have thousands of real plants and variants you could model for templates even long dead Species of plans and animals could be reacted in this manner. this comment was meant to be short then I kept thinking and typing my thoughts I had them. I hope it's clean enough to read and understand lol
2:01 i hate it when people do this, because i was listening to everything they said beforehand and they just handwave it away like not a single soul cared, i came here to learn god dammit!
I think you're missing some of the competitive advantages large plants has and that means we don't really see the same progression we see in the real world. In the real world large plants have significant advantages that let them outcompete small ones like blocking out sunlight (which you don't really accurately model since you you just have a congestion penality that applies to all plants but in the real world large plants would be completely unaffected by the light the they block from other plants), they are also able to produce much larger seeds that thus have more energy and better chances to germinate and they can produce many more seeds, plus they time their seed dispersal so some years they produce a massive abundance of seeds to ensure they don't all get eaten by animals. Also another aspect that might need simulating is the light spectrum because one of the big differences between tall plants and underbrush is what wavelengths of light they absorb, tall plants will absorb the most energetic parts of the visible spectrum but underbrush will focus more on efficiently absorbing the parts that haven't been absorbed by the large plants, which is why their leaves are different shades of green. And if you're gonna introduce animals you should probably also simulate seed dispersal so there's some opportunity for mutualistic symbiosis between plants and animals by letting plants evolve animal based seed dispersal. Also if you worry that this would make large plants too competitive I could suggest also implementing disease, since large plants are just naturally more vulnerable to disease due to their long life span.
@@hedgehog3180 thanks for the detailed comment! Some of these features (like speed dispersal) are hopefully going to be in the next update. Also, the light spectrum was particularly interesting as that isn’t something I’d heard before!
@@EightLittleBears It's one of the reasons why you don't see grass in forrests since grass is adapted to use the same wavelengths of light as trees, another is that grass can't develop its complex root system in a forrest since the underground is already taken up by the roots of trees. On the topic of roots another thing that might be worth modelling is the density of nutrients in the soil since that's one of the most important abiotic factors for plants. You can model nutrient levels in a pretty similar way to how you modelled ground water, but have the nutrients get washed out by overflowing water, and in turn the rate at which it gets washed out is based on how crowded the underground is since roots stabilize soil and prevent run-off in the real world, especially large roots like the ones trees have. Of course if you combine this simulation with your animal simulation it'd make sense to make the nutrient replenishment scale in accordance with how many animals a tile has.
@@ethanjaycecantalejo3995 these are all things which are on the way, but what do you mean it is less time consuming to code? In my head they were more complex because (for example) pollination would also require a pollinator, which would require insects and so on down the rabbit hole 😄
Not a biologist of any sort, so grain of salt, but I think perhaps old age didn't entirely reflect the real-world penalties outside of slowed growth? Organisms broadly have worse health as age increases, which (within the scope of this simulation) might lead to less successful reproduction and less resource efficiency? I'm not sure if the literature you've based the sim on has any quantitative data on those aspects, or maybe you've already accounted for them and worked them into the sim, but it would be interesting to know how that affects evolution?
@@signofmars it’s a great point! Creatures in previous versions of the sim had a rudimentary version of this, were they couldn’t reproduce in the final third of their life, but it’s funny you mention it because I actually just updated this earlier this week so creatures now age on a proper curve (not based on any particular literature but they start weak, gradually reach a peak, and then gradually weaken until they die). I am not sure how well that applies to plants though, or whether there is a general rule that even could apply to plants (comparing a redwood to some seasonal flower for example)?
i have a theory on why plants evolve to live longer. think about long livers, in your simulation plants reproduce continuously after maturity so long living plants will produce more seeds on average, raising its chances of successful replication. i guess this is why they were favored in your scenario. i think that a decline in quality of offspring with old age and a population of primary consumers would reverse this trend, but what i'm thinking is that there aren't many threats to the plants at all, so they can live longer making a lot of seeds. edit: just read other peoples comments, they have much more detailed theories about why that trend might be, this is actually really interesting
@@Polonium209 yeah there’s been some great discussion and I think you lot are on to something! Thanks so much for taking an interest and taking the time to comment 😃
If you would add atmosfear or carbon silicate cycle you could simulet global extinctions. For exapmle when a plant gets to got at it's job and spreads into regions where are no animals to eat the dead biomass. This will make a thiner CO2 layer, because all the carbon is now in a different form, and this will cause a global climate change an ice age. But afrte a while the CO2 layer will be restored, because the cycle is self-balancing.
Hm. Naturally evolving plants will learn to basically cover the earth even in harsh conditions? Not entirely true. However also not that far off. Even arric and desert conditions have plants that have evolved to exist at certain times. Of course our earth does have some hellscapes in which nothing lives for long. However life gets closer than one might assume. Maybe some of the conditions need to be more extreme, to make the simulation more accurate.
Interesting. The point at 9:08 was related to max energy storage rather than collection. Of if I’m not mistaken that should still scale with volume, or have I missed something?
It’s not that’s it’s impossible to have a long lifespan and quick reproduction. It’s because reproduction is linked to rate of growth, and time to reproduction is calculated by rate of growth / lifespan (and some other math but this is the important bit) - so, if you want to have a long lifespan with fast reproduction, then you need to increase your rate of growth along with it. It’s not a perfect representation of reality (as you say), but it works a very general rule. It’s something I will refine in the future when we bring in pollination and other reproductive methods!
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This is the percent chance of a seed not germinating after 100 days
36.23720178604972098813098663067922123278%
Will this project ever be something thats playable?
@@joeburnover4110 yes eventually I am planning on making it playable.
@@EightLittleBears how much will it cost? Do you have any idea yet or unsure?
@@joeburnover4110 it’s not something I’ve thought about yet. We are still a long way from something that’s finished so cross that bridge when we come to it 😃
maybe with creatures in the simulation will change the plant behavior, longer lives would be less efficient because they would be eaten more
@@Karnivor-0us yeah it’s a good point. It might also be that getting to full maturity more quickly is more valuable with animals because plants could start to fruit and animals could help disperse the seeds, etc.
@@EightLittleBearstrampling by large animals, defenses against (specific) herbivores and the presence of nutrients as a result of dead animals and feces could lead to interesting effects too.
Not to mentions hurricane's tornados , ect
@@harrysarso I genuinely read “hurricanes and tomatoes” 😂
@@EightLittleBears 🤔 thats called seed dispersal i think ;p
I love the simulation, but my favorite part is always your art! It really adds a lot of life to everything outside of pure numbers and calculations.
@@t-money2558 thanks! I’m not as good with the numbers as some of the other sim gurus so I try to keep it as visually engaging as I can 😃
Honestly, what I liked most was seeing the plants completely cover the colder enges, hibernate when the winter came, and then just keep going, flashing between green and brown.
@@samueltrusik3251 the interesting part about that which I forgot to mention in the video is that going brown actually indicates that the plant is struggling to remain hydrated (as opposed to explicit hibernation). The fact that extreme latitudes which have volatile seasons caused this to happen en masse and in unison wasn’t explicitly designed.. it is closer to (although not exactly) an emergent behaviour in the overall environment (I.e. I didn’t design hibernation, but the plants evolved it anyway).
It's always fun to see thatQ even at such simple and small scales, complex interactions and chaos can arise!
It'd be interesting to see how different types of seeds would effect the germination system?
Like smaller seeds get fewer chances to germinate, but more can be made, and they can travel farther.
While large nut-like seeds get more chances to germinate but can't travel as far, and the parent plant must use more resources to produce them!
Yeah I agree! Plus birds and stuff can carry the smaller seeds around so it can introduce some interesting interactions when animals come back into it!
It's likely going to be very difficult to simulate properly the biodiversity of rainforests without having to zoom in to focus on a specific location & then creating 3D renditions to accommodate the various plants at ground-level, in the canopy, & everywhere in between.
While trees in rainforest biomes are numerous, their general strategies for success are quite similar.
What's interesting is that the simulation chose to prioritize growth in the desert, but that might have something to do with their proximity to water. Something I've noticed is that while plant growth near water, particularly rivers & river mouths, isn't necessarily diverse, you will see a slight uptick diversity in trees, algae, & moss, specifically.
I don't know if there's proper research to back any of what I'm saying up, but I am a nature nerd who grew up on documentaries, so it's just some observations I've noticed.
@@MildlyOCD interesting points. I have been thinking about how to visualise the diversity of ground-level plants in rainforests but haven’t come up with a solution yet.. I’m sure one will come! It’s a good point about the similar strategies of trees in rainforests as well. That isn’t something I thought of!
@@EightLittleBears Maybe you could do some sort of parasite plants like vines that abuse taller plants for easier access resources like sunlight in dense areas.
the plants evolve longer lifespans (and size) because the additional time to mature isn't enough to dissuade them. Throw in periodic fires (idk maybe once every few decades) that have a probability to kill each plant in the tile, with a bias so that larger and older plants have a higher chance to burn. That should give you enough selection pressure against huge ancient trees.
you'll also want to implement fire resistant seeds
That’s an interesting concept!
This is really cool! Do you have any plans of implementing this alongside your animal evolution algorithms?
@@jesperisborn9894 yep! They are built on the same core so the next stage(s) is probably going to be tying herbivore diets into the new plant system.
Just commenting for the algorithm and to wish you the best of luck on your future endeavors! Love your vids!
@@MattCaballes thanks! Glad you like them!
I heard someone say that comments don't affect the algorithm anymore, just watchtime and likes and subscriptions (and presumably super thanks and channel joins too). But I don't have any sources for that to back it up.
Not sure if you already considered it, but it might be an interesting idea to make the temperature tolerance a variable too, with higher tolerances allowing for viability in a larger range of environments (or in more extreme seasons). Not sure what the tradeoff for this generalism should be, perhaps an overall lowered germination chance so they have better chances in varied environments (since other plants wouldn't be able to germinate half of the time at all), but worse chances in stable environments.
Yeah that is something I am considering but, like you say, the trade-off is the tricky part.. It will probably be something along the lines of specialists being generally better at everything as long as they are in their environment.
@@EightLittleBears My first idea is to make them more sensitive to overcrowding than specialists, both when trying to germinate and while growing. The only problem is that if they can't get a foothold early, they may not be able to at all.
My other idea is to separate the temperature tolerances for germination and growth and allowing them to mutate separately. If they drift apart, these plants can germinate during seasons beyond their tolerance then grow when conditions are more favorable. However, they'll probably need shorter sapling stages and lifespans to capitalize on this in environments where this difference is big enough. They also risk their two tolerances drifting too far apart, making them have less viable environments due to there not being enough change.
At least, that's my theory.
@@strcmdrbookwyrm great theory. I think separating the seed’s evolutionary story from the plant itself is particularly interesting and the code could probably be re-used for things like chrysalis stages in insects!
@@EightLittleBears What about plants with less enviromental diversity get an overall improvement on many stats, but the more adaptable the plant becomes, it gets a gradually lower bonus until it may become an actual hinderance.
@@Lallunalapruna123 yeah I think something like that would probably work!
I am curious how the build would be affected by different seed distribution methods. For example how some trees only spread seeds after a fire where nutrients the the plant life used get added back into the soil
@@zane_sadauskis I am hoping to get this kind of detail in there at some point!
I want to see more competition between the plants, maybe soil fertility that is drained to promote size, and fertility goes up from death? And perhaps seed dispersal distance vs time, maybe separate optional conditions for germination?
Thanks for the comment! And agreed these are all good ideas. The update I’m currently working on includes animals carrying seeds, so it’s a start on the dispersal point!
I've been watching for a while now, and this is amazing to see how far its come and where its going! I can't wait to see how the creatures adapt to this!
Thanks so much for watching!
This simulation perfectly demonstrates successional ecosystems, which start with smaller grass like organisms and generally morph into larger tree like organisms over time.
On earth, Savannahs and Tallgrass Prairies are the second most diverse terrestrial ecosystems. So that your simulation has them as the most diverse actually makes a lot of sense.
I loved the frustrated acorn when you started going overboard with describing how plants get energy. So cute
@@magnolia1253 haha I had fun making it
i just genuinely love these videos and i hope eventually your programs and programs like this can be used to fully show the development of terrestrial life on other planets from specific adaptations and unique evolutionary developments. like "spore" but rather than a human creating a random funny monstrosity its a ai system using already pre documented evolutionary adaptations mixed with potential x factor adaptations to create and simulate new creature. i also want these types of simulations to be implemented into games like rpg's where after a while if you aren't carefull either you will end up devastating an ecosystem due to over hunting/fishing/ resource gathering etc or there will be a species that adapts to better kill the player
Another really strong video! This is one of my favorite projects being documented right now. Keep up the great work and can't wait to see how creature dynamics are bidirectionally influenced with plant dynamics.
Thanks for comment! Glad you enjoyed it!
Amazing video! I've always been fascinated with the thought of simulating evolutionary processes and it's really interesting to see how you implemented it.
Great work!
Amazing video as always! I am excited to see what adaptations develop when the plants evolve alongside creatures.
I'm also excited for your shift in focus towards TH-cam content. Your videos are always educational, entertaining, and visually stunning.
@@Briscanator thanks so much!
Hello! Loved the video and this project! I am about to start a similar project for myself.
I think a few others already mentioned this in the comments but I believe an important reason your populations trended towards long lifetime was lack of disturbance regimes. Plant ecosystems are heavily influenced by disturbance regimes, which promotes a gradient of adaptations across two different general strategies: R-selected (short-lived, adaptable, fast reproductive cycles) or K-selected (long-lived, stable, long reproductive cycles). K-selected features are more common in stable areas (with very long time between disturbances, for exampe coastal temperate forests of the Pacific North West a.k.a. redwoods) vs R-selected being common in dynamic areas (for example, alders, willows, etc, in floodplains).
There is also a tremendous amount of diversity and trade-offs in different reproductive styles (wind vs animal polinated, wind vs animal dispersed, hypogeal vs epigeal seeds, etc etc). But I think adding in disturbance regimes would be the biggest first step if you wanted to refine the simulation.
I would consider how each disturbance regime affects certain organism types. For example: Low-severity but high frequency fire typically kills many smaller plant species (though most are adapted to regenerate vigorously) but only rarely kills larger, mature trees. High-severity, low frequency fire kills most of what it touches, but is typically patchy on the landscape (doesn't affect 100% of the forest). Windthrough hits most tall organisms in a relatively small patch. Insects typically kill only mature trees. You could have disturbance goverend by a few factors: (1) severity-mortality, (2) severity-size, (3) frequency, (4) what features it selects for (young, old, tall, etc).
Also, what software and language are you creating this in? For my project I am planning to learn Godot but I am curious what you used :) thanks for the awesome content!
That’s for the detailed comment! I am planning on adding disturbances at some point, and I like the breakdown you have summarised as low-sev/hig-freq and vice versa! I use Unity for the bulk of the development and I draw all the art on an iPad using an app called Procreate. I suspect Gadot would be fine as well but I like Unity as a product (even if its leadership has been “rocky” lol).
I look forward to what shenanigans ensue with different types of seeds and 'seed packaging' and giving herbivorous animals different wants for those seeds and fruits and such
I think this just became my favorite video of yours. Really cool deep dive on plants. Can't wait to see more!
Thanks! Glad you liked it!
Loving the new stuff and how much care you put into calculating each factor as thoroughly as you can reasonably expect. Very excited to see what's next!
Thanks so much! ❤️
As someone with Atychiphobia, this is literally my perspective: 0:32
great video, glad youtube recommended me it!
Glad to see you were recommended it! 😃
I love this sm, evolution is always interesting just to watch but your va really adds a lot. I do wish there was a Key next to the map for the biomes, i quickly forget what means what but that might just be a me problem lol
@@aaronforpie thanks! I’ll bear the key in mind for next time 😃
Imagine if this was in a survival game and the world evolved around you. Why has no one done this yet?
@@Solitario9475 sounds like a great idea! I think there is something similar by another TH-cam dev called Germanunkol. Some very cool evolving monsters there!
Too much calculation and effort that goes into something that's not the primary gameplay loop. Additionally, probably a huge amount of backlog data needed to be kept to rationalise how the world has reached its current state. Newer players would have an increasingly massive data dump to deal with. On the gameplay design side, it would also be hard to design gameplay elements and mechanics around a world that keeps changing.
Sounds kinda like Spore that's why
@ No it doesn’t. The world doesn’t actively evolve like that. It has a bunch of made up monsters that spawn randomly. No actual evolution just a false sense of it. So my question still stands. Also you sound like you’ve never played spore so definitely go try it out but you’ll find I’m correct. You can even just look at videos and you’ll see the same creatures that ver and over except the ones the player actually develops.
@@matthewchinmingwei6721 There’s always a way to strip useless data since you don’t need to remember the old evolutions only the ones happening now, you can also simplify the evolution stats, you could have the game run off of a server instead of the players computer meaning you could have multiplayer as a main mechanic and you can dramatically slow the process down so it uses less power and has the world feel natural instead of rapidly changing every five minutes. It could be a game where you have to play on the same server/world over and over to see the effects.
I'm glad this intro had a little bit of video at the end.
You also need to factor in seed germination type. For example some seeds are spread by wind, some by animals, some do not grow unless heated by a wild fire. There is some research on the walnut trees and how they will overproduce seed every couple years to ensure new trees and underproduce to cull the scavengers from eating all their seeds from the birth booms after a overproduce year.
found you just now, loved everything and good luck with stuff!
also, maybe consider a different approach to the member stuff
idk how much youtube takes from that, but something like ko-fi (not patreon because it seems they take way too much) could be better in a way that you get a higher %
again, idk the numbers but consider that!
the best for you!
@@sundown456brick thanks so much for the comment and the advice! I’ll check out ko-fi for sure. One thing I like about youtube is that it keeps everyone together and I thought that might be beneficial for live premieres etc.
@EightLittleBears That's a good point, though I'm not sure wether if it would prejudicial, but you're the only one who can decide that
Glad to help if anything! Have a great day and I hope to see more
nice, new video on the simulation
@@Choompar glad you like them!
@@EightLittleBears quick question, do you remember me?
I do! Though I’ll admit I had to look back at what your comments were… sorry I only have a mediocre at best memory 😅. Natural disasters are still in the plan!
@@EightLittleBears nice, next add disease
Brilliant video, it’s super impressive what you’ve done. One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is the feedback loop between biology and environment. You’ve started out with some base geographies. How interested are you at allowing each tiles biome type change based on precipitation, elevation and the plants growing in it?
Thanks for the comment! I am quite interested in changing environments. The current geographies are calculated based on temp and precipitation (which by proxy is impacted by things like altitude and latitude), but they are only calculated once at the start. In the future I want to add things like plate tectonics and atmosphere which will cause the environment itself to evolve over time.
Im super excited for this project. I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time and seeing what you’ve put together is pretty amazing, keep up the incredible work!
It sucks that you made them compete so much because it’s actually a myth that taller trees with more leaf coverage steal resources from ones they overshadow, but we learned recently that because the roots are all intermingled, the big ones share the excess they get with the little ones they ever shadow. Unless the plants are like weeds, they usually share resources via their root system, and they’ll share other information and help. I don’t remember all of it but look it up. It’s really cool
Mashing the plants and animals together and seeing how both impact each other (similar to reintroducing wolves to Yosemite) would be amazing.
This is so cool! Can't wait to see it combined w the animal sims
Very interessting Video. You gained a new sub:).
I love EvoSims but have almost no knowledge of them.
I got a few questions about this sim tho.
What was the parameter that the plants evolved towards?
Were the plant categories pre selected (trees, shrubs etc)? Or were there any categories, it seemed like it was because of the Art.
Did the plants have to make a tradeoff while evolving?
And how did the plants procreate?
I was thinking about creating a very similar tile-based simulation.
With sometimes lava coming up from under the ground and then these new mountains would emit water from under the ground as well later, and the different altitude would make the water flow.
Creating it for a game where you have to survive, figure out laws of this nature and taking advantage of them and such.
Plant evo! Excited to see this alongside the animal evolution sim. You might want to do some sort of layering option so you can have rainforests
Very interesting sim.
I know its impossible to account for every natural phenom in a simulation.... Even though some try.
My personal favorite things to add into parts of this would be.
The fungus that connect trees in the soil. It acts as a syphen / distribution network. If there's a dead tree it takes nutrents + water from one and brings it to a more healthy tree.
+ Allows trees with an overabundance of water / energy to distribute that energy to others around it.
The thing about this fungus is it doesn't interact with plants that arnt tree sized as far as I know.
This specific adaptation allows large trees to sustain larger groves more efficiently.
+ Predation from animals.
So much of the evolution on earth is directly related to animals+ plants in an arms race.
I figure its basically impossible to implement this in any sort of complete way.
However.
Setting up 3 different predators for plants that have specific continually adapting factors might be possible.
1 to go after trees.
They trim the tree tops. Giraffe essentially.
Over a specific hight at first they can't hit.. but the longer the sim goes the higher they can trim.
1 for grasses ( where it actually helps the grass through fertilizer+ )
Look at the new wave of cattle ranch practices where cattle are moving through an area rather then simply eating all the grass in a given point.
Then brush.
Something like the goat. That eats almost anything but especially likes brush or midlvl plants.
( Plants eaten by this animal get a seed boosted in energy. )😅
1 for mid lvl / rocky plants.
Give the plants a taste that the grass eater + tree eater doesn't like but.
This third does..
Provides fertilizer, + seeds eaten by this specific animal get a boost for germination..
These changes together i expect would alter the simulation to be more aligned to what one would expect.
A forest area.
Savannah with a predominant base grass type plant..
+
Brush types of plant in the dryer areas that aren't quite dessert..
Very interesting and detailed comment! I am actually working on getting plants and creatures to interact now! Currently looking at a digestion system that will allow seeds to be dispersed through animals and better energy exchanges depending on diet type! I think some of your other ideas are interesting too! Deffo want to have height play a role and fertilisation be a thing, which can also pave the way for fungi, but they are probably for a later update I think!
@EightLittleBears
First great vid and that's for the response.
The point with the specific fungi I am referring to is.
mycorrhizae
The reason I brought it up is that it doesn't act much like other fungi in the ecosystem.
It specifically works with trees.
So most of the issues working with other aspects of fungal life would be unneeded.
The point of adding in this specific fugal effect is that it promotes groups of trees to form.
If you don't want groves to form on the map. Probably not worth it.
As to simulating animal plant interactions.
1 fruits, or the lure for animals to eat the seeds are an interesting byproduct here.
/
More energy is put into a seed then strictly nessary to lure animals to eat / transport the seeds.
2 seeds need to be produced quickly to be available for consumption.
Hay grasses have quick up and germination times to allow for grazing animals to have a chance to eat them.
So speed to seed and shorter growing size and time seems weighted here.
3 fertilizer.
Eating seeds and giving them a bonus to germination.... Isn't the only use of excrement. It typically boosts soil health and minerals as well.
How to model this though....
Smaller plants..... Usually use a bonus to growth after an area is disturbed. Quick ground cover.
Larger ones come in later over time. + Tower over them.
Fertilizer could give a boost to bounce back from predation. + Boost growth in a given area for a time.
Not a lot but enough to break the math but enough to be boosted right after the animal moved through.
I don't know how to account for better overtime soil quality.
Usually that can't be directly attributed to animals anyway. As flooding, minerals, activity keeping herbivores moving all play a roll.
Anyway these are ideas.
Use as you see fit.
You know your systems limitations much better then I do.
An amazing video and simulation. I cant wait to see what interactions with creatures does to both the plants and the creatures themselves!
Thanks! And I agree creatures and plants evolving together is gonna be wild!
When the world got too busy the plant life started adapting for all the other plant life around it, affecting the way it grew, does this mean if we control the environment enough, more specifically where the trees grow and how much life is around them and when, could we evolve trees in unique ways?
I think there are a few conditions you could change here to get results closer to the real world. Max height, max age, plus a kind of correlation between height and age, and finally a differing absorbency rate between different types of ground. Also for your map you would need to address that one of the key aspects of a rainforest is temperature, same with other biomes. Rainforest doesn't simply mean huge rainfall or there would be several in new york state where there are none instead, the other key aspects are the temperature and absorbency of the soil (for example new york state doesn't have rainforests because the soil layer is too thin after the ice age scraped it away so the rainwater doesn't retain well enough to support a rainforest)
Interesting - the simulation uses temperature and precipitation to determine biomes based on the Whittaker Biome System. But it doesn’t (yet) take into account things like soil quality which is something I’d like to tackle in the future! Thanks for the comment!
@@EightLittleBears no problem at all, i love these kinds of simulations and how they themselves evolve over time
Longer lifespan means more time between reproductions, meaning less mutations per unit of time. In real life less specialized r-strategists are often the ones to first swoop in after a big dieoff, being faster to mutate to fill newly-open niches than the longer-lived K-strategists and becoming the ancestors of dominant taxa. Perhaps in a more dynamic environment, where conditions change and more factors are in play, meaning there's more adaptation to do, faster mutations will give an edge?
@@ozirmokion7358 that’s a great observation, and actually the desert specialists were in an area where temperature fluctuations were severe across seasons, so that is one piece of evidence which supports your theory!
One problem, maybe already mentioned, is that plants also consume nutrients from soil, not just water. And diferent plants consume diferent nutrients, ergo crop rotation.
I feel like surface water should evaporate relative to temperature and elevation, also how "full" of water a tile can be should be based on neighbor tiles too, for example, if it rained a lot next to a river, it would top it up but realistically it's already very well hydrated as it's lost less, and can share less, but in a desert X rainfall on one tile would be spread amongst surrounding tiles quite quickly and also evaporate faster.
Two things I think could be interesting, but probably wouldn't change much (They are kind linked too):
One, I feel like there should be a penalty for having too much above ground mass verses root mass, especially as a plant gets bigger. I don't think it should bother short plants much, but if a plant gets taller it should need more root mass to keep it from falling over. It's a bit of a balancing act though, as if it's too severe it will stop tall plants from forming.
Two, I think that the amount of water in the ground should effect how hard it is for plants to grow their roots. My idea is that it costs plants more energy for plants to grow bigger roots in areas where there's less water because the soil is harder. It could also be linked for how long it takes a plant to grow, with slower speeds being effected by this penalty less. I think it would lead to more plant diversity based on environment, but at the same time I'm not sure if it would make much of a difference overall.
Both interesting ideas. To some extent, larger plants already require larger roots because, without them, they would struggle to collect enough water, but I haven’t thought about it from the “falling over” perspective. That might be even more interesting when large animals are added to the equation!
I think you should make fruits that fruit eating animals can transport further. You should also make nuts that specialist animals have better access to. Maybe even an arms race where the plant makes harder nuts and the animals has harder teeth for example. You should make arboreal animals that get tree resources like fruits leave and nuts faster. Also smaller herbivores might favor small plants and larger ones large plants. You could even make a smaller animal that needs very few resources and can sustain a population on a single tile like incects. You could also do a flying animal. It could be like those that favor fruits in trees become arboreal, then if they become even more arboreal they become a parrot or some bird. Then maybe that opens a whole new pathway where they can pre predators. Also wetlands would be cool. Like wetland plants and animals to live there.
All good ideas! I think in the next phase where I bring animals and plants together I will be trying to implement some similar things (or at least seeds that animals can transport around and different seeds/nuts etc. thanks for the comment!
Perhaps Vines as choking plants could be a factor in Rainforest?
Hi! Wonderful simulation, it could be very interesting to see what happens in case of a general increase (global warming) or decrease (ice age) of temperature during generations
I think that that puting all complexity of fight for resources into one level of congesitivity is too big simplification and it should be replaced with nutrition Also to make it work you should add cycle of matter Mabye if speed of cycle would be dependent from temperature that would bring more complex compositon of life form into rainforest Other thing that animals could be useful to put more evolutionary pressure and decrease life spawn of smaller plants because they are more vulnerable to be eaten by animal And i know that my english is really bad but this simulation is so intresting that i couldn t resist to help make it better
How about adding occasional natural disasters like earthquake, typhoons, floods, or wildfire?
Because in natural selection even if some traits are very useful for a thriving population, most get wiped out because of disasters. Then, the ones with traits that let them survive the disaster remain, despite the fact that the trait is detrimental against their competition.
It's just an interesting addition for me, and I predict it would make weird mutations later.
In real research we see a lot of "useless" body parts in animals(or even humans), but we just have to wonder why did they remain despite having no uses? It's possible they were useful in ancient times and they just mutated to the point that it became redundant, or maybe it's a weird disaster saving trait.
Maybe this is overkill, but you could create 2 levels of underground water (in addition with the surface water, so a total of 3 levels) and only the plants with the biggest roots can access the deeper level?
At the same time, maximum root depth should follow a ratio with respect to plant height, to allow trees to access the deepest waters and coexist with shrubs without competing to the death
@@carlosroura7581 yeah I agree!
Savanas are actually really diverse tho its mostly grasses
Yeah that’s a good point!
soil quality should be added as a factor
Agreed!
Could be calculated by the amount of available biomass died on the tile over time
With so much data about all of the kinds of plants an their chances of survival given their current world status, imagine using machine learning to predict the chance of survival for any kind of plant depending on the current (and predicted) world status
That would be pretty crazy!
make some plant that can grow on shallow water. It would make more diverse plants. BTW, I love your content. Keep it up.
Thanks so much! And yeah I am going to try and tackle some aquatic themes after merging creatures with plants.
wait until he hears about the forest network
What is this? When I google it there are all sorts of things that come up!
"I'm not a biologist." Neither are people who study plants. Botanists and Arborists do. Love watching videos about simulating evolution. First I've seen about plants though.
@@wilcojar haha good point..
A bit late, but I want to try and give my 2 cents about why lifespan increased so drastically despite the lower time to reproduce. I think it boild down to 2 factors:
1. Resources being too bountiful and
2. Inability to compete.
Point 1 refers to that fact that it doesn't seem like any resource other than space actually depletes. Water is infinite (although the amount differs based on the tile), CO2 never decreases, and soil quality/nutrients aren't a factor in this simulation. On the last idea, actually, I do think they should be included since, although the process of photosynthesis does lead to the creation of carbohydrates, it doesn't lead to ATP; there's one more process inbetween where molecules break and recombine where ATP is actually produced (I think 5-6 times more than in photosynthesis), and this cycle as it's called uses other nutrients that you can only obtain from the soil, like Magnesium or Nitrogen etc. Having a soil quality factor that slowly depletes over time as it's used but replenishes once dead plants "decompose" (could just be once they die) would inherently lead to a lot more diversity. You should look into succession for even more factors/how soil quality could be balanced!
Back on topic of infinite resources though, since there's nothing to compete for, there's very little competition between individuals, meaning that there's nothing to actually kill off the plants once the simulation more or less hits equilibrium. It's like humans in real life: we have so many easily accessible resources and medications now that there's little to no reason to compete, so our lifespans continue to increase.
Now onto Point 2. I might be wrong since you did mention you gave the plants ways to compete, but since you weren't very clear on what they were, I can only assume those ways to compete are root size and mass. The issue is, however, like I said above: there's no reason to compete over water because, as far as I can tell, there's no limit to it. The only actual resource they're competing for is space. And here is where things get interesting. Since, as far as I can tell, there's no way for plants to kill each other, that means that they are incapable of competing for space once that space is already occupied. Since being overfilled on a tile is damaging to ALL plants on that tile, they try to avoid it because there's no incentive. But if you are incapable of competing for space once that space is taken, how do you get the space?
Simple: you never let go of that space. By growing to live longer lives, the plants are effectively killing any and all other plants before they can even germinate by occupying the space for longer and longer. All a plant needs is 1 descendant that will keep passing down its genes, so the slow reproduction rate isn't an issue here. And I think those "random trees" are the culmination of this process: the seedling stage takes so long because you don't want other plants to take it once you die, and the adult stage is so short because you want the best chance for your seeds to take your space once you die. And then the cycle repeats itself.
There's 3 ways you could solve this issue:
1. Make more finite resources (like water, CO2, and soil quality/nutrients)
2. Add more ways for plants to compete (maybe some release chemicals that kills other plants around them, or they strangle and sap the nutrients from a different plant etc.)
3. Add more ways for plants to die or factors to worry about (like wind resistance, soil hardness/softness, rain and intense weather etc.)
The Sapling is a really in-depth evolution sim with very advanced plant evolution. Your simulation doesn't have to have all of these factors at once, of course, and I'd argue looking at only a few factors at a time can be even more interesting than 30 factors you can hardly keep track of at times, but if you want to see how others have dealth with plant evolution, this is the game I'd highly recommend!
@@ceawithac4095 wow thanks for the detailed comment! So, water is finite on the tiles but it replenishes (around 10% of total tile capacity) every turn. Bigger roots allow plants to take a bigger share of the available water every turn. That said, I think that, because so many of the plant became small and grew very slowly, the amount of water on tiles was easily enough to sustain them so it was sort of “infinite adjacent” lol.
Solar energy is also kind of limited in a different way. There is a max amount plants can get from a given tile based on their overground mass (and indirectly through other stats) but this doesn’t deplete at all. That said plants compete through height and overground mass because bigger/taller plants have better access to light in a congested environment.
Soil/nutrient quality and atmospheric effects are all things I want to look into! In terms of “more ways to die”, there should be some of this in the next update when animals come into the equation (and natural disasters at some point).
Also, I’ve not played the Sapling but I’ve been watching the videos for years and love them!
@@ceawithac4095 also please feel free to join the discord if you haven’t already 😀! Great place to foster these kinds of ideas!
Suggestion: Animals that help spread plant seeds.
@@Average_NerdIII next phase is adding animals back in and I’m gonna try and implement this 😀
Yesss! Do More of this!
Your making a game like oxygen not included
Fungu could be an addition, either feeding off the dead or helping out plants
@@shilo-j5v agreed!
Glad to see you back
@@Misto_deVito6009 good to be back! 😀
It's funny being recommended this video, watching it, and thinking, "wow, it'd be cool if he could do animals, too" only to discover that animals were the focus!
I'd be really curious what happens if you got a feedback between CO2 and O2 needs between animals and plants, along with biomass of the plants with carbon as a limited resource. After all, an explosion of hyper successful plants could cause a mass extinction, like, a real one: ancient non-tree, tree-analogs once used up all the carbon and caused an ice age that resulted in one of the big five extinctions in Earth's history. I feel like that would be unfortunate to see as the sim probably couldn't recover (or maybe it could if you don't do the green house effect and have ice ages), but it would also be cool if one time you ran the simulation you reproduced one of Earth's major geologic events.
Agreed! Atmospheric change and balance is on my list of things I want. Realistically I want the world itself to evolve rather than just the world’s inhabitants.
So now begs the question do you plan on adding aquatic plants to the build?
@@zane_sadauskis haha - this made me smile.
On a realistic note, hopefully next year, but the next goal is to merge the animal and plant systems together so it depends how long that takes, along with a couple of environmental changes to get lakes and stuff.
@EightLittleBears Awesome, I love seeing the progress you are making for a more comprehensive simulation. Really amazing stuff you are doing!
i always make sure to watch the vid all the way through
@@vinestick amazing! Thank you! Supposedly it’s what the algorithm cares most about!
@@EightLittleBears of course, hopefully your channel picks up traction
It would be interesting if the seeds could float to two or three tiles away to cross rivers or penetrate deep into mountain grasslands
The update I’m currently working on will allow seeds to be carried by animals
Nice love your videos. Something that most genetic simulations don't consider, is that our DNA evolves to be redundant as a way to be more resistant to mutation. I'm curious how a mutation resistance gene, would affect the simulation.
@@EbonyWolf. that is an interesting idea and a few people have mentioned similar things. I can set mutation levels manually so it would probably be quite easy to allow “mutation chance” and “mutation amount” to mutate itself (and lowering would be roughly equivalent to developing a resistance to mutation). I’m probably going to do a specific video on that!
First the Bibites and now this? We're getting spoiled!
just seen that the sapling has one coming out tonight as well!
It's funny how universally everyone thinks 5 is a rounder number than 4 or 6
@@moldybot9387 easier to multiply and divide I guess
I had a thought about using the world model of earth as a control value, same Continental locations, same regional environmental factors such as heat and cold, how much water, how much it rains and more, even similar solar rotations around sun that makes up year is similar, idea is to see how close you can get to earths ecosystem while do similar natural random state of growth. Maybe even environmental disasters such as hurricanes, Earth quakes and volcano eruptions and etc?
@@demian_csomic_winters9484 it’s an interesting concept. Think I still have quite a way to go before I could attempt something like that! That said atmosphere and natural disasters and so on are all things I want to add at some stage (essentially an evolving world rather than just evolving things in a world). Thanks for the comment, and please feel free to join the discord! 😀
@@EightLittleBears for now could make flat map of earth and general idea for different regions and so on, like where median line and artic poles are, more complex stuff like spherical world, disasters and so could come later, something like this could probably make in similar manner to game making but with more sandbox style, and you could "update" or make "dlcs" to alter your scenario game of sorts. Like making a program where you can edit the solar system such as how many stars, what type of stars, how many and types planets how do they all move and so on, down to smallest details though how much depth you can control can be improved over time, and as its more of tool then genuine game balance for players isn't really required to worry about as for testing but who knows maybe in future others could use such useful tool too.
Even adding ability to design both real and fake plans and test them in scenarios, like what if world tree of elf's as really and had genuine capabilities as they are shown what would real world look like with such a tree and with right settings and programming you can see how they could naturally work in a IRL world if real.
And the great thing about this idea is you have thousands of real plants and variants you could model for templates even long dead Species of plans and animals could be reacted in this manner.
this comment was meant to be short then I kept thinking and typing my thoughts I had them. I hope it's clean enough to read and understand lol
2:01 i hate it when people do this, because i was listening to everything they said beforehand and they just handwave it away like not a single soul cared, i came here to learn god dammit!
@@EnderCats8 lol sorry! Maybe one day I can simulate the actual chemistry! 😀
2:00 is that 2 voices?
grass is the ultimate plant when there are no sheep to eat it
Ha! That’s the next phase… maybe I’ll even add a sheep avatar…
@@EightLittleBears it would be fitting
Can you add deforestation to the simulation to see how the plants will react?
I am planning on adding natural disasters in a future update. It is probably a few updates away though.
@@EightLittleBears nice
I think you're missing some of the competitive advantages large plants has and that means we don't really see the same progression we see in the real world. In the real world large plants have significant advantages that let them outcompete small ones like blocking out sunlight (which you don't really accurately model since you you just have a congestion penality that applies to all plants but in the real world large plants would be completely unaffected by the light the they block from other plants), they are also able to produce much larger seeds that thus have more energy and better chances to germinate and they can produce many more seeds, plus they time their seed dispersal so some years they produce a massive abundance of seeds to ensure they don't all get eaten by animals. Also another aspect that might need simulating is the light spectrum because one of the big differences between tall plants and underbrush is what wavelengths of light they absorb, tall plants will absorb the most energetic parts of the visible spectrum but underbrush will focus more on efficiently absorbing the parts that haven't been absorbed by the large plants, which is why their leaves are different shades of green. And if you're gonna introduce animals you should probably also simulate seed dispersal so there's some opportunity for mutualistic symbiosis between plants and animals by letting plants evolve animal based seed dispersal.
Also if you worry that this would make large plants too competitive I could suggest also implementing disease, since large plants are just naturally more vulnerable to disease due to their long life span.
@@hedgehog3180 thanks for the detailed comment! Some of these features (like speed dispersal) are hopefully going to be in the next update. Also, the light spectrum was particularly interesting as that isn’t something I’d heard before!
@@EightLittleBears It's one of the reasons why you don't see grass in forrests since grass is adapted to use the same wavelengths of light as trees, another is that grass can't develop its complex root system in a forrest since the underground is already taken up by the roots of trees. On the topic of roots another thing that might be worth modelling is the density of nutrients in the soil since that's one of the most important abiotic factors for plants. You can model nutrient levels in a pretty similar way to how you modelled ground water, but have the nutrients get washed out by overflowing water, and in turn the rate at which it gets washed out is based on how crowded the underground is since roots stabilize soil and prevent run-off in the real world, especially large roots like the ones trees have. Of course if you combine this simulation with your animal simulation it'd make sense to make the nutrient replenishment scale in accordance with how many animals a tile has.
Its less time consuming to code even flowering,soil nutrients, and pollination
@@ethanjaycecantalejo3995 these are all things which are on the way, but what do you mean it is less time consuming to code? In my head they were more complex because (for example) pollination would also require a pollinator, which would require insects and so on down the rabbit hole 😄
i always love these vids
Glad you like them!
Can I ask what you used to make this? I’m building my own evo sim in Unity!
@@AmyClerk996 awesome! I also use Unity
He is Back!
@@werwolli69 happy to be here
Not a biologist of any sort, so grain of salt, but I think perhaps old age didn't entirely reflect the real-world penalties outside of slowed growth? Organisms broadly have worse health as age increases, which (within the scope of this simulation) might lead to less successful reproduction and less resource efficiency?
I'm not sure if the literature you've based the sim on has any quantitative data on those aspects, or maybe you've already accounted for them and worked them into the sim, but it would be interesting to know how that affects evolution?
@@signofmars it’s a great point! Creatures in previous versions of the sim had a rudimentary version of this, were they couldn’t reproduce in the final third of their life, but it’s funny you mention it because I actually just updated this earlier this week so creatures now age on a proper curve (not based on any particular literature but they start weak, gradually reach a peak, and then gradually weaken until they die). I am not sure how well that applies to plants though, or whether there is a general rule that even could apply to plants (comparing a redwood to some seasonal flower for example)?
i have a theory on why plants evolve to live longer. think about long livers, in your simulation plants reproduce continuously after maturity so long living plants will produce more seeds on average, raising its chances of successful replication. i guess this is why they were favored in your scenario. i think that a decline in quality of offspring with old age and a population of primary consumers would reverse this trend, but what i'm thinking is that there aren't many threats to the plants at all, so they can live longer making a lot of seeds.
edit: just read other peoples comments, they have much more detailed theories about why that trend might be, this is actually really interesting
@@Polonium209 yeah there’s been some great discussion and I think you lot are on to something! Thanks so much for taking an interest and taking the time to comment 😃
@@Polonium209 (also please feel free to join the discord 😉)
now what will evolve faster digital panda or digital bamboo
Maybe they will evolve in perfect harmony?
Do Mycelium next, trading resources game.
its kinda like the sapling
If you would add atmosfear or carbon silicate cycle you could simulet global extinctions. For exapmle when a plant gets to got at it's job and spreads into regions where are no animals to eat the dead biomass. This will make a thiner CO2 layer, because all the carbon is now in a different form, and this will cause a global climate change an ice age. But afrte a while the CO2 layer will be restored, because the cycle is self-balancing.
What a cool concept! An atmosphere is in the plan, but I haven't considered how to actually implement it yet..
Hm. Naturally evolving plants will learn to basically cover the earth even in harsh conditions? Not entirely true. However also not that far off. Even arric and desert conditions have plants that have evolved to exist at certain times. Of course our earth does have some hellscapes in which nothing lives for long. However life gets closer than one might assume. Maybe some of the conditions need to be more extreme, to make the simulation more accurate.
@@jarjab2games agreed. I think the extremes will be more apparent in a bigger world, but I need to do some code optimisation for that!
Can plants evolve to consume less water or sun?
@@Lallunalapruna123 yeah, being smaller and reducing rate of growth will lower a plant’s water and energy consumption
I need water next
Good stuff.
Hope you're having a good day, cus you made mine. Hahah!
Good luck.
@@snowmanthegamer4983 thanks so much!
9:08 no it scales with surface area
How so?
@@EightLittleBears Square-cube law. Only the cells exposed to the air can actually absorb oxygen
Interesting. The point at 9:08 was related to max energy storage rather than collection. Of if I’m not mistaken that should still scale with volume, or have I missed something?
AFK evolution games might... have a niche...
:| Holy shit dude.
Ha! I’m gonna make it playable at some point, so hopefully you are right!
Can I get this on steam?
Not yet, but one day!
creetchurssss 👀👀👀
I wonder how climate change effects might change how this evolves over the years
Climate change is on the agenda!
cool anyways last week
Why does longer life span translate into longer time until reproductive maturity exactly? I'm not sure that's an accurate representation of reality.
It’s not that’s it’s impossible to have a long lifespan and quick reproduction. It’s because reproduction is linked to rate of growth, and time to reproduction is calculated by rate of growth / lifespan (and some other math but this is the important bit) - so, if you want to have a long lifespan with fast reproduction, then you need to increase your rate of growth along with it. It’s not a perfect representation of reality (as you say), but it works a very general rule. It’s something I will refine in the future when we bring in pollination and other reproductive methods!
hi