Obviously plants in later stages will be rendered differently than animals. They will be a fundamental part of the gameplay but unlike animals, they won’t split off from the player species. Plants, at least as I see it, will have their own auto evolution line separate from Animalia.
This all begs the question, how will the appearance of plants be explained? In most play throughs I’ve seen, plants only appear if the player makes them. If someone doesn’t have plants cells, why would plankton and algae be appearing? Same thing goes for when plants and trees begin appearing.
Below is a dev post talking about the implementation of plankton and algae (among other things) into late multicellular stage:
Should we introduce tiny plants in late multicellular stage that will slowly become more complex? Should auto evolution force some cells to become plants?
There are many solutions to this problem that I think should be discussed.
But auto-evo already makes plant cells even if the player isn’t a plant?
Though, you are right that after multicellularity (which may have evolved just once on Earth), the situation might be a bit different. I’m hoping that if we model competition well enough, plants will always naturally appear as an entirely uncompeted niche will get filled very easily once something kind of goes that way. In the worst case scenario we’ll need to fudge the numbers a bit to force plants to always to evolve.
