IDK if this is a known problem or not but I looked around and haven’t seen someone talk about it.
I decided to try out making a plant organism because of the new day-night cycle.
However, after making my organism’s behavior as sessile so they no longer move and mostly making their organelles the ones that photosynthesize, the auto evo estimated that my species would do poorly.
My species count ended up dropping until there is only 50 left and the auto evo estimates that my species would continue to drop to zero, but each time I go back into the game with it estimating that, nothing goes wrong because nothing is wrong with my species.
On where it says how much ATP is being used it tells me that I am using too much ATP for how much I am generating. The issue is that the ATP usage is counting movement, something my species doesn’t do because it’s sessile.
I think the auto evo isn’t taking into consideration that my species doesn’t move and trying to kill my species off, but ultimately cannot because nothing is actually wrong.
i’m pretty sure this is a known issue as thim made a fork where that is not the case and there is code to calculate the ATP usage when sessile and show it to the player
That error message and your creature being sessile seems unrelated. Adding code to check if a creature is sessile, and adding that to auto evo should be rather easy though. Might add it to my current auto evo PR.
The reason why the player can’t go extinct unless you die while playing yourself is actually a feature to stop people complaining. We already get quite many complaints from people saying they don’t understand why auto-evo wants their species dead. So as a special consideration the player can’t go extinct from auto-evo, just your population gets stuck at 50.
The player is not playing with all of the trillions of members of their species that live over the span of a 100 million years, so it makes a lot of thematic sense that auto-evo affects the player species. After all the player’s personal performance would be basically a rounding error (but as we are making a game the player’s performance is actually a pretty big part of the player’s total population).
With that ramble out of the way, I agree that auto-evo probably needs some extra attention to make sessile species possible. Which is again one of the reasons why day/night cycle is not enabled by default. That is tracked by this issue: