BlazingCorvid

I really like this idea, and I feel like it is well balanced since being blind is a harmful gene, so using up an action to touch or hear before they can do anything makes sense.

Since all actions in niche take up gems, this idea might not flow well in the game. However, perhaps you could have a nichling splash another to cool it down and allow it to regain that gem, or a nichling could splash some nichlings in a radius of them. Or, if that nichling jumps into the water, they could get their gem back as well.

I really like your idea, but it would make some things more complicated. For example, what determines when carnivores will make their moves? After all, a bearyena has two moves, and your nichlings have three each. So when do they move? The first two moves of the night? Once at dusk and once at dawn? There is no precedant in the game for this. I would almost think that the predators should move like rabbils at night, but that would be hard to deal with. Also, when would diurnal mothers give birth (and nocturnal at that), and same with deaths, sickness, and damage taken from drowning and poison and bleeding? Would, for the diurnal creatures, it happen at dusk, and for the nocturnal ones, at dawn?

@Incyray I think that adding in flop ears would differ from adding in a scorpion tail since scorpion tails naturally evolved in the wild, while flop ears only exist as a result of artificial selection. Since niche evolves around natural selection, I don't think that adding flop ears in would make sense.

I think the movable thorn bushes sound like tumbleweeds. Perhaps they could be added to the savannah biome (or a desert biome if it ever comes). Tumbleweeds are plants that, to spread their seeds long distances across the windy, open environment they live in, shed their entire overground part and allows that to tumble in the wind and slowly degrade, releasing the seeds/spores at many intervals. Perhaps you could roll the tumbleweed to wherever you want and secure it using building material to form a defense. However, after a little research, I found no precedence of animals (besides humans) purposely making structures out of thorny bushes for defense. However, some birds do nest in thorny bushes, and may even prefer to, probably for the extra protection against predators.

I think that idea is very interesting and would be a convenient way to get rid of unwanted nichlings. However, it might also be a bit op since the issues that come along with overcrowding are meant to be one of the challenges of expanding your pack. I think there should be a price in food for sending a nichling away since it takes time to find new food on the island. Since you start with 2 nichlings and 20 food, having 10 food per nichling sent away makes sense, though that would be a heavy price, but if you have a useless nichling that would just be a food sink for all its life, that price might be worth it. It would also be cool if, when you send a creature away to an island and then travel to that island later, you could see that nichling there!

Nevermind, I thought the asp trees were beech trees for some reason.

I really like your idea for adding a blur effect in smell mode. I think that would work really well in combination with the high winds suggestion if it is added in, where it moves the location of the creature in scent mode. However, I don't like the idea of leaving nichlings in color - if you have a green poison-body nichling, a yellow nichling, or a red nichling, you could perhaps mistake them for food, an enemy, or a wanderer. The nichling's colors would also distract from finding those things in scent and hearing mode. If the purpose of your second suggestion is to make it easier to find your nichlings in smell or hearing mode, perhaps instead they could be outlined in an unused color, like pink or purple or dark blue.

I think this would be a really cool idea, but maybe it can be a gamemode all by itself, like continent mode, since it would be very hard to traverse that long distance to go to the port you wanted.

I agree that this would be a realistic addition to the game. I also like @ChasingNyx 's idea for a reviving rain. Another possible way to cool off I thought of is that, if you're in the oasis, perhaps a nichling could carry water from the sea or oasis somehow to restore the nichling that has heatstroke. Perhaps they could do so with a gene like water paw, since the webbing between the fingers has to be waterproof to allow them to get extra swimming, so they could theoretically carry some water with their water paw to revive a nichling from heatstroke. Perhaps a similar idea can be introduced into the burning savannah - perhaps the devs could add a watering hole, like a small puddle or spring a bit like the hot springs in the mountains, into the savannah, and nichlings could use this water to revive nichlings that have heatstroke. Perhaps, they could even use a similar tactic to put out fires when they are small. To me, this sounds fair because, in the burning savannah, water paw is otherwise useless, so having it in your savannah tribe for this purpose would be a disadvantage unless nichlings get heatstroke or a fire starts.

Maybe they could have pinecones on the ground or dangling from branches (that you would then need flying to get), and if you have nimble fingers or the bird beak (or maybe just cracking) you can get pine nuts out of them

I love all of these new ideas and really want to have a forest biome with lots of different plants! I like the idea for your beech forest that would give the beeches purpose in-game other than for perching on.

Those ideas are really cool, @Fishyfishyfishy500 ! I also agree with @Frozenpelt Warrior that I would just really like to see more plants added in general! I was so excited when they added the new varieties of trees in this last update, and seeing more varieties would definitely increase the aesthetic appeal of islands that are currently rather drab in some ways like the savanna, or even the oceans if coral or the like gets added. I would really like to see a biome that is rather forested and would have all sorts of trees in it!

First of all, amazing art! I really like all the poses, they give each of your creatures a lot of character! I like a lot of your designs, though many, like the monkey tail and reptile body, have been suggested in other threads. Some of them, though, are very unique! I really like your squid tail with its fishing and cracking (though you should frame it as clam cracking and not nut cracking since squid don't encounter nuts), and the design is very interesting. For some genes, specifically the rabbit genes, you have them giving less benefit than others of the same category. For some people, including myself, that would make me not want to use them where there are more useful genes in that category. The rabbit ears should give at least +3 hearing like the other ears, and the tail should have a purpose too. In the wild, rabbits have bright white tails to confuse predators - the predators focus on the white spot, and so when it is hidden when the rabbit moves, the predators have to refocus on the rabbit, costing them time. In niche, this could translate to something like stealth or camouflage, or it could add a new trait like evasiveness, which could increase camouflage after turning or something like that. Also, snout genes don't affect sight, only smell, so the rabbit head should have +2 or +3 smell instead of +1 sight. Unless you actually want to disable the eye genes, but there is not actually a head in the game that does that currently. For your reptile body, +3 defense is really high. The only gene that currently has that is armored body, which is really hard to get since it is a prehistoric gene, and even that does not add any resistance. I would say that a +2 defense, with +1 heat resistance and -1 cold resistance is more reasonable. For the mouth, again, snouts don't affect hearing or sight - you could introduce other genes like no ears or inner ears or reptile ears to give 0 hearing (though I would not recommend that- I would give inner ears +2 hearing since animals like birds can still hear). The bearyena snout gives +2 strength and strong voice, so +3 strength without the strong voice makes sense. By the way, what do you mean by "mutation tree"? I like your rules for the grazing mouth - that seems fair to only eat the regrowing grass - but your hooves seem over powered. If each hoove has +3 movement, and you have double hooves, that gives 6 movement (compared to 2 for runner's leg), and if you combine that with lean body (+2) and whatever the back hooves give (+2?), then you have 10 movement, which is more than flight. The attack stats on top of that is far too much. I really like your idea for the attack stats when you have the set, and for the stampeding, but I would nerf the movement a little - perhaps by making each one only give 1 movement like runner's leg - that way, you can still move 6 paces with the other aforementioned genes and get the stampeding. Overall, you have great ideas!

I love the colorations! The green and red morphs at the bottom for the tropical habitat remind me of the eclectus parrot, where the females are red and the males green, and the females try to entice the males with their bright plumage, the opposite of most avian gender roles.