Ok where to start... Here's a pick of the map I'm working with.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=597579088

It's maxed sized, about half ocean and half land, and has hidden/ uneven light sources as well as some limited obstacles. My thought process was that differing conditions would lead to different paths for the locals and therefore more diversity. In this pick you can see some of the earlier locals, but more on that later.. Also important to note I had Child only DNA setting on, which is important, and later on I switched on Force food preference as well. Both effect the world more than you would think.

Getting plants and using only light energy started was not easy. I messed with a the random creaures spawns, the chances of neurons showing up (bumped up photo massively and the replication neurons some), and maxed out the spawn rate of randoms. All that and it still took most of a day. Once I had something that could live and make more of itself, I dropped everything back to close to normal, but with a bias towards photo neurons because that's what I was testing.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=596692500

My ecosystem that's grown up around the islands is based on speciecs with 2 kinds of dna. The Floaters and the Moss. Techinally all the same. What happens is the Moss form sits there building up energy until it builds up enough to spawn something, it randomly picks between the 2 DNA's. If its another Moss it gets piston pushed a space away so they don't eat off eachother (everything is super parasidic with stingers because of earlier on in their evolution). BUT if it's a Floater spawned instead, it just goes off in a direction forever. In this form they slowly lose energy, but are able to move well on the water and eat off things it runs into. Because of the island map, when the Floater hits the far shore its gets stuck and just sits there. The trick is that there's a steady amount of addtional Floaters following behind it from the Moss back home. They eat off eachother, get pushed around, or just die and get corspe eaten, but the energy on the new shore builds up. Eventually one of the stranded floaters gets enough to spawn something, and again it has both DNA to pick from. Eventully this makes new Moss, now on the other side of the ocean. The new one starts building up more energy and the cycle goes on and sends Floaters off in a new directions.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=597567875

Ok so here's one of the main shores but not the big island with the light. Everything on the water there is in motion, most hte of the land stuff is sitting still. You can see the Moss is working it's way inland. They do it a square at a time after generations...

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=597568014

Here's some floaters hitting a distant shore, far from the main area (the map is massive and not all used but I'm fine with that, the land is there if they can make it work). It's taking them much longer to build up because the light is weaker here. its 2-1 light energy instead of 3 like the main area (I used the read tile tool to check since i made the lights techinally invisible for my own view).

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=597567965

Here's another of the main coastlines. again the water is in motion, and most of the far shore is stationary moss. The difference being the main island on the left, which is cleaner because it has a few land walkers (They haven't made it off that island at any point so far).

Much fiddling with settings and countless generations later I had an interesting ecosystem built up around the coastlines. But I was constantly running into fps and population problems. Credit to qelbiv who inspired me to try the light based idea and trading a lot of ideas with me about sliders and how to make plants stop being just plants and start making other things. He gave me the idea of controling the population by much more actively controling the energy my creatures were getting from the photosynthesis neuron (there's a slider for that, like everything else, thank you dev). I slowly steped down the 'light' in the world this way until I ran into the problem of the slider at the end. It was jumping between 0.4 and 0.2 energy which doesn't seem like much except.. it was too much of a leap for my poor little critters. They would go extinct in the long run at 0.2, I tested it. Then I realized... I can just bump it back up when they drop below a certain threshold.

This is the boom bust cycle.

My world pop was capped at 2000, and my creatures had been severely limited by it for a long time, but I didn't want to change it because of the sim speed/ fps problems. I decided I would drop the energy input to 0.2, but only until the population dropped below 1000. When I bumped it back up the population exploded, which I realized was a good thing because more new creatures = more mutation chances. After they hit the limit again, I dropped it back to 0.2, and the bust started again, but more this time more slowly. I did this a lot, and every time they took longer and longer to drop off and boomed faster from the up time. They were changing MUCH faster with all this and felt like I had much more control over it. During all of this I was also playing with the amount of photo neurons they could have. Anywhere from the default 10 to 24, to the current... 6. And in the current game even with that few, and the light at 0.2, they aren't going extinct. I've also noticed the complexity off all my species has droped steadly. All those unused, random neurons have dropped away, and much more quickly than that kind of thing has happened in any of my other games.

I think this Boom Bust idea will be a good strategy for the more standard random spawning food worlds too, All you have to do is change the rate at which new food is added in. Increase the intervel / time between food drops, to crash the population, but before too many go extinct, crank the amount of food back to where it was and let the pop boom again. This should give you creatures that have to be more efficient, as the energy add to the world slowly drops off. This, and a map different features, should also give you a more varied and interesting world/ ecosystem.

I'm still doing things, trying to get more kinds of creatures, but getting any creatures to move to food sources other than photo is very difficult. At the moment I have a few more specialized parasites (sort of preditors/plant eaters I guess, but they are painfully slow), but I'm not sure what's next.

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598119243
http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598119124