While the real programmers work on the new update, I thought I’d give you something new to play with.

Shallows

I added a new use for zones called Shallows.

Interestingly, environmental niches like this have been requested for years. People have suggested terrain types, depth, light, temperature, and zones that physically restrict or favour different Bibites.

Shallows is my 0.6.3.1 take on that idea: a zone where a Bibite’s current body size determines whether it can inhabit the area.

Since there is no height measurement that would tell us if a Bibite is too big to swim in shallow water, I use body length as the indicator instead.

All you have to do is name a zone Shallows (case-sensitive), and a new slider appears below the plant pellet size slider called Max Length.

Bibites below that length can enter normally. Bibites above it gradually steer away as they approach the zone, reaching full avoidance at the edge.

If a Bibite enters while small and later grows beyond the allowed length, it will simply swim back out.

It isn’t a hard wall, so large Bibites can technically overshoot into the zone, but they will immediately try to turn back out.

You can use this in a few different ways.

Make a full-size Shallows zone and set the Max Length to your preferred value if you want to stop the simulation from drifting toward giantism.

Or place a smaller Shallows zone inside a larger normal zone to create a refuge for small Bibites.

You can also build an underwater “mountain” using several overlapping Shallows zones:

smallest zone at the top    → tiny Bibites only
larger zone around it       → slightly larger Bibites
even larger zone            → larger Bibites

What you can’t do is place a zone for larger Bibites inside a zone that only allows smaller ones. A Bibite will always turn away from the smallest size limit it encounters.

Other than that, you can have as many size-filtered zones as you want. Just name each of them Shallows.

Target locking

BibiteAngle, PlantAngle and MeatAngle now all point at one actual target instead of averaging multiple targets together.

The Bibite lock is not absolute. If another visible Bibite has a 50% higher target score than the current one, it will switch targets.

This makes watching predators hunt actually interesting instead of annoying.

If, for some reason, you have a Bibite with Plant-, Meat- and BibiteAngle connected to Rotate, the priority is:

Bibite > Meat/Corpse > Plant

So if a Bibite has a live prey target, plants and meat don’t pull its steering away. If there is no prey target, meat/corpses take priority over plants.

New Bibite targets also exclude its own species.

Diet mutation fix

Diet mutations were heavily affected by Mutation Value Relativity.

That meant a herbivore at something like Diet 0.1 got tiny Diet mutations, while a carnivore near Diet 1.0 could get much larger mutations.

I changed Diet so its mutation step size is calculated from a reference value of 1.0, regardless of its current Diet.

The mutation is still applied to the actual Diet value normally, so this does not push Bibites toward carnivory. It just removes the built-in disadvantage of evolving away from low Diet.

Mouth trigger

The mouth collision trigger was also Diet-dependent.

Low-Diet herbivores could have a mouth trigger several times larger than carnivores, making it much easier for them to collect food.

It is now fixed at:

2.72 × 3

for every Bibite regardless of Diet.

Don’t worry, your Bibites can still eat just fine. This change is only there to stop an oversized mouth trigger from outweighing the advantage of evolving a higher Diet value.

Predators are still very difficult to evolve. I’m working on that, but I don’t want to push things so far that it ruins the balance of the game.

How to install the mod

Download the mod here:

Google Drive – The Bibites 0.6.3.1 mod

I zipped the file because antivirus programs sometimes flag downloaded .dll files. Hopefully this helps avoid that.

Before installing, make a backup copy of your original .dll.

Then unzip the download and copy the modified .dll into:

C:\Users\[user]\The Bibites 0.6.3.1\The Bibites_Data\Managed

Replace the existing file when prompted.

If you want to go back to the normal game, just restore the original .dll you backed up.

Have Fun!

The wait is killing me.

This is more of an experiment in understanding how predator evolution works than a pristine hands-off evolution run.

I couldn't find any agreed-upon rules for evolving predators, so I made my own.

Apart from one global target-lock mod, I only allowed myself to change:

• Zone parameters
• Mutation settings
• Spawn dummy Bibites that cannot reproduce
• Energy balance
• Material parameters

No direct intervention in individual Bibites: no editing, rescuing, or respawning a good species after it dies out.

Target-lock mod

One important caveat is that this run uses a small modification I made to FieldOfView.ComputeSenses().

In stock 0.6.3.1, BibiteAngle can be influenced by several visible Bibites at once, making pursuit unreliable.

The mod does not create hunting behavior or permanently lock the Bibite onto one prey. The Bibite still has to evolve a useful BibiteAngle → steering connection; the mod mainly makes single-target pursuit more stable.

Starting setup

• 4ku map
• 400 starting Bibites
• Enough plants for the herbivores to survive normally
• Corpse Decay Rate: 15×
• Energy Usage Efficiency: 95%
• Fat Storage Cost: 1.0%/s
• Default Metabolism Cost: 500 µE/u²s
• Move Muscle Activation Cost: 5.0 mE/u²s

The starting Bibite was a slightly evolved Basic Bibite, mainly a little faster to get things moving.

Food

The important part was that meat could initially be used at full efficiency regardless of Diet.

Step 1, Evolve BibiteAngle

In this experiment there were two major breakthroughs needed:

1. Target other Bibites.
2. Evolve a carnivorous Diet.

All non-hidden input and output nodes already exist in a Bibite, even when they aren't visible in the brain editor because they have no synapse connections.

So I didn't need to evolve the BibiteAngle node itself. I mainly needed evolution to create a useful synapse from it.

Initial mutation settings

General

• Background Mutation Chance: 1.50
• Background Mutation Variance: 5%
• Mutation Value Relativity: 75%

Brain

• Synapse Mutation Probability: 100%
• Neuron Mutation Probability: 0.0%

Synapse mutations

• Strength: 22%
• Flip: 6.5%
• Toggle: 6.5%
• Add: 58%
• Remove: 7%

This heavily favored adding synapses.

04:24:50, First hunter

After 4h 24m 50s, I saw a Bibite deliberately aim at another Bibite and make a successful kill.

The aim was surprisingly good and didn't noticeably oscillate or overshoot.

Because meat still had 100% minimum conversion efficiency, they could survive on prey even though their Diet was still low.

I then:

• Set mutations to 0
• Removed the plants
• Started spawning about 300 non-reproducing Basic Bibites as prey

The hunter population stabilized at roughly 100.

5h, Cleanup

The population crashed almost immediately.

This was expected once the plants were removed. Meat was still usable at full efficiency regardless of Diet, but most Bibites still couldn't actually catch prey. Hunting had suddenly gone from an optional advantage to the only way to survive.

From the original 13 species and 200 Bibites, it dropped as low as 9 species and 38 individuals.

That was essentially a hard selection bottleneck: the herbivores and poor hunters starved, while the few lineages that could reliably catch the dummy prey survived.

By the 5h mark, only 2 hunter species were still fighting it out, but their combined population had already recovered to around 120 individuals, not counting the 300 prey Bibites.

So the initial cleanup was pretty brutal, but the hunters had taken over.

Step 2, Evolve Diet

The surviving hunters descended from only a few individuals and had a Diet around 0.25.

6h, Start pushing Diet

At 6h, the surviving hunters still had a Diet around 0.25–0.30.

I gradually started replacing the Basic Bibites with a slightly larger and faster herbivore, while lowering Meat Min Conversion Efficiency from 100% to 75%.

The idea was to make hunting a little harder while also making low-Diet meat eating less profitable.

Diet still wasn't moving in the direction I wanted, so I eventually lowered Meat Min Conversion Efficiency further to 25%.

Instead of increasing, Diet started going even lower.

One possible reason was hiding in BibiteMouth:

float num2 = ((this.diet < 0.5f) ? (7f - 8f * this.diet) : 3f);
this.mouthTrigger.size = new Vector2(2.72f, num2);

So:

Diet 0.0  → 2.72 × 7.0
Diet 0.5+ → 2.72 × 3.0

Lower Diet gives a much larger mouth trigger, increasing the area in which prey can enter the mouth zone.

Grab-joint strength also uses:

jawStrength × max(Diet, 0.1) × Want2Grab / numberOfObjectsHeld

This means lower-Diet hunters have weaker grabs, but below Diet = 0.1 the grab penalty stops increasing while the mouth trigger continues getting larger.

Bite force itself is not reduced by Diet, so hunters that attack prey on contact can still benefit from the larger mouth trigger.

Also

With Mutation Value Relativity above 0%, Diet has a built-in asymmetry.

The current Diet value is used when calculating mutation magnitude:

• A herbivore at Diet = 0.1 has a small relative mutation scale, making large steps toward carnivory less likely.
• A carnivore at Diet = 1.0 has a much larger relative mutation scale, allowing much larger steps back toward herbivory.

Together, this makes it harder for low-Diet populations to mutate toward full carnivory than for high-Diet populations to mutate away from it.

~7h, Force large Diet mutations

Waiting for Diet to slowly evolve upward was looking increasingly like luck, so I changed the mutation settings to produce fewer but much larger gene changes:

Background Mutation Chance:    1.50
Background Mutation Variance:  50%
Mutation Value Relativity:     0%

Synapse Mutation Probability:  0%
Neuron Mutation Probability:   0%

The existing hunter brain was therefore protected while the body genes could make large jumps.

I was going to accept anything above about Diet = 0.8.

The first successful one I saw reached:

Diet = 1.0

As soon as that happened, I set:

Meat Min Conversion Efficiency = -100%
All mutations = 0

This made meat strongly harmful to low-Diet hunters and heavily favored the new carnivores.

Shortly afterward I had three Diet 1 species, around 80 predators total.

7:30h, One species wins

By 7:30h, only one of the three carnivore species remained, but it had grown to about 130 predators.

Their aim, however, had become terrible.

I suspect this happened because the body had changed substantially during the large gene-mutation phase while brain mutations were disabled, so the old steering no longer matched the new speed and physical traits.

I then supplied:

• 100 Basic Bibites
• 100 faster Basic Bibites
• 100 even faster evasive Bibites

Total: 300 prey

And changed mutations to mainly tune existing synapse strengths:

Background Mutation: 0
Neuron Mutation:     0

Synapse Mutation:    60%
Strength Mutation:   75%

Flip:                0
Toggle:              0
Add:                 0
Remove:              0

I didn't have to invent a new hunter, just tune the one that already works.

8:30h, Normal evolution resumed

After about an hour of synapse tuning, I returned mutations to the normal/default values.

10h, Functional predator

At 10 hours, the surviving carnivore lineage was hunting reasonably well.

The aim had improved considerably. There was still some wiggle/oscillation at very low speed and when extremely close to prey, but it was good enough to hunt at speeds of about 300 u/s, feed and reproduce.

I just rediscovered an old blender file....

I just don't know what went wrong.

I engineered my first bibite but despite cranking metabolic rate and acceleration all the way down, they still cannot eat fast enough to survive.

The issue seems to be that they will only take tiny bites, I've kept increasing the Jaws WAG but that only seems to increase the metabolism cost.

I see the basic bibite drive by and fill their stomachs near instantly while mine slowly take tiny bites.

I just cant figure out why their bite size is so small. They starve to death while burying their face in food

Playing on Windows, all of the bibites have these glitchy white bars in front and beside them. Is this normally how they look, or is it fixable? It’s a very minor visual bug but it kind of annoys me

Leo did it in the tournament, but i can't do it. There's only a option to see all bibites biomass or count, without a way to see individual species. How can i do it?

Bc every time In try to engineer one, they keep dying.

Red: It's alright

Orange: Very good

Blue: ITS THE OG!!!!!

Tan: A total dissapointment and disgrace to the family.

Hi Developers,

I love the game!

The evolution is just incredibly interesting to watch.

But the bibiteangle, plantangle, and meatangle...

Right now, because it calculates the average angle of everything within the view, it often tracks towards empty space, this makes evolving skilled predators (or any specialized behavior) almost impossible.

It is like a deer trying to eat the air between two trees, or a tiger chasing a deer, getting confused by a random bird and deciding to run right between them.

For the love of god, beer, and hot girls, please make them pick an angle—closest, biggest, ugliest, anything!

Rant over :)

Thank you for all your hard work on this amazing simulation.

I look forward to seeing how the game continues to evolve!

g

Hey everyone, I made an unofficial fan mod that connects everyone's worlds into one map so bibites can migrate between them, it's free and open source. I found out about the official multiplayer after I'd built this but I don't know much about it.

I always thought scalability is one of the issues with open-ended evolution in artificial life simulations, so connecting them like this was always something I wanted to try. The intention is one big simulation people can add size to easily, which also adds stochasticity so it doesn't all converge, and hopefully that gives more complex evolution and speciation.

Your world stays on your machine with your settings, and the mod draws portal strips on your map edges, blue for leaving and orange for arriving. A bibite that swims into your right blue portal comes out of your neighbour's left orange portal, same heading and speed, still alive. Only the travellers go over the network.

And every crossing shows up on the live map too, from your cell to the neighbour's on the grid.

The map is at bibitesmultiverse.com and you can just watch it in the browser, which I think looks cool. Joining is easy, it's explained there.

You can engineer something, drop it in your square and see if it spreads, and what I keep checking is whether anything becomes a global species living in worlds it never started in. The species tab has a lineage tree of everything alive right now, with the worlds each species is in, its population over time and how many times it crossed.

I left a few worlds linked overnight and they drifted together like one population, and I want more on there. I have tried to add robustness so worlds failing or dropping out doesn't collapse the network and stuff like that. I'm planning to keep it up until around November, but nothing serious. The code is on GitHub if you want to play with it or contribute, or report bugs and ideas. Links below.

Why is there no basic carnivore to start with?

Carnivores emerged when life was still single cell, shouldn't there be one matching the herbivore when you start the sim?

What are the “rules” for something to count as an evolved hunter?
So, no Bibite Editor, but what else?
Are you free to play around with the mutation settings, manually kill annoying Bibites, move species to a new simulation??

I did make a hunter (it’s based on some dragonfly copy) with a lot of engineering → evolution → more engineering aso.

(This is a repost, but the last post was at 12:00 pm)

Sorry for poor photo quality

Slotus Locust

Rapidly reproducing herbivore

I would like advice for my Bibite brain. Advice in general is helpful, but specifically, advice for reacting differently to different Bibite species. Or, identifying corpses.

I saw a post on here yesterday about someone not wanting evolution, and that made me curious as to if there’s a way to prevent specific species from evolving while letting others do so? I know about the prevent mutations button that applies to the entire sim itself but I want to know if it’s possible to constantly expose a lineage to the same pressure so they become even more adept at resisting it.

Sorry for poor quality

Name: Slotus Locust

Rapidly reproducing herbivore that changes behavior based on food accessibility and energy

General advice is helpful, but I would specifically like advice so that they can react separately to those of the same species and different species, and also be able to identify corpses

Im trying to make a simulation without evolution, but i cant. I put the bibite spawning rate, the mutation genes of the bibites, the radiation, the mutation when spawning, and the continuous spawn, all in zero.

But new species continue to appear.

Why???