Bug bounty

As a developer, fixing a bug is nearly impossible without being able to reproduce it: if you cannot make a problem appear at will, you also cannot be sure your changes to the code have any effect. Whereas for some reported bugs, the description already includes how to reproduce ('button does not respond'), for others I cannot get them to show up no matter how hard I try. These bugs do show up in, and in severe cases even cause, negative reviews, so I am desperate to discover the reproduction steps. This page is an experiment to see if I can crowdsource a solution to this problem, and what the effects of a monetary reward are on the community.

If you know the reproduction steps to a problem below, please reach out to thesaplinggame@gmail.com. Keep in mind that:

Your submission will only be taken into account when hyper specific, so not 'play the game for some time', but 'add two pairs of compound eyes and scale them up slightly'.
Your submission is only eligible for a reward if it works on my development PC.
It may take several days before you get a reply.
If you include a Paypall account name, you will get your reward faster :).

Besides the monetary reward, you will also be mentioned in the patch notes! If you provide information that is not the reproduction itself, but brings me a lot closer to solving the problem, I might decide to give you a percentage of the award money.

Negative population sizes: $60

If you have played the game for longer than a few hours, you probably encountered this: fewer than 0 organisms for some species. You can find these 'negative species' easily in the species list view by simply sorting on population size. Unfortunately, just knowing that this problem will show up at random if you play long enough is not helpful: if I haven't encountered negative species after 20 minutes... is that because I've fixed it or am I just lucky today? By including the problem in this list, I hope to learn about a method to reproduce it that is both more reliable and less time consuming.

Requirement: written reproduction steps, starting from an empty sandbox, not from a save file. There is randomness involved here, so I understand if the problem will not show up 100% of the time.

Plants duplicating in place after leaving the editor: $60

This is an issue I know about because players keep reporting it, but I have never seen it in person; it apparently happens after playing with random mutations turned for some time, and then going into an editor several times. What I do know is that plants duplicating in place is a symptom of the game being into some sort of illegal state. It is possible this illegal state is only possible to achieve with random mutations, which would make this problem even harder to 'catch'.

Requirement: written reproduction steps, starting from an empty sandbox, not from a save file. There is randomness involved here, so I understand if the problem will not show up 100% of the time.

Incorrent family relations between species (like an animal descending from a plant): $40

Sometimes you see an animal that (according to the game) evolved from a plant, or a plant that did NOT evolve from an alga while you know for a fact that it must have. But what are the conditions for this problem to show up?

Requirement: written reproduction steps, starting from an empty sandbox, not from a save file.

The camera becomes unusable: $40

Along with performance, camera controls are mentioned most often in negative reviews. While these issues are partly related (with a low FPS, the camera becomes way harder to handle), I believe there are ways to make the camera do something that it is not supposed to do even with a 60+ FPS. This could for example be looking straight down or straight up and being unable to fix it, or the camera being moved to a place where you can no longer see the terrain, whatever you do.

Requirement: written reproduction steps or a video. You may start from a save file if you provide it.

Stuck in glitchy UI: $30

While I have managed to catch and fix many UI problems over the course of development, glitchy UI continues to be reported every now and then. For this bounty, I'm focusing on the kind of problem that the player cannot remove without going into an editor. Once you know how, UI problems are often easy to reproduce, but this 'HOW' is not always easy to put into words; you might need a video to make clear what exactly you do to make the UI glitch out.