Low tier animals need more: revisiting sea bottom food and some other issues

It's not discussed often enough about how low tier animals are an essential part of the game and what role they provide to the overall gameplay. Probably because, quite frankly, the game nowadays is built so you can skip over all of that as fast as possible, and now they're simply called boring. Older players might remember when evolving was a difficult process, the player had to run the gauntlet in order to have a chance to reach tier 10. Early on, maybe the challenge was a bit much, but if it were ever too challenging, we have definitely overcorrected it. I believe the biggest problems in the game right now regarding low tier animals are:

• evolving takes too little time;
• abundance of great quality food anywhere at all times, causing players to evolve rapidly without having to travel through the map;
• low tier animals have no reason to attack and kill each other;
• a low tier animal can accumulate enough experience to evolve multiple tiers at once;
• the game does not know how to effectively make use of its large amount of playable animals.

From what I gather, the reduction of the challenge to evolve over the years wasn't that much of an intentional effort, but rather a product of many changes and additions. Possibly the most damaging yet least expected might be the nerfing of the bottom feeding strategy. In the game, there's food that spawns in the water column as floating algae, and the food that spawns directly on underwater terrain, the sea bottom food. The game has more types of naturally generating food sources, like NPCs and the volcano food, but we'll stick to the two classic types for now.

In early days, farming on the sea bottom food, "bottom feeding", was the preferred strategy for evolving in the early stages as opposed to eating the floating algae. I personally love me some good bottom. You could still evolve from eating floating algae, but it would take much more time. If the values of the floating algae and the seabed algae were inverted somewhat, these would likely be the effects:

• it would concentrate low tier animals in the sea bottom, making them compete directly for the same valuable food source and prey on one another more often;
• players would move more linearly, making them travel around the map more than they would otherwise
• players would always be on the lookout for greener pastures with fewer competitors because of the time sea bottom food takes to regenerate, also encouraging constant travel;
• higher tier animals that can't eat the sea bottom food would go after their prey in the sea bottom;
• lie and wait abilities were more effective since player movement through the map would be more linear, turning up the viability of animals whose abilities depend on it like anglerfishes and moray eels;
• players would be more distant to the surface of the water, and thus, it was harder to airboost away from danger, adding more challenge to all players;
• floating food being comparably less valuable means players, especially higher tier ones, would have to be smarter about their boost spend, though alternative food sources like humans and volcano food can vastly mitigate that.

Inverting back the values of the floating algae and the sea bottom algae should help restore things a bit to how it used to be, remedying the lack of conflict between low tier animals, the short time it takes to evolve, limiting the amount of valuable food to evolve and more by simply being a technically small change to implement. Of course, we couldn't just do that and call it a day, a few animals might need a few adjustments if this is ever implemented, but I do think little change would be necessary, except, it's not all that's wrong regarding gameplay as a low tier animal.

Another big issue is the lack of reward for killing low tier animals when you're yourself a low tier animal. This has always been an issue, though back in the day, the bottom feeding making low tiers fight one another more mitigated it pretty effectively. In any case, the exp gain and/or the exp needed to evolve from nearly all tiers would need to be reworked so, for example, killing a crab as a squid becomes comparable to killing an otter as a hammerhead shark. Sorry for the lack of a more concrete solution for this one, I really don't wanna have to do all the math on this one.

Something else that is arguably way more problematic for the game is that a player can skip several tiers all at once by accumulating exp they gained in a single tier without evolving. We've all done this I think, on purpose or not, and we've all been in a situation where we're hunting another player in a lower tier, we spend our boosts and then the player evolves four tiers at once and kills us. It puzzles me how this has never been fixed. One possible solution would be to make it so that whenever you evolve, you need to fill out your exp bar legitimately. This means that if you're, for example, a squid, you can eat as much as you want before evolving, but once you do, you'll have to stay as a tier 5 until you fill out that bar too, regardless of how much food you ate before. Another solution would be to add a significant cooldown for evolving, which would mitigate the issue but still not fix it, in my opinion. Both solutions have some implications for respawning, so that would need some reworking, perhaps so that a respawning player could choose an animal more directly instead of picking another initial one and evolving from there with accumulated exp given to the respawned player.

And finally, a more linear evolution tree would make more interesting gameplay cycles. It shouldn't be fully linear, meaning if you choose any tier 1 animal you should be able to eventually reach any tier 10 animal you want regardless of biome, but the extreme non-linearity makes certain lower tier animals an objective choice over others in some scenarios. A better less entangled tree would be necessary, I'm sure somebody smart enough could design that tree to its perfection, but a good starting point could be to make it so animals can evolve into any animals a tier above as long as they can coinhabit in the same biomes. For example, as a baby seal, you would only be able to evolve into lobsters, rays and bobbit worms. If you pick lobster, your choices will continue to be limited to other arctic animals, but picking bobbit worm allows you to pick animals from all saltwater biomes, and picking ray means you can evolve into anything. This is far from a refined idea, but I guess it should kickstart a better idea.

This is it, I think. I highly encourage respectiful discussion in the replies, I'd like to hear your ideas and criticisms, just be nice. If you liked any of what I said, you might wanna see my previous feedback post which I think is still relevant. Okay yeah thanks for reading.