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The Sapling
The Sapling is a short simulation game where you design your own plants and animals, and put them in a world together. Or you turn on random mutations, and see what evolution does to your ecosystem!
What players say
Steam review score and the most-helpful voices, which may include critical ones. Data as of 2026-05-20.
“This game is pretty interesting and has a ton of potential—imagine Spore, but done with way more care and zero publisher meddling that crippled the original. In The Sapling, you actually get to build a whole planet: plants, animals for land, sea, and air. You can skip time,…”
— a player, Steam review · 37 hrs played“Short but honest review: It's not only a promising successor to Spore (2008) but it genuinely has GREATER potential. Don't let my first words diminish the fact that it has now established itself as its own amazing evolution game with its own fresh mechanics even in Early Access.…”
— a player, Steam review · 7 hrs played“i love the game but its quite laggy i would recomend a mid to high end becouse im running it on a laptop over all a good game recomend”
— a player, Steam review · 6 hrs playedPlayer activity
Monthly average concurrent players. Live count fetched 2026-07-11 13:10 UTC · history via SteamCharts.
Achievement stats
Global completion rates across all Steam players — a data view of how far people actually get. Source: Steam official stats · as of 2026-07-25.
Price tracking
US-region pricing (USD), sampled twice daily by our own tracker since 2026-07-11. Steam prices vary by region — always confirm your local price on Steam.
Regional prices at last sample, in local currency — Steam sets each region's price independently.
Cheapest → most expensive, converted to USD at ECB reference rates (2026-07-24). Relative comparison only.
Latest official news
Developer announcements via the Steam news API — links go to the original posts. More across all games on the news hub.
The stream is almost halfway! Watch together with the dev in 2 hours
As you might know, at the moment I'm running a long livestream, simulating evolution 24/7. It's all epxplained in this video: We've been able to follow the planet Wright-2b for almost a week now, and
Wright-2b is live!
Streaming evolution simulation indie game The Sapling, 24/7 for 2 weeks: We started on planet Wright-2b with a simple alga and underwater animal, turned on random mutations, and now we watch what evol
Patch v13.71
Balancing and fixes for animals Various legs besides the body now have special requirements for the animal to have more than 1 set of limbs, to make them look more natural (already in the previous pat
Patch v13.57
Balancing and fixes for plants Major rebalancing of leaf statistics, so you will more variety in the leaves evolving Bioluminescent flowers and fruits now cost slightly more energy (thanks, Warlord-vi
Patch v13.52
Working on land animal evolution Made the evolution of land animals more likely Animals with aquatic eggs that can only walk very slowly are now considered land animals if they also swim very slowly I
Games like The Sapling
From our knowledge graph — ranked by shared traits, not a black box. Each card says why it's here.
Universe Sandbox
96.7% · 22,242 reviews
shares God Game, Science, Education, Sandbox
SpaceEngine
96.0% · 9,300 reviews
shares Science, Education, Procedural Generation, Sandbox
Ecosystem
78.0% · 501 reviews
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Solar 2
90.4% · 1,597 reviews
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Cell to Singularity - Evolution Never Ends
86.1% · 10,734 reviews
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Prehistoric Kingdom
90.0% · 3,839 reviews
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Townscaper
95.7% · 11,258 reviews
shares Short, Nature, Procedural Generation, Sandbox
Cloud Gardens
94.9% · 1,453 reviews
shares Short, Nature, Procedural Generation, Sandbox
Screenshots
Official Steam store screenshots — click any shot to enlarge.
Facts & details
From the Steam store record, snapshot 2026-05-20.
| Genres | Simulation, Early Access |
| Player tags | Life Sim · Sandbox · Science · God Game · Nature · Artificial Intelligence · Procedural Generation · Simulation · Dinosaurs · Aliens · Education · Relaxing (SteamSpy community voting) |
| Features | Single-player · Steam Achievements · Steam Cloud · Family Sharing |
| Languages | English |
| Achievements | 5 |
| Estimated owners | 100,000 – 200,000 (SteamSpy) |
| Official site | http://thesaplinggame.com |
Minimum system requirements (PC)
Minimum: OS *: Windows 7 Processor: A processor with SSE2 instruction set support Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities. DirectX: Version 10 Storage: 150 MB available space