Losing features not used

I know we don't even know how determining what new traits/attributes/features are acquired and when using auto-evo, but I want to bring something up that I think should not be forgotten.

Humans, at some point in their evolutionary paths, had tails. We no longer have tails, and that is because they fell into disuse. Once humans descended from the trees, the tail was no longer needed to help us maintain our balance and provide another grip. There are many other artifacts of our biological past in our body, but all of them are much less vital than they were. The point I am trying to make is the evolution not only creates new features to help survival, but it also takes away ones that are no longer needed. We need to have a way to simulate this within Thrive.

Now, I am not a coder, so the following may be laughable to those who must implement it, but this is what I suggest. The autoevo process should detect what parts of the creature are not being used, and gradually decrease the size (or output) of said part. At some point, the part will be mostly useless and taking up space, so it will be advantageous for the player to remove it from the creature. In this way, the player still has the choice to keep the part (thus giving control to the player) but it's effect on the animal's survivability is greatly diminished. So, if you really want to keep those hooves on your aquatic creature, you can, there is just really no point. I just wanted to point this out, so it is not forgotten, and can be worked in without much changing of the code later on.

Yes. The auto-evo process will likely remove such unnecessary features from non-player organisms automatically simply because the construction of such features takes energy that could be better spent on necessary features, thus increasing the fitness of organisms that lack unnecessary features.

Yes, natural selection would remove them because of the energy requirements. However the exact mechanism would likely be such that it decreases in size 'by accident' because it is helpful to decrease it's size.

everything takes energy, if having a tail is energy saving and doesn't affect how you behave then it'll end up remove

Yes the fact that having large tails causes higher energy expenditure than those with tails would cause a decrease in tail length, but it would be a very long term change because not every individual would be greatly selected against.

Perhaps this kind of change is more due to genetic drift (The change of allele frequency over time without any major benefit or detriment)

Mainly because theres no major change in species fitness. (I mean compared to camouflage or predation evasion)

Xenopologist wrote:

Yes. The auto-evo process will likely remove such unnecessary features from non-player organisms automatically simply because the construction of such features takes energy that could be better spent on necessary features, thus increasing the fitness of organisms that lack unnecessary features.

QFT