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Features

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GrandAdmiralCrunch edited this page Oct 30, 2026 · 1 revision

Features

For players

Living worlds

  • 107 animated species on Kerbin, Laythe, Eve and Jool. Creatures appear a few hundred metres to about a kilometre around you, and despawn as you leave.

  • Territories. Each world is divided into roughly 3 km cells, and each cell decides once which species live there. A valley that had herds yesterday has them again tomorrow.

  • Behaviour. Every species has a temperament:

    • Skittish animals flee.
    • Passive ones barely notice you.
    • Curious ones come closer.
    • Territorial ones approach and stand their ground.

    Some also have day or night activity, herds and flocks, sleeping, flight, burrowing, swimming, attacks, roars and even boulder-throwing.

  • Habitats: ground walkers, flyers that land and take off, aerial drifters, surface swimmers, deep-sea life, seafloor and amphibious creatures, and sessile organisms like corals and fungi. Gas giants have their own floating ecosystems at fixed altitude bands.

  • Geysers and fumaroles on Laythe, with geyserkites riding the steam.

Discovery and science

  1. Observe a creature on EVA (press O within range) to catalogue it and collect field-note science.
  2. Study fossils with a scientist at outcrops marked by a faint green glow.
  3. Capture specimens of small creatures into a CO-Z Containment Unit, and recover them alive for triple science.
  4. Analyse specimens and fossil samples with a scientist in a science lab (such as the Mobile Processing Lab). This gives science and extra evidence for the tree of life.
  5. Survey lairs: the Cyclops' Cave, the Glowworm Grotto and the Glimmering Reef.
  6. Instruments:
    • the Xenofauna Tracking Camera photographs wildlife in line of sight;
    • the Hydrophone hears sea life up to 4 km away.

The Field Guide

Open it from the toolbar.

  • Species pages show portraits, silhouettes, habitat, range, diet and life stages.
  • The Fossils catalogue lists every fossil type you have studied.
  • The Tree of Life for each world starts hidden:
    1. Every discovery adds evidence to its branches.
    2. A branch with some evidence shows as "Unknown lineage".
    3. Enough evidence names the branch.
  • Panspermia events link trees across worlds once proven. Duna seeded Kerbin, Kerbin's sea life reached Laythe, and Laythe's animals fell into Jool's sky.

Settings

GameData/Xenobiology/Settings.cfg sets:

  • spawn density and the creature caps (maxActiveCreatures, maxCreatureObjects);
  • level-of-detail distances;
  • key bindings;
  • spoiler-free mode, which hides worlds where you have found nothing.

Alt+F8 opens a debug window. It lists config problems and which species can live where you stand, and lets you spawn any creature or fossil.

For modders

Everything is defined in ConfigNodes, and ModuleManager patches work on all of them. Worlds that aren't installed are skipped quietly, so content can ship without conditions.

Node What it is
XENO_BIOSPHERE "This world has life." One per world. Can be extinct (fossils only).
XENO_CLADE A branch of the world's tree of life, with a parent and a revealThreshold.
XENO_LIFEFORM A species: where it lives, how it behaves, and what it looks like.
XENO_FOSSIL An outcrop scientists study. It adds evidence to the clades (or panspermia events) it names.
XENO_PANSPERMIA Links a clade on one world to the tree of another.
XENO_LAIR A fixed site (cave, nest, reef) with a model and resident creatures.
XENO_FEATURE Non-living scenery such as geysers and fumaroles, which a species can gather around.

Two ways to give a species a body:

  • PROCEDURAL: built from primitives and animated in code. No art needed. Body plans: Quadruped, Hexapod, Serpent, Avian, Fish, Floater, Blob.
  • MODEL: your own .mu with legacy animation clips (idle, walk, run, alert, and optionally sleep, glide, flap, takeoff, land, attack, swim, float).

Tools that come with the mod:

  • Tools/xeno_tool.py validate <GameData> finds broken links and thresholds that can never be reached.
  • xeno_tool.py tree <GameData> <biosphere> prints a world's whole tree.
  • xeno_tool.py outlines <GameData> draws Field Guide silhouettes for procedural species.
  • The source repository adds the full Blender pipeline used to build every stock creature (in Tools/blender), and xeno_dds.py for texture conversion.

Ready to start? Go to Adding Life to Your World.

Xenobiology

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