Moving away from the broken achievement system is objectively a step forward considering how it tended to randomize itself with every iteration. Ran through a couple of playthroughs, and have a few comments.
It might just be my game, but you are only able to acquire the supply items once. This makes them effectively useless. Even when more expensive and impactful supply items are added, several of the things that are in the one off purchases (stones, fruit, etc) are required in quantity for any reasonable benefit.
Maybe the item supply choices can be restricted to 1 per day if balance is a concern? (So that people dont farm and get 50 fruits at the start of every run if that is desired)
I am guessing that the later and more expensive choices will be perks equivalent to some of the achievment effects. An in run method of generating resources is required for any significant exploration or actually getting into the breeding mechanics.
Combat XP progression feels good. Get in fights, get xp. Relatively quick to get, I got more than 1000 in a single (long) play through. The supply choices from it are nice, but suffer greatly from there being nothing else to get and being one time buys. It would be nice if it was listed exactly what you were getting when you buy it.
Item XP gain is simply not sufficient for the items it offers. Spending several runs sprinting about getting fruit just to get enough xp to start with 1 extra random fruit is just a pain in the but. Atleast as far as I have found only fruit and stones contribute to item xp, but there is a fair chance that I have missed something. If per use is the only way to get said xp, which is very slow (20 fruit usage to get 1 free fruit max at the start of a run) it would feel better if item use xp was expanded to every item, or atleast herbs/contraceptives/bateries/etc.
Having item usage tied to the way to get evolution stones and fruit on future runs feels very odd. You can only really play for so long, but not having any in-run method of generating evolution stones feels makes actually getting into the breeding mechanics very difficult. There is a healthy variety of types, and a limited number of loot spots.
Genetic XP is brutally slow. Without a way to get more stones in a run past the random loot spots, getting into breeding is very difficult and very time consuming in a bad way. I legitimatly resorted to memorising loot spots and speedrunning the opening area to see if I got enough bug stones to matter, and resetting if I did not.
The game does not save any progress, and trying to get a full run in can be a 4-6 hour endevor with how long the UI interactions and combat speed takes if you are legitimatly trying to do everything. Current strategy to get genetic XP at something approaching a not horrifically painful rate is to get bug stones by luck, loose three scouts to bugs with good genetics, and then just sit on my but for several days until food runs out. Playing the game normally as it currently is you are effectively garunteed to never get enough genetic XP until decently far into a several hour playthrough, and its a very small amount.
Survival XP gain is good. Got enough in my first playthrough to get both of the selections. Dont have too much to say, will need to see the later perks to get a better idea for how the progression is but it feels good right now. It might be good to tune gain rate up depending on how many perks there are later on, since you can only get the equivalent of a few points after an hour of speedrunning about. It might be good to heavily increase the survival XP you get from exploring, and maybe give some for each night survived? Right now the quickest way to get it is releasing mons, so I got most of mine trying to get genetic XP.
In general outside of combat XP and (sorta) survival xp, I think the xp gain rate needs to be notably upped. It takes several hours of playing to get things done just because of how slow it can be at times to work the UI, and the game not holding onto a save file makes that absolutely brutal for getting any kind of notable xp accumulation. I doubt that many people will have consistant 6 hour chunks to sit down and play the game to try to get maybe 200 genetics xp through normal play.
Hopefully the later perks solve most of these concerns.
That being said, improving the UI speed/reliability (Stables are very difficult to use for me especially the second slot of scouts, have to select them, back out, select stud, back out, then select breed or it does not work and will sometimes chose a first slot scout to get bred instead) would be a massive improvment to playability and reduce the time commitment. Mouse control for most things maybe, and reducing the dead time between inputs so you can cycle options faster. Maybe an option to speed up most combat animations/selections? Legitimatly most of the time in my runs has been spent trying to force my way through menus as quickly as I could.
Just my 2 (7 paragraphs) cents. It is really nice to not have to deal with the absolutely busted achievment system, but with the game not storing any saves the time to play desperatly needs to be reduced.