Thank you for putting so much time into analysis! You are absolutely right; we waited too long to scope down the game with the initial intention that more evolutions would be satisfying for experimentation. Thus we were going to keep the recipes hidden. But given that we didn't have enough evolutions to make experimentation feel worth it and after submission, people were struggling to figure out how to play (and validly so), we posted the recipes in an attempt to give an aiming goal at least while still hiding the stats to invoke experimentation hopefully. There was originally going to be a terrain, and blueprint upgrade system, believe it or not, *cries*. For the next jam, we will focus on one core mechanic and build off of that instead of scrambling to scale down at the last second and meeting balancing issues.
Thank you for your input and playing!