Okay, since you have to mutate to evolve and you have to reproduce to mutate and you need nrg to reproduce and you have to feed to restore nrg, and a sim without costs won't select for much, the minimal functioning non autotroph I could come up with that has any chance in an environemnt with at least some costs has 1 gene and 14bp. There may be even simpiler bots that would suffice, but I can't think of them. Even so, the only cost I'm using is a minimal nrg/cycle cost (new in 2.42.2) and I had to create a "nursery" of stable autotroph veggies to enclose my starting organism. I'm 100k cycles down the road, reproduction and mutations are happening and the environment seems capable in theory at least of evolving more complex bots over time. I'll let if run a few days and see what happens.
-E