I included the settings I'm using in the post I linked. That would be a good place to start.
The default mutation rates are probably a tad high (so you'll want to increase the numbers from their default (5000 I believe) to maybe like 10000).
You probably want significantly more than 30 0s in the DNA. In our experience from various people's attempts, zerobots tend to shrink their DNA over time once they start replicating. Once they strip it down to 8 bps, there's not much room for improvement. You'll be much better off with more like 100 0s. I'm doing 1000 0s in my sim, for instance. Word of warning, though: the longer the DNA, the slower the sim will take to run. With just zerobots, physics and vision simulation time is negligible, and most of the simulation time is spent executing DNA. All 0s in the DNA will execute quite fast, but once the DNA mutates to do various commands it can bring the simulation to a crawl (my sim is 5x slower than when I started).
There should be a "physics and costs" tab. There's an "Advanced costs" button you can click to open up more options. In the settings I provided in my thread, most are set to 0 except for moving, shooting, and building stuff. But even with that I've had bots learn how to die, (presumably the most promising bots for learning to replicate) so for quicker results I would recommend that all those numbers be 0. You can turn them on again later once you have some bots that can survive.
With all the costs set to 0, you shouldn't need to give any nrg to the sim, (the only energy loss possible is if a bot learns to shoot -2 shots and they don't hit anything, or if a bot shoots -1 or -6 shots (feeding shots) and they hit the other bot but the returning nrg shots don't make it back to the feeding bot for whatever reason). So you wouldn't have to set the bots as veggies (which has always been a bit artificial IMO).
Also, once the bots start replicating, make sure that there are no more than 1 new mutations per generation over time. Preferably that number should be even lower. Like 10 generations per new mutation. Otherwise you don't have evolution, you just have random behavior.
