I cracked open Loddlenaut today since I'm still too "but what if worst case scenario" about the Paleo Pines patch and I have two thoughts from it:
1: I am beginning to suspect I'm playing the game wrong because my 4 hours played so far has been very Power Washer Simulator with barely any loddle uptime at all. I clean them off, I give them some fruit, then I get yanked to the next place that takes 45 minutes to tidy up. I am enjoying the tidying! But, uhm, I thought the game would tell me to go play with my loddles more. Maybe later when everything's tidy....
2: It turns out loddles are parthenogenic. Very enthusiastically parthenogenic. The "max loddles per zone" number is not a joke and it's also the only mercy you're gonna get. This makes sense for a game whose premise is you're cleaning up their habitat so they can repopulate it, but I wasn't ready to turn around and find out my happy little reef had SIX blobby lovelies when it only had ONE last time I looked!
Perplexed to report that you can beat Loddlenaut and it ends the game for that save file if you do. The infinite cute smol fren game has a hard stop? And you can reach it in a scant few hours without ever really messing with the loddles?
EDIT: brief testing is you can open the save after the credits are done and you'll be on a penultimate step, but you can just... untrack that quest and go on your merry way NOT ending the game. 👍🏽
This REALLY confirms that I was playing it wrong though! Apparently the idea is you DON'T just rush through the quest objectives and my RPG training has betrayed me.