Branches

Steam allows for games to have beta branches that offer alternative versions of a game to be downloaded. Steven the Sperm HD made use of this feature and offered two now-defunct branches: the rotation branch and the blue branch.

Rotation
The rotation branch was the first branch to be offered, going live on November 20th, 2019 at 7:41 PM as version 1.3.1R. The branch allowed for Steven to rotate with a center pivot, as opposed to pivoting around his tail.

While center rotation had been a major request since Steven the Sperm Classic, Simmons never thought to update it since he thought it would ruin the stage design. However, a classmate who purchased HD was constantly asking Simmons and his friends to "fix the rotation". Making an ingame option to switch between center and tail rotation would've required an overhaul of the game's animations and collisions, so Simmons hesitated until he remembered that the beta branch feature existed, causing him to create a separate version that he would update along with the base game.

The final version of the rotation branch went live on January 3rd, 2020 at 3:09 PM, as version 1.3.3R. The branch is no longer receiving updates because interest was low, and porting the changes made in The Color Update (1.3.5) was decided to not be worth it.

Blue
Going live on January 3rd, 2020 at 3:08 PM as version 1.3.3B, the blue branch turned all spermicide in the game blue as a psychological experiment to gauge the effects the color of the spermicide would have on players. Also it was blue, which is pretty cool.

STS was infamous inside Perfect Acorn for causing players intense rage due to its difficulty. However, after a few negative gameplay experiences, Simmons wondered whether the rage and headaches the game caused was necessarily only the result of its difficulty, or its difficulty in combination with the game's overwhelming use of red, which is a violent color.

This led to the creation of the blue branch, as well as encouragement from Simmons for players to state in the discussions whether or not the branch actually offered any real benefit. No user ever left a message, but somebody on the game's IndieDB page requested that the game should have more color, which led Simmons to create The Color Update (1.3.5), rendering this branch obsolete.