CULTURE

From atoms to an animal.
Kindle life from non-life, carry a lineage through deep time, and meet the creature your path built — unique to the choices you made.

A single seeded run. Permadeath. Real science as the mechanics, honestly labeled. Every act is played — including the microbial epoch, where you hold a living food web together and whatever you build there becomes the body you inherit.

Act I · Matter

A world before life

No life yet — just chemistry at a hydrothermal vent (modeled on the real Lost City field). Cook a pool of building blocks. What you make here shapes what life can become — over-investing one monomer starves your options later. our simplification
energy source — drives the chemistry
atmosphere — which is realistic is still debated
monomer pool — shifts with your choices
homochiralityracemic — unresolved

Life uses only left-handed building blocks; a random soup is 50/50. No spend fully fixes this — it's an open problem in real science, so it stays an irreducible risk into the next act. real open problem

pick an energy source and an atmosphere

Act II · Abiogenesis

Life, or not

The hardest step — and the one nobody has fully reproduced in a lab. You'll try to kindle a self-copying system inside a protative cell. It mostly fails. That's honest: a win here is beating astronomical odds, not solving a puzzle. real: lab-evolving protocells not yet achieved
first replicator — a genuine fork, still argued over
protocell membrane — Szostak's tradeoff

Act III · Microbial epochs

The living dish

Your lineage spends the next two billion years as a microbe. It does not spend them alone — it has to build a food web and hold it through whatever the season throws at it. You play this part.
what you carry in

Whatever the dish becomes is what your body inherits. A web you actually held together writes a different animal than one you barely survived. real: microbial ecology drove eukaryotic origins

Act IV · A major transition

Endosymbiosis

Your cell engulfs another — and instead of digesting it, keeps it alive. This really happened: it's where mitochondria and chloroplasts come from (Margulis). It decides whether your descendants power a mobile animal-line or a sessile plant-line. real
you've engulfed a cell. what do you do?

YOUR CREATURE ✕

Every feature was built by a choice on your path. Tap one to trace it.

EXTINCT