Roles you've witnessed. Reach new succession phases to unlock more.
CULTURE
Hold a living dish through the season.
Build a food web and keep it alive through escalating shocks. You spend a scarce ◆ biomass budget — you can't just spam, so read the dish and act where it counts. Growing biomass poisons itself with waste; seed syntrophs to drain it or producers die.
Shocks are coming — famine, heat, phage — telegraphed fuzzily. Spend budget to ⌖ steer evolution and pre-adapt your strains, but you can only prep a couple, so gamble which. Survive all the shocks and you've won. what is this?
early playtest — the encounter core (the roguelike map comes next). is this finally a game?
What's real vs. simplified✕
REAL — the ecology is genuine, not scripted:
• Trophic roles: phototrophs fix energy from light and leak sugar; fermenters eat sugar and excrete waste; syntrophs eat that waste; decomposers recycle the dead. A real food chain (producers → consumers → decomposers), the structure of every ecosystem.
• Cross-feeding is a real force: the fermenter is self-inhibited by its own waste; the syntroph, by draining that waste, literally speeds the fermenter up — through the same uptake math, not a scripted bonus. Remove the syntroph and nearby fermenters visibly slow. This is real syntrophy — cooperation as a physical transaction.
• The nutrient cycle closes: dead cells become a detritus field; decomposers graze it and remineralize it back into sugar. Without them the dish slowly starves — recycling is what makes the world self-sustaining.
• Emergent, not scripted: nothing computes "fitness"; cells eat, divide, and die by local rules, so selection, predator–prey oscillations, and which role wins which zone all emerge. Heredity is copy-then-mutate. The phage still plays kill-the-winner (it hunts the commonest surface antigen), so diversity is protection.
• Monod uptake; Fick-law diffusion; a light gradient (Winogradsky zonation); genetic drift at small population size.
SIMPLIFIED — honest limits: timescale cranked for legibility; the roles and their trophic edges are authored (we don't claim species emerge from a soup — that's the unsolved "open-ended evolution" problem); genomes are toy; the four environmental axes are reduced to a light gradient; body shapes are drawn faithfully but their survival effect is largely cosmetic; the succession phases are detected from real population thresholds, but which phases exist is a designed ladder.