Starting off?

[Beni]

I've been playing this game and I'm having a hard time getting started, I can only get two organisms, I can't get past 8,960 Zooplankton. How do I get more Zooplankton to spawn?

[TheRealLizardQueen]

I have this same issue, can't figure it out for the life of me...

[gote]

You need to play the story mode, and save around the point where you get the stromalites.
then load it as a freeplay world and youre good to go!

[Kupferdrache]

ad more -1T water to your map (around 60 % of your intital map) asuming, you don't put too much montains or deep sea to your starting infrastructure.

[KhalunQalli]

It's because of the Broth of Life... Hopefully this is patched into Free Play soon. Here's how to get Free Play mode working:

1. Play the Campaign until you have Stromatolite.

2. Save your game.

3. Start Free Play mode game on a map size of your choosing. (Beware, larger maps mean colder maps.)

4. Import progress from your saved game. (You can repeat these steps later on to increase your world size if you start off in the smaller worlds. This can prevent you from having an early ice age that you'll have to carve seas for hours to fix.)

5. BOOM... you're now playing in Free Play and you're passed the hurdle that is the Broth of Life.

[WhyBorne]

There is another way that doesn't require the tutorial or the broth of life and is similar to what Azure mentions above.

The "issue" is that the game requires ~25% water on the map for zooplankton to grow above 8,960 (my experience testing). If you are going to play free mode, you need to start on the small map first. (Unless you want to spend HOURS terraforming to get 25% water before anything advances = not fun)

Get the water to at least 25% of the small map, then you can get past the 8,960 zooplankton. You should really use the item that creates valleys to expand water quickly, rather than trying to terraform one block at a time. Even after you use ALL the valleys, you will need to do some single block terraforming to add more water. Then you can go back over the valleys to level them off a bit later. You don't want your sea areas so segregated like the valleys create, so you should connect some of them or make a larger/connected sea area.

Want to get to that huge map? If you don't progress through each free mode map level (small to normal to large to huge) you are going to have some major issues with your water percentage and your temperature. The normal map is 4x larger than the small map and large/huge are each 2x more blocks than the prior map size. So your percentage of water (and temperature) will take a major hit each step up. I don't recomend moving that small map save file to a normal map until you have 80% water and an avatar with 5x5 terraforming. At 80% water on the small map it will yield 20% water when you load it on the normal map. Then you can use that 5x5 terraforming to add at least another 5% water.

There doesn't seem to be a need to raise any land until later.

I'd suggest just taking things slow and terraform some cool oceans on those small and normal maps before moving up. It doesn't seem like you really need the extra space early on in the game.

Hope this helps.

[Beni]

Thank you very much for your help... I did just that, I started off on a small map to get started and will progressively work towrad bigger maps

[TheRealLizardQueen]

I had no issue transferring a small number of stramatolites to the giant map--no need to progress through the sizes.

[Kupferdrache]

stromatolite, have a adation tem, down to -1 °C, but that isn't the proble, with, loading into a bigger map, it, the birth temp, of the next creatures in line, that is off then.