Understanding Some Basic Concepts and Mechanics

** WORK IN PROGRESS **
This guide is subject to chance as I learn more stuff and/or the game updates

This guide is intended to provide some basic understanding of how to set up and play the game to end up with something resembling the results you had in mind. It's mostly for those who actually want to understand the game rather than just goof around.

INTRODUCTION

NOTE: This game basically boils down to stock-breeding. As with all such endeavors, you will frequently have to cull the herd, either manually (and mercifully) or letting nature take its course (with starvation and suffering). If you can't stomach that, find another game to play that's less like the real world.

Key Concepts:

• This game is about modifying life, not creating life. You have to start with something.
  
• The lifeform you start with has its own original DNA. When you gene-splice a lifeform, you get a mix of what it had to start with and the target template you selected. It takes multiple generations to breed up to the template and there'll always be at least some of the original DNA left. Thus, you never end up with quite the results you wanted if you're trying to build to a template.
  
• Natural evolution takes geologic time. In this game, the player's main role is speeding this process up. But it still takes quite a while, like semi-geologic time. So don't expect instant gratification. As a result, when gene-splicing, it's generally better to make a series of incremental changes and let each settle in and prove itself successful for a while before taking the next step towards your ultimate goal of creature design. Radical changes, such as trying to turn the basic potatoworm into an intelligent humanoid all in 1 go, generally don't work very well.
  
• You have 3 main tools to alter the natural evolutionary process: gene-splicing to a target template, world-altering climate manipulation, and artificial selection with rover. In general, gene-splicing and climate-alteration do not play well together so stick with one or the other until you've accomplished your goals. Rovers can be used either alone or in combination with your main strategy.
  
• Before starting a game, you need to decide how you want to play it. You have quite a few options here, ranging from total spectator to creating your own ecosystem from the progenitor potatoworm, and all points in between. The degree of difficulty and the time required go up exponentially the less you start with. Thus, choosing your starting conditions, and the main tool you'll use to achieve your goals, is of fundamental importance. Changing strategies mid-game usually results in disaster.
  
• While the game itself is relatively simple to learn and use, the subject matter is highly complex and full of scads of interacting variables all heavily dosed with randomness. Because much of this is outside the player's control, and because players have different goals, there is no "magic bullet" for success and this guides does not pretend to be such. All this guide does is lay out some of what's going on and what you can do to influence it, if you're totally lost.

CHOOSING YOUR ROLE AS A PLAYER

The cool thing about this game is that you can role-play it in different ways. You can be the all-powerful Creator God trying to build the Garden of Eden. You can be a minor Trickster God causing mischief without sweating all the creationist details. You can be an all-powerful Trickster God creating a world of silliness and despair for your own amusement. You can be a high-tech interstellar race using down-to-earth (but still quite advanced) science to create a militarized race of genetically enhanced warriors to drop on other planets. You can be a higher-tech interstellar race wanting to turn a barren world into a viable colonization target, or trying to save endangered species from environmental collapse. Basically, anything along this whole spectrum and many off it are possible.

Regardless of how you want to approach the game, it's generally advisable to pick a role (and an associated goal) to start with as that will help you pick which of the 3 main tools will be your primary weapon. All this will help you maintain your focus as the game progresses. Maintaining focus is paramount because no matter what role you play or how you implement your strategy, this game unfolds SLOWLY (geologic timescales, remember), so you have to keep your eyes on the prize. Loss of focus leads to switching horses in mid-stream, and just makes a mess of things.

STARTING CONDITIONS

Now that you've decided what your role is in the game, and what your ultimate goal is, you need somewhere to make this happen. So now it's time to create the world.

THE WORLD ITSELF
Most of the variables on the "New World" creation page have to do with the map and climate. Some of these might seem rather opaque although most have useful tooltips. However, most of them aren't all THAT important---make them what you want. Just keep the following things in mind:

• If you plan to force the critters to evolve naturally in response to major climate change, you want to start with a map that's rather different from what it will become, and has room for that to happen.
  
• The DNA of your starting population will be adapted to the starting environment. If you don't make major climate changes, their descendants will stay adapted to this environment and you don't need to make too many major metabolic changes during your gene-splicing.
  
• Any critters you've exported from other games, and any you've downloaded from the workshop, will almost certainly have evolved in a different environment so likely won't do well on your new planet without MAJOR gene-splicing, especially on the metabolic side of things. So in general, it's a good idea not to mix critters from other games or players.
  
• It's a good idea to start with a map that provides a range of different habitats. This encourages natural evolution and speciation. The less diverse the environment, the fewer species you'll have to play with.

STARTING POPULATION
This little box in the upper left of the world creation screen is THE most important thing when setting up a new world, because it HUGELY impacts how much time and effort you'll have to spend getting the desired results. Pick the one that's right for your skill level, intentions, and patience. Your options, in order of difficulty from easiest to hardest, are as follows:

• RANDOM; Gives you 50 computer-generated random species, some land, some aquatic, with a mix of predators and prey. No potatoworms---all are relatively highly evolved with useful limbs, sensory organs, a bit of a brain, the works. This is a full-blown ecosystem for you to wreak havoc upon carefully manipulate. HOWEVER, if you leave the total number of creatures at the default of 250, this means you only get 5 individuals of each species. This is really not a viable number so most if not all of your species will go extinct almost immediately. To prevent this, run your initial total population up to 750 or 1000, which will give you 15 or 20 individuals of each species. Pros: Interesting just to watch, easier to make the monsters you want because the critters are already well-developed, species diversification protects against mass extinction, and can use any and all of the main tools however you want. Cons: Lacks the satisfaction of growing your own ecosystem from potatoworms. Also requires LARGE initial population so limits growth to cap. Highly recommended for most games as you don't have to wait so long to start messing things up.
  
• EXPORTED: Uses all the creatures you have saved from previous games and any you've downloaded. It's likely that most will do poorly as they evolved for conditions significantly different from what your new world starts with. If you're going to use this, it's best to play a number of games with the same climate and build your library that way.
  
• PREDATOR-PREY: Gives you 2 types of terrestrial potatoworms, one vegan and the other sensible. Easier than breeding your own carnivores but that's about it. MUCH assembly required. More suited to a gene-splicing strategy than climate-changing.
  
• BLANK SLATE: Gives you 1 type of terrestrial vegan potatoworm. Breeding anything more interesting, including carnivores, is up to you. Again, only really works with gene-splicing.
  
• AQUATIC: Same as Blank Slate except you start with 1 vegan water-breathing potatoworm, so not only do you have all the same work as Blank Slate, you also have to coax the critters up on land. Requires a lot of shallow seas with reefs so make the map accordingly.

REPRODUCTION
This setting is the 2nd most important on the screen as it has huge gameplay implications. So choose wisely.

• Asexual: Genes only flow vertically between parent and baby, not sideways between adults. This effectively makes every single individual creature its own species. The advantages are that reproduction is limited only by available food and any genetic tinkering you do is isolated from outside dilution. The disadvantage is that every lineage has to "reinvent the wheel" itself as there is no sharing of evolutionary advances between lineages. This setting works best with one of the potatoworm starting populations. You pick one lineage and try to do better with science than nature does with the rest.
  
• Sexual: Reproduction only happens between 2 separate adults so a population of just 1 is doomed. This greatly reduces the likelihood that radiation-induced mutants will be able to pass on their traits, which is usually for the best anyway. It also tends to reduce natural speciation because all the gradual, minor, and beneficial changes get spread throughout the population, while the detrimental changes get weeded out.
  
• Parthenogenisis: Critters can reproduce both sexually and asexually. Their preference for one or the other is dependent on the amorousness setting in their brains. It's the best of both worlds, at least if amorousness is somewhat over 50%. Individuals keep up with the Joneses via sexual reproduction but can, in a pinch, fall back on asexual reproduction.

TOOL 1: CLIMATE CHANGE

Before we start changing the climate, we need to understand what happens if we don't.

Basically, on most maps, there will be a variety of biomes based mostly on elevation unless you specify otherwise. A single species, including the initial potatoworms, will always do better in 1 or a few similar biomes than in others--it is adapted to that environment. Other biomes will be uninhabited until some new species evolves to live there, but that takes a long time and is not certain to happen. More frequently, new species evolve to be better adapted to the biome(s) their parents lived in, ultimately replacing the parent species. That is, potatoworms might start growing legs but will keep eating the same plants and preferring the same temperature as before, because this is easier than revamping their whole metabolism to tolerate a different environment. So basically, no matter how many species you have, most of them are going to be pretty specialized to particular biomes.

Now you go playing with the climate tools. What nearly all of these do is alter the amount of the map that is covered by each biome, including eliminated some biomes and introducing some new ones. If a certain biome gets significantly reduced, so too will be the populations of the species that like it there, and vice versa. So unless you started with the diverse RANDOM ecosystem, it's usually a bad idea to mess with climate before you've let the game run on 3x for however many hours it takes to populate most of the map surface. If you mess with the climate too early, you risk mass extinction because you'll likely reduce the few biomes that your existing critters like.

So in general, climate manipulation as a player tool to drive evolution is playing the long game. You first need a large, diverse population. And then, when you make changes to the climate, you want to do so very gradually. Like make 1 little change, then wait a fair number of generations to give the critters a chance to adapt to it before making another little change. You have to give the weak time to die off and the strong time to survive, which doesn't happen immediately. Then once you've changed as far as you want it to go in that direction, let it sit that way for a long time to see what happens. Ice ages take thousand years to get going and end, after all, with millions of years of cold in between.

Although climate change doesn't give you fine control over the details of the creatures' appearance, it IS a powerful tool for developing important general characteristics that are a pain to make with gene-splicing. For example, getting warm-blooded creatures, especially carnivores. Carnivores work best if warm-blooded because that gives them lots of stamina for the chase, even if they're not all that fast. But being warm-blooded means you have to eat WAY more than a cold-blooded critter of the same size. Thus, warm blood will never evolve on a world warm enough that cold-bloodedness gets by just fine. So if you want warm blood, drop the temperature so that the cold-blooded critters don't get to move around (and eat and breed) as much as warm-bloods. And if you have a highly fertile planet teeming with plants, there's no food-shortage stress to make critters want to eat each other. So drop the fertility.

OTOH, you can also use sudden, massive climate change to drop major disaster on your critters. The result, however, is going to be fairly predictable. Whatever you had before that liked whatever biome you end up with after the disaster, that will be about the only species you have left, if any. So this sort of change is really only useful to end a game you're tired of playing, or to restart a game essentially from scratch. You'll be making a K-T Boundary, in effect.

Note that making frequent small-to-medium climate changes merely reduces the effectiveness of the climate changing tools. Conditions don't get bad enough for long enough to kill off much of anything nor force speciation. All that happens is that critters evolve increased temperature tolerance, so that future changes have less effect on them.

Creating islands by raising the sea level does not seem to have much effect on speciation because this does not, by itself, change the biomes on the island. So, you have the same critters living in the same biomes on both landmasses and they won't change very much if at all even if there is no gene flow between them. Given a huge amount of time, you might get speciation this way from random mutations and genetic drift, but it does require total isolation, which is hard to do without raising the sea level so much that it significantly reduces land area and therefore overall population. If you want island populations to become somewhat different in a reasonable amount of time, use the island as an easy way to box-select all the critters there and then hit them with radiation frequently.

This brings us to the one climate tool that doesn't change biome distribution: radiaton. Radiation is in general bad. Most of the changes it causes are harmful. You'll get a bunch of mutants, most of which won't reproduce and will quickly die, doing nothing but cluttering up your cladogram with scads of dead-ends. Those that survive as new species are almost always freaks that never become major species. Stunted heads, stunted limbs, loss of facial features, that sort of thing, is what you usually get. So don't expect great results from radiation. It's more of a disaster scenario that wrecks a world rather than a vehicle for positive change.

TOOL 2: GENE-SPLICING

Rather than let nature takes its long, slow course with climate, gene-splicing is very much a hands-on approach giving faster, much more noticeable results. The results are often bad and never exactly what you wanted, but at least you get to see something happening while you play, and there's always the entertainment value of creating horrible, misshapen freaks.

Before getting into the various methods of actually doing gene-splicing, first understand how it all works. What you're doing is taking a living creature from your world (the "subject") and injecting it with SOME of the DNA from another creature (the "target") in the hopes that the subject's offspring will eventually become very like, but not quite the same as, the target. Thus, before you can gene-splice, you need to have a library of target creatures. To create your library, you can make your own creatures or download creature's made by other players.

To make your own, select any creature, hit the Genetic Engineering button on its stats box, make the changes you want, and then hit the EXPORT button. This saves your design to your library. Then, when you hit either the Gene-Splice button on a selected creature, or when you set up the Nursery, you get to pick the Target. Select your design and (when gene-splicing directly) hit the IMPORT button. This is what puts the target's DNA into the subject.

GOLDEN RULES OF GENE-SPLICING

• This is NOT a 1-and-done process. The offspring of the creature(s) you gene-splice are hybrids, a mix of their original DNA and that of the target. It takes a number of generations of selected breeding and/or repeated gene-splicing to weed out as much of the original DNA as possible. If you don't do this, your changes won't last.
  
• The greater the difference between subject and target, the more generations it will take to reach the target.
  
• The target has to have at least 1 better stat than the subject, and the others no worse, or your creation will not survive in the wild. If it's worse, the subject will out-compete it. If it's the same, then there's no point in doing this.
  
• Limbs are only useful if the creature's metabolism can produce enough energy to use them. Adding legs without boosting metabolism will result in a creature that takes a few steps and passes out from exhaustion, then dies because it can't reach food before starving.
  
• Target libraries go stale because natural evolution is constantly improving metabolisms even if it's not growing legs. Also, climate changes since the start of the game make old targets maladapted to current conditions. So, never re-use a target after a lot of gametime has passed. Always start from a currently existing creature and make a new target.
  
• Downloaded creatures made by other players probably won't work well in your world because those creatures evolved for conditions in the other player's world, which are likely significantly different from conditions in your world.
  
• Evolution marches on. Even when you eventually breed creatures to your specifications and release them into the wild, they won't stay that way very long. Assuming they flourish, they will immediately begin evolving naturally just like everything else, gradually changing their shapes and ultimately fragmenting into separate species. So don't get too attached to your creations. Even if successful, they're only suited to that one moment in time, and must change with it. So rather, become attached to the lineages you create.

GENE-SPLICING IN THE WILD vs IN THE NURSERY
The actual gene-splicing command only becomes available when you have 1 or more critters selected, and only affects the selected critter(s). Because it takes a number of generations and often repeated splicings for your subject to breed true to the target, gene-splicing free-range creatures is generally a waste of time because you'll never find all the offspring to hit again, nor be able to cull out the undesirable hybrids. Seriously, splicing in the wild only has a chance of success if you only have a single species on the whole planet, such as when using the Blank Slate starting population. Otherwise, you're just throwing some weird genes into the general mix and creating a freakshow. That can be fun if you're into watching random silliness unfold but if you want specific results, you need to use the Nursery.

THE NURSERY
If you plan to use gene-splicing as your main tool in the game (as opposed to climate change), then you'll need to use the Nursery a lot. This makes its location of vital importance because it will have a biome inside it and whatever you make there must be able to survive that biome long enough to reproduce. Thus, when creating a new map, drag the nursery to a good place on the map and then adjust its elevation to what you think is a good average biome for the world. And if you plan on raising sea level significantly, be sure the Nursery is high enough not to get flooded unless you want to breed fish.

The Nursery automates much of the multi-generational gene-splicing process while keeping the subjects isolated from the rest of the population to prevent your genes from being diluted. When you set the Nursery target, it automatically gene-splices the subjects in the Nursery so they soon produce 1st-generation hybrid babies. The Nursery also has 2 dedicated rovers inside which automatically evaluate the hybrids. One rover culls (kills) those farthest from the target, the other feeds those closest to the target. Those that survive the rovers grow up and produce 2nd-generation hybrids which will be closer to the target. The rovers again cull and selectively feed the herd. After a number of generations, you'll eventually have 20-30 individuals pretty close to your target. Then you can release the final hybrids into the wild. It's best not to put them all in 1 place, though. Scatter them out in case you misjudged which biome to drop them in.

NOTE: The Nursery also has a radiation setting. This makes it possible to mutate creatures without gene-splicing them, simply by keeping them caged in higher radiation that the rest of the world. This usually results in something worse than you started with, not with a superhero. Sorry. So unless you really want to see what happens, I recommend reducing the radiation down to ambient levels or even less so it doesn't mutate your target DNA.

Effective use of the Nursery is covered in a separate section due to space limitations.

TOOL 2A: EFFECTIVE USE OF THE NURSERY

As mentioned in the previous section, the Nursery automates much of the multi-generational process of turning a subject critter into a target critter. However, it only works well if you know how to use it, and you can also improve its function by manual intervention. Here are some tips for effective use of the Nursery.

• REPRODUCTION TYPE: If your critters are asexual, start with only 1 individual. Otherwise, start with 4-6 reasonably healthy individuals of the subject species. If your critters have parthenogenisis, be sure the target's brain has amorousness set above 50% so the hybrids will crossbreed to even out the changes.
  
• Create the target template AFTER placing the starting subjects in the Nursery. Select one of the subjects, hit the Genetic Engineering button, and use it to create the target. This way, any metabolic and brain advances the subject has already made naturally won't be lost from using an obsolete target template. And once this batch in the Nursery is finished, never use this template again.
  
• The target must be better in some stat(s) than the subject, and no worse in the other stats. Otherwise, you're devolving and your new creatures won't survive.
  
• When making the target, don't make it radically different from the subject. You want something that steals a march or 2 on the slow pace of natural evolution but is not so far in advance of what you started with that the critter has limbs it can't use. Remember, the whole body has to evolve together, inside and out, to function properly as a whole. Focus on metabolism and brain first, then start working on limbs and other features. Over several iterations, you can eventually reach something approximately like creature you had in mind when you started.
  
• Once the Nursery contains 20-30 things very close to your target, release them into the wild in 2 or 3 clumps in different places. Then let a fair amount of gametime elapse on 3x acceleration. This field-tests the changes you've made so far. If your creatures survive, great! If not, start over and do something different. Plus, the descendants of those you released will evolve naturally to better fit their environment. Once you think you're on the right track, catch a few of the new breed, put them in the nursery, and make the next incremental change toward your ultimate goal, again creating the next target template from one of the current creatures.
  
• You can speed the Nursery process up by manual intervention. Each time a new litter is born, pause the game and look at the pups yourself. Kill all those you don't like then select the rest and manually gene-splice them with the target template to reinforce the genes you want them to have. Let the rovers and Nursery itself handle the rest.
  
• BE CAREFUL WITH THE RADIATION! Radiation doesn't make your target genes more likely to take, it randomly alters any gene in the creature. Thus, it causes deviation away from the desired target. Nearly all such deviation will be bad. Sorry, radiation does not usually result in superheroes. The radiation level in the Nursery defaults to 2x ambient the 1st time you open the Nursery. If you're serious about gene-splicing, turn it down to ambient or less. Only use high radiation if you want to see if you can beat the odds and create superheroes, or actually desire to make a freakshow.

TOOL 3: ROVERS and CLIMATE CONTROL DEVICES

This section is about the rovers you can place out in the wild to interact with the general population. All such rovers are optional and are created and controlled from the Rovers button on the left side of the main screen. If you don't push this button, you'll never have this type of rover. You ALWAYS have 2 rovers in the Nursery but they never leave there, and are controlled automatically by the Nursery--you can't interact with them directly. So, when the word "rover" is used in this section, it refers only to the optional type created and programmed from the Rovers button.

These optional rovers are the 3rd main tool you have to alter the natural evolution of life on your planet. They do so by selective breeding, either feeding or killing creatures with specified traits. At present, you can have as many such rovers as you want for free (expect them to have a pricetag in the future), each feeding or killing creatures based on different traits. You can also have them do the same to the plants, so they can be your gardeners.

This makes rovers extremely powerful tools, able to reshape the entire biosphere to your liking. This expands the gameplay options to include terraforming a barren land in preparation for initially aquatic potatoworms to evolve onto, without touching the climate controls. Climate control devices and be part of this strategy, too. However, on a less-ambitious scale, rovers are still quite useful for nudging life along the path you want it to follow, using carrots (feeding) and sticks (killing).

Think of rovers as part of the environment. Those that feed act like higher fertility or more plentiful game. Those that kill act like predators preying on the weak. As such (if properly set up), they drive a slow, steady, "naturalistic" evolution, although the more rovers you have doing the same thing, the faster the process unfolds. But like using climate change as your main tool, rover-caused evolutionary changes require a lot of time to produce noticeable results. Also, while you can use rovers to breed for specific traits, you don't have all that much say in the final form of the resulting creatures. They will be a cross between what the planet would have produced naturally, with certain desirable traits enhanced and certain undesirable traits weeded out. If you want creatures to look a certain way, use gene-splicing.

As with most things in this game, with rovers it's best to take the long view and give them time to do their jobs. Make incremental rather than radical changes, especially if you've got any killbots out there. You don't want them genociding your whole population because you set your goals too high. And always try to encourage adaptations that are actually beneficial in the world in its current state. Reprogram or change out your rovers periodically to keep them up with the state of the world by then.

One risk you need to be aware of when using rovers heavily is that of "domestication". Picking the wrong traits to feed, or feeding the correct traits too long, can cause populations to become maladapted to the real world and dependent on the rovers for survival. Thus, if you take away the rovers, the dependent creatures will soon go extinct. So monitor your rovers frequently.

Rovers can also be sparingly as part of the other main strategies of climate change or gene-splicing. For example, when you've first released a new batch from the Nursery, you might send out 1 rover briefly to feed them until they establish themselves, just to provide some cushion to the shock of introduction. But don't leave the rover with them too long or you'll domesticate them.

Rovers and climate control devices can also be used to roleplay saving lifeforms from environmental disaster. This can be either your plan for the game, or because you accidentally overdid the climate disaster and don't actually want to kill everything. So, you send out rovers on "humanitarian aid" missions and establish safe havens with the climate control devices until the climate becomes more livable.

As to climate control devices in general, they're really only useful in extreme conditions, such as to terraform hellworlds or to create havens when a previously good climate goes really bad. In both cases, however, life can't exist beyond their borders, so is automatically domesticated. The only way out is to change the climate of much of the world to match that of the device.

Another use for climate control devices is if you want to develop critters for a biome very different from that of your Nursery. In that case, put a device in the Nursery so it mimics the biome where you intend to release your creations.

[Spring_Onion]

Oml i did not know domectication was posibble. woooo, i want to buy this game more and more!

[jjuneau]

Does anyone know why all my creatures children produced in nursery instantly die even if i pause immediately after they hatch? I've tried with many different games, many different climates and species, many different targets both close and far away from the starting creature. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.

[Ichigo]

@silverfox123 looks like your creatures aren't very well adapted.

[silverfox123]

All my Creatures Instantly die no matter the map starting conditions nor climate. Even the Regular Maps that are there Kill them Instantly. If i dont use custom creatures and use the presets they die instantly.

[Trans Girl Kasyu]

you can also access it just by going into the betas tab on the properties panel in the library, and as for writing my own guide, I'm not very good at writing guides, but would love to try and update this to fit the experimental version with some help!

[Trans Girl Kasyu]

the experimental version changed basically everything. it added erosion, seasons, gravity and oxygen manipulation, map editing, custom starting potatoes, and the use of up to four different starting potatoes. look at graystillplays's newest episodes on the game to see what has changed.

[Bullethead]

@Kasyu. I don't have the experimental version but I'm sure the basic concepts haven't changed that much. If you're familiar with them, maybe write your own guide?

[Trans Girl Kasyu]

Can you update this for the experimental version?

[flopp]

Thumbnail reminds me of the barotrauma head.

[Bis_Cat]

Can you please provide some tips or tricks to stop the game from crashing?