Foreword – I’ve already donated $10 for the preorder and I encourage you to try this sim out for yourself. If you like it, help the devs out – the full release is supposed to be much more costly.
Also, this was originally intended to be a 1 part entry but it’s been split up for easier reading.
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I know I’ve been at least aware of this game for a long, long time but I’d never actually loaded up the game in my computer before. Curious, I decided to finally give it a shot.
I’d already messed around with the game for a few hours on the default settings but I decided to try something different for this particular entry. This time, I’ve given myself a goal. I increased the benefit from grazing and reduced the aging rate to .25. Just to see what would happen. I really don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m going to try to encourage the artificial life in this game to grow as big as possible. My tools were pretty limited but Rovers, I think, are going to prove more useful in the future.
These are my initial shots. With the aging rate slowed a bit, I can take more time to document what I see. Even in x1 speed, the population quickly capped but the game still didn’t seem to have any performance issues.
In a very short period, I had creatures with legs, some with eyes and many others still were a different color than the yellow potato color we’d started with.
The last two thumbnails above are of the rover and its settings. Since bigger animals were my goal, I decided to have a rover feed all the larger animals. I don’t think size has anything to do with how well they can survive in this particular world but heck, why not?
Species is a really fun game once you get get past the whole potato creature stage. If you ever need another neat idea for the game, generate a flat world, make grazing more efficient and encourage the creatures to be really speedy with a rover. I got some really interesting bipedal creatures once by doing that. Another neat thing to do is generate an island chain that lets you isolate a part of it when you raise the water level. That way you can study divergent evolution, and see what sort of differences pop up between the different populations. Though sometimes the creatures decide that swimming between the islands is a good idea and ruins the whole “separate populations” idea.
The islands can sometimes spawn sea grass if the ground is just right. I had one island that had a huge field of the stuff and a new species evolved that I like to call the Water Bug. It had two legs that it used to swim around, and the rest of it’s body sloped down into the water. It evolved the perfect sea grass grazing body, and it eventually took over my beaches. I think I wiped them out when I raised the sea level though.
I think you might like my subsequent Species posts – they’ve been scheduled to publish for the next few days before I go back to Creatures stuff.
I got lucky with this world and it ended up being laid out in such a way that if I raised the water level, I could have 4 islands, one of which was really huge. I’ve been experimenting with it “off camera” for the last few days and it’s amazing to see how much the creatures have changed since my last blog entry on this game.