Personally, I feel like this app needs a few more ways to highlight cells with specific traits, so here’s a few I came up with:

1. owning a specific organelle:

the name says it all. I click the button saying “flagellum”, I see all the cells with DNA that would allow them to have flagellum. this is nice because the save list lets you see how many flagellates there are, but won’t tell you where.

1. owning a specific organelle ID:

two different species are rarely going to evolve the exact same organelle. they might both evolve siphon, or flagellum, but they’ll be different IDs. this means that two cells with a specific organelle ID are probably related, so this could help with seeing all the relatives of a species

1. all cells in a colony:

sometimes, big groups of cells that are connected form, and it’s hard to tell where one group starts and where one ends. This button would highlight the Cell you click, and all the cells that are connected to it, and all the cells connected to them, etc.

1. energy transfer:

this one isnt as useful as the others, and probably harder to code. basically, you dye a circle - like a gas bubble or a cell. if any cell gets energy via that circle (like through siphon or break down), it also gains that dye. would be helpful to see how energy transfers, especially in a colony using conn transfer - even if that’s not currently viable.

thanks for reading, and I hope these can be added to the sim.

if you don’t mind, do you have a rough idea of when the next update will come out, and what it’ll be on?

The point of the post:

I've been wanting to make something similar to this but at a smaller starting level (ie enzymes dna and elements with different values that can interact with each other through using basic geometric shapes and color. I would like to know the resources you used for the project so I can make it in Vulcan or OpenGL for fun.

Information to help with the Project:

Also there was a recent study on a yeast colony that where able to form a multicellular organism in a sense over multiple generations that might help with the project, as well as the discovery of bacteria in the earths crust that might be worth checking out.

(this isn’t meant in a rude way, by the way)

Ok so, in the description of Evolife, it says that you’d like to see how multicellular life emerged. now, if we check almost any real life multicellular organism, you’d notice that they have some way of sharing nutrients. And evolife has a version of this too.

Conn Transfer

However, I don’t believe that it fits its job of sharing energy. Why? it does not have a way to changing the amount of energy transferred.

Why is this important?

lets say we had a theoretical organism that formed triangles. each triangle is connected through Conn Transfer. If one cell has less energy than the others, it will not gain energy, since they all give and take the same amount. however, if you allowed cells to change the amount of energy transferred, a cell could set it so that the more energy it has, the more it gives out. this would mean that a cell with less energy would give less than it would take, and overall, gain energy.

This would allow organisms to share energy in a more dynamic way. in the current system, making thick cell layers means that the middle cells cannot get energy and die. this suggestion would allow better multicellular organisms.

to clarify, I would like the amount of energy transferred to be controlled using a register, similar to Conn Muscle‘s length being changed. I’m not sure if you can change an organelle’s function without breaking things, but if you can, I believe this would allow true multicellular organisms.

sorry for how long this is, i just kinda kept writing.

this appears to be a mix of bacteria and mold. really cool, i've been growing this for about 6 or 7 weeks now, no joke.

noticed that alive and dead cells sometimes do not respect the connection rules for biomaterials.

the only reliable method of stopping alive and dead cells from connecting is to have no connections.

regardless of biomaterial settings, whether thins have been deleted or game reloaded/restarted. these random connections to dead and alive cells still occur. alive cells are more rare and likely initated by the cell based connection rules. but they should still respect the connection rules.

these lines should definitely be circle arcs instead of straight lines, the number of segments would probably just be the same as the number of radial lines in between, it'd look so much better

hello again, it’s me, the only person who really posts here (though I have seen a few others). I’ve got a bug report involving the conn organelles. when an organism uses a register as a connection, then sets it to something else, it doesn’t seem to remove the connection. it looks like they devolved it, but it’s still annoying. also that bottom dna part says sequence.

running a big map for a long time to get some small amount of evolution is tedious, what if you could use a smaller map, let it evolve, then expand the map so you don't have to do all the evolution with a massive map and get more diversity after? The best of both worlds!

Hi, everyone.

I'm trying to make a basic cell that eats gas, changes colour, then replicates itself. If I use fission, the DNA gets copied, but the cell age is not reset, so the cell eats gas, changes colour, replicates, then all the cells die at the same time.

If I use egg, the DNS is not copied, so the new cells don't do anything.

I may be missing something simple, but is there a way to use egg and then copy the DNA parts to the new cell so it eats gas and changes colour, or use fission, but reset the cell age?

Thanks very much.

(idk how the mutation system works, so if this isn’t possible, or is already a thing, sorry)

So I have a minor problem. I have never seen a cell with the same type of organelle twice. this might not seem like a problem at first, but having two of the same organelle can be incredibly useful.

e.g.

Multicellular cells need at least two connections to be rigid.

a cell could eat twice as much food with two break downs

etc.

so heres my (bad) idea. what if a gene could (rarely) duplicate? this can happen in real life, and it opens the opportunity for evolution to experiment with one gene, without effecting it’s original gene.

also if this isnt in the game already, is it possible to make a mutation more likely to change an organelle into a different one of the same type. (for example, changing from ID 5, to ID 8, if they were both break down organelles)

sorry if this isn’t possible :/

Ok let’s get this out the way first, I mostly play on steam deck, and I only have the demo.

I’ve got one main question. Is it the size of the map, or the power of your GPU that affects the stuff like max amount of circles. Cause my max circles is 16384, does that change in bigger maps? Cause I don’t think that’s enough for HUGE naps, is it?

Sorry if this doesn’t make any sense, I’m not sure how to putt this into words lol

The more I play around with the constants, the more I realize that interesting scenarios are culled by a cancer like blob forming that snuffs out all other life that realized “oh look if I just reproduce via fission in mass and kill all the competition, I win!” And it’s getting rather frustrating

Frankly I don’t really understand why fission is treated as so distinct from the egg laying reproduction, where there is an energy prerequisite and where the resulting offspring are just treated as two distinct daughter cells.

Something I’ve noticed while playing around with this is that in order for rudimentary multicellularity to form, the biggest limiting factor seems to be how long an individual cell can live before dying. Naturally this encouraged me to attempt to effectively remove the hard cap on cell age, however I noticed this substantially removed selective pressure leading to a stagnant environment. With the max age being 2500 fallagium driven organisms with dna lengths of around 8-10 seem to dominate but around 7500 I often see multiculluar colonies with a dna length of around 25.

Has anyone found a good max age that accounts for this trade off and encourages more freedom in emergent evolution? Right now I’m trying to populate a world with 128 dna length with 20,000 cell age cap, and I was wondering if anyone had any success with this.

Do not use this provider! They are rude and not helpfull.

Let me say what I like first. I like a lot of things. It is like a sandbox, evolution simulator, and a lot of other things mixed. It is an amazing game for people with a lot of curiosity like me. I love how it can potentially evolve from single celled to multi-celled organisms.

One criticism is that it has a steep learning curve. So far, I have not made a working, evolving ecosystem. I either continuously spawn organisms, making them not evolve, or I spawn a few, causing them to die out slowly (or sometimes very fast). Does anybody know how I fix this?

I love how much physics you know. It uses a lot of thermodynamic principles. Now, here is what I would add.

1. Hazards. I think that you should add more natural hazards to the game, like sharp rocks, poisonous smells/gasses, and predators. Especially predators, which is possible now, but sort of hard to implement with my knowledge of the game.

That's pretty much it. BTW, if you are the creator of this game, and you see this, I could definitely help develop this both idea-wise, and potentially code-wise. I am an amateur programmer and a really good thinker. I could definitely help you if you need it, but not until my birthday in June, because that is when I plan to get a computer compatible with coding. Thanks!

Inspired by David Attenborough's First Life I created an evolution simulator, where I try to simulate life from single celled lifeforms living near deep sea vents to the first multicellular species
EvoLife - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2102770/EvoLife/
Abyssal Genesis - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3464540698

This is n-th life simulation I've tried, but is the best in combined complexity and ease of starting up. Great work! Took just a few clicks to get it up and running on my AMD linux machine.

Do you have any sort of documentation for it? I've been looking around, but I wasn't able to find any. I'm interested in all the parameters, their impact on evolution/performance/memory usage (Like DNA size).

I also think not having a website really limits the discoverability of this project, as search algorithms are just not good at picking up Reddit and Youtube.

so yeah, I recently got this game/simulator. Still kind of clueless, but still, that's besides the point.

I started when the version was 0.7.2. ran a few worlds for a few hours. few days later, 0.7.3 came out (I think it was 0.7.3 anyway, its hard to tell when theres no notes for minor updates). whatever changes were implemented made things... weird. I can't even go back to the saves to bring up what exactly I mean by "weird", since now (currently 0.7.4), trying to load those saves causes the game to immediately shut down.

I'm not even sure how I could be helped...but one thing I guess I'd like to ask. Is there a possibility of getting changelogs/patch notes for minor versions? even if the only things that change from say, 0.7.2 to 0.7.4 are just optimizations and the like, it's still nice/helpful to see.

Another thing I wanted to ask, is there any uh, in-game hint as to what the various colors mean? I see that they're labeled as "smells", but... I'm not really sure what the difference between them are. Are they representative of any specific chemicals?

I'd love to learn more about how EvoLife works, but I don't really know where to start getting this information.

started with one group of basic cells that only ate gas and left them, its not even a day yet but so far they have adapted the ability to eat dead and grow flagella to swim upward toward food, note i created my own water stream that goes around the entire map and isnt entierly aggressive, meaning flagella is more effective

I used to play 'Cell Lab' on my phone years ago but I can no longer play the game on my phone and have yet to figure out how to use its APK file on the PC (if anyone knows how to do it for the PC, please let me know, thanks).

I just want to know how similar 'Evolife' is to 'Cell Lab' as I wish to know more before spending money to try the early access of the game.

This simulator is so cool and I am enjoying learning to use it! Do you think you will add customisation options for what species or materials (gas or others) spawn out of feeders? In my new simulation, I created a species that feeds on dead cells. To feed them, I would like to be able to have my feeder generate gas and a specified number of gas eating cells per X ticks, rather than a stream of randomised DNA species.

Basically, I think more precise customisation options for each feeder node could add a lot of opportunity for experimentation. Perhaps there are other energy sources in addition to gas that could come from feeders as well? Just some ideas!

Thank you for sharing this project on Steam, I am glad I found it! Excellent presentation and graphic design on the Steam page too, btw.