Yeah I think for vertebrate/arthropod-likes early cambrian equivalent is the latest we can talk about the creatures being macroscopic.
Fairly sure all other kingdoms of life and even just groups of animals stay macroscopic past that timestep though… Would that mean they’d have to all be implemented in macro first or would some of their features only come in aware as has been suggested before?
Personally, I think about the time the Cambrian Explosion starts would be about when “Awareness” starts, assuming that is still the plan for when to switch stages. Although, to be fair, their will be quite the variety of abilities to figure out how to add even after the point Dues stopped at. Production of things like silk, milk, and honey, making cocoons, webs, and hives, moving to land, climbing trees, swinging from branches, flight, etc. Although . . .
Before the Cambrian Explosion, most “animals” where (cough) “vegetation” (sponges, corals, sea anemones, etc.). Bearing in mind that sponges move 1 to 4 millimeters per day, assuming a minimum speed is necessary for the game to consider a creature “Motile”, than the Cambrian Explosion is likely effectively when motility evolved. So perhaps having the “line” a bit later would be better. Or perhaps a looser definition of “Motile” is needed in Macroscopic, becoming stricter in Aware, when faster is actually possible.
Yeah maybe you’d only have to tweak the ratheloses’ suggestion by swapping their suggested boundary for when the classification sets in with some later point within macroscopic or macro-aware boundary
Also, mineralized parts/exoskeleton evolved during the Ediacaran.
Edit: Since the above article is unavailable, here is an alternative.
Also, guts evolved (or were already present) during the Ediacaran.
In cast people cannot access the article, here is another one from Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13882-z
I suppose those could be late macroscopic evolutions then
And Chitin cutle during the Late Ediacaran!
You already said exoskeleton evolved then?
One appears more akin to bone, while the other is like an Arthropod.
I wonder if we’ll discover the first actual vertebrate one day…
Could you elaborate what you mean here? Anything that stays macroscopic just stays macroscopic instead of aware. Like plants. That shouldn’t be a problem since there won’t be a hard stage transition probably. That does mean that any features they need, need to be in the Macroscopic selection.
Many of the motile animals, for example bilateria are not necessarily descended from these though, so I suppose those would still be in the Multicellular.
I honestly don’t see what you mean here. “the line” is on the gameplay perspective change, rather than any point in chronological time. Like said, those animals you mentioned are sessile, just like any animal feeding of dissolved compounds likely is. (note, I said the latter would have to be sessile, but that doesn’t mean there can’t also be sessile bacteria eaters.)
The rather critical part was that by having any compound-eating life be practically forced to be sessile and it only being a slight bonus for motile animals, we don’t have to worry about how to render the equivalent of “compound clouds” in the 3D Macroscopic environment, and instead we can focus on microbe clouds and mats.
by far the most inteligent cnadarians are box jellys… who got smart because they move quickly and needed eyes so they could move quickly in the direction of prey and not a brick wall… who’s nervous system is more centralized to make this possible. I think forming large clusters is how inteligence works. Obviously with cephalopods, you can have many clusters, but most of the thinking is still done in one, and we dont know how much that scales.
It was suggested to split up macro features like that as to not overlongate it’s development iirc
My point is that motile animals evolved from non-motile animals. So if all precambrian non-motile animals are vegetation, animals are descended from plants. I see two possible solutions:
Many plant evolutions, such as Fruit and Flowers, came later, well after Aware animals evolved. Some of them even require Aware animals, including but not limited to pollinators, to function. We need a good cut off of what plant parts to include in Macroscopic and what to save for later, after half of the Aware animal features are done. Otherwise we will spend way to long programming features that cannot be used yet.
Edit; Same for Fungus, as aah31415 pointed out. Also for Protaxites and any other Kingdoms that may have been/could be.
It’s nice to see such forward planning for how current features will interact with future features that are probably still years away from being started on. 
Wouldn’t some fungi also be locked to aware?
Ah, I see now. I suppose any technically Macroscopic-Stage features that IRL did not show up until way later when animals were well into the “aware stage” would indeed be left for when we are developing the latter. They would still be Macroscopic-Stage though, and I definitely wouldn’t put any hard timeline requirements on them. Instead just have as requirements what is naturally necessary for each individual part.
I see, but this isn’t even what I was directly talking about in the section you originally quoted, hence my confusion:
All I am saying here is that any obligate and exclusive chemo-autotrophs should not be able to be motile, and therefore be the same as phot-autotrophs. Note that even the sponges you use as an example are mainly heterotrophic.
So now to answer the actual problem you mean:
So, first of all I suppose that would only apply to all precambrian macroscopic animals. There’s some debate on the origin bilateria, but I think it’s reasonable to suppose they evolved from microscopic animals, not directly from sessile macroscopic animals. Which would just mean that they entered macroscopic later than the sessile animals. So that’s more of a question of how to handle species going to Macroscopic before the player. (Which might also have to be answered anyway).
So in my opinion the real problem is that moving 1-4 milimeters a day is… not exactly riveting gameplay. For a player playing the game, that is effectively sessile. So this would also need whatever solution we might propose for “plant gameplay”. Either that, or they’re not playable, or we need to somehow accelerate time.
But I honestly don’t know what you mean by “letting what, in our faster moving world, are considered sessile species still be animals in Macroscopic“. Because that does not fix the problem that these species would play as sessile. Are you confusing things with the LOD system? We were not talking about that here.
So also, Macroscopic would not be starting later, you would just be entering it later (because those sessile macroscopic species already exist).
I also don’t think moving the startpoint of Macroscopic has anything to do with its endpoint.
Basically speeding Macroscopic movement up, so what in an Aware world is considered a slow moving creature would be moving at a (semi)“riveting gameplay” speed in Macroscopic. Though it might need a warning about moving to Aware if it is below a certain speed.
Its a question of how many generations will the player be Macroscopic. It took a while to evolve speed. So skipping that journey could lead to the player being “Macroscopic” only a few generations before they become “Aware”.
I think the belief of the motile entering macro without sessile predecessors is especially propped up by the nature of ctenophora, which is more basal than sponges most likely
Also, Jellyfish have a sessile larval state and a motile adult form, while Sponges are the opposite, being motile as larva and becoming sessile later.
So couldn’t one lifestage end up becoming the creature’s whole life, possibly changing their motilityness designation?
Ah, I suppose that could work. It’s acually somewhat similar to “speeding up time” but more practical. You would still expect some actually sessile creatures though, like Charnia.
Yeah, Cnidaria (jellyfish, corals, etc.) can be quite varied in that.
IIRC this was one of those other hypotheses for the origin of bilateria: permanent larvae. Also, non-Tunicate Chordates potentially being Tunicates that lost the adult stage.