So, I think a lot of the underwater smelting ideas here, require a lot of work from specialized workers, and are best perused by an agricultural society. So here is where we can discuss ideas for the progression of under water civilizations through the awakening stage and beyond.
Agriculture should be easy so long as there is an obtainable organism which produces a nutritious edible product, and hardy, easy-to-store eggs or seeds. The game should ensure that such an organism will always evolve on all playthroughs, to avoid stranding players in the awakening stage. After this, they can make cities, and could likely go quite far, especially if they find a way to smelt metals
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You need tools for agriculture.
You need hands to use tools.
Hands are not good for swimming.
Fish who evolved hands died due to natrual selection.
The sea is full of many forms that are not fish-like, many of which could easily support hands
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Agriculture means to settle down,
Settle down means ppl/other Fish/ predators will know how to find you.
Your species got extinct by getting over hunted.
Uhh, this also applies on land. so why didn’t humans quickly go extinct?
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Because humans are lucky. That and the fact that we already were higher up on the food chain. Also there are many causes of extinction so those must be accounted for.
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Population and migration( hence game should support colony system, or close species jump system)
so why couldn’t sea animals do the exact same thing?
@Deathwake Other species on other planets could be lucky, and could be apex predators.
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Yes they could, but the amount of luck we are talking here is astronmical ( pun intended )
First game should support this ( which i think it should)
Then the player should be smart and would need to have multiple run before becoming remotely succesful.
us humans were extremely lucky. in fact the chance that life would evolve is extremely low. so i dont see why underwater settlements would be a problem.
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Life started in ocean way before it started on land,
So if it was indeed so likely we should really have mermaids running for presidency election. (Joke)
On land a species actively improvise and optimize for survival.
In ocean, many thing are there which works just enough to avoid the pressure for having agriculture.
Also with agriculture to thrive the species need tech advancement and knowledge share.
For either of them you need stages
Stone age > bronze age > iron age
etc.
If we never had Coal we wouldn’t have been able to make nuclear.
So stages are also important
i never said it was likely. I actually said the opposite. Sapience is so rare, it is a miracle us humans achieved it.
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This thread a lot of biases and assumptions here so far. First off, it assumes the build for hands is less favourable than fins. The thing is, the hand is just a special type of fin, and the only reason fish don’t have them is because they don’t have need to evolve if you can easily catch up things from your mouth and swim high up to food instead of reaching out (as well as the fact they don’t have to walk on terrain and grab for traction). This doesn’t mean fish can’t have hands, it means most don’t need to. It also takes in factors that have all show to be beat up here on land such as settlement. Even more annoyingly, there was the claim that since aquatic creatures rained longer, they would’ve grown into every possible niche. This is in no case guaranteed or true. Also going on as of luck, is it not clear to you that sapience in itself is a lucky trait? Sapience is what allowed smart moves to avoid predators in the first place. If we are going off luck to anything in this game we might as well get rid of all of the stages accept the first three. Just to be pushy with this, here is a frog fish, a fish that walks on terrain and has specifically evolved webbed-hand like fins: 
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While there might not be pressure for agriculture in-universe, there would certainly be a heavy pressure towards agriculture due to the player needing it to progress through the game
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may I remind you of something?
octopuses can manipulate the environment around them with their tentacles
they don’t have hands, and they are smart
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I agree, but I think the player might try to be more like Posideon than of octopus.
But I really don’t know, unless someone really makes it real.
There are several rather fish-like creatures which have grasping structures that could easily be replaced with hands, such as squid, cuttlefish, and dolphins
In all of those cases, hands would look pretty cursed. I see it more for a stubby reef fish, like the frog fish i’ve shown. Just segment the bones in the fins into bendable fingers, control with some tendons, and you have a hand/foot able to grasp better.
Hands are easy, tentacles are common enough in mollusks, with pincers in arthropods. Chordates have evolved even more solusions to this problem, from the opposable thumbed hands of higher mammals and the claws of Mesozoic reptiles on land, to the tails of seahorses and the frogfish under water. Players are going to have enough of these hand analogues, as prehensile organs are a convergent features that have evolved many times. Also I think that most sentient aquatic animals will evolve during a change in ecosystem either from or to a kelp forest or a reef. This is due to the fact that most smart animals (humans, dolphins and ravens/crows) all evolved during a change from one habitat to another (arborial to open plains, land to sea and i-don’t-know to urban respectively) and many smart sea creatures (octopuses, cuttlefish and probubly something other then a mollusc) live in kelp or reefs.