Round 0 - Year 0, Month 0
It was a yet another day in internet forum of a certain evolution game. Forum games were being played, bugs were being reported, questions were being made and answeared. Nothing seemed too much out of ordinary… Until someone noticed that letters began to mysteriously disappear; Quickly they noticed strange, tiny things moving between the words…
How will it work
The place in the internet which those creatures call home is not like the real world. However, many similarities can be found…
How to live in this world?
Letters and Symbols found on posts are like plants in the real world, and are the main food source for the “herbivores” of this land. Letters and symbols with colors other than white are fruit-like.
If an organism falls into a gap between posts, they will fall into a never-ending void, and die unless they can fly back up.
The environment is land-like.
Under Letters and Symbols is a layer of “soil”, which contains counterparts of elements found in soil and rocks on Earth, such as phosphorus, silicon and sulphur. This “soil” provides nutrients for Letters and Symbols. Note that some of “vegetation” floats in atmosphere. The soil has thickness based on size of the post, and under it is a layer of extremely hard rock-like material shaded all the time.
Atmosphere of the forums has similar properties to Earth’s ones.
The “postlayer” on which creatures and vegetation live is illuminated all the time from direction of your monitor (or up from perspective of forum’s creatures).
Posts are locked in space and creatures cannot move them in any way, however they can burrow into them.
Organisms CANNOT use any means of transportation to get to other places in internet. They are bound to the forum. They can only use links and hyperlinks which get them to other parts of the same forum.
Creatures have access to all pages on the forum aswell as PMs (which they can access by sliding into user’s profile).
Sidebar can be used to traverse topics by creatures.
Users of forum can interact with organisms by using cursors.
Rules
Mutations will always succeed, and so the survival of species is not going to depend on rolls, but instead it will depend on how do you spend those mutations. You will be able to spend 2 mutations every round on upgrading your creature.
Creatures have a scientific name and a nickname given by the users of infested forums (you decide what the nickname will be).
Each species has a conservation status:
-Highly Overpopulated (HO),
-Overpopulated (OP),
-Under Control (UC),
-In Decline (ID),
-Near Eradicated (NE),
-Eradicated (ER).
Each creature that you’ll be designing will have 3 statistics:
-Speed, which describes the swiftness of your organism,
-Stealth, which describes your creature’s ability to hide and observe the world around it and
-Strenght, which describes your creation’s ability to fight off other creatures and users
Stealth decreases with size increase and strenght decreases with size decrease. There are 5 sizes:
-Tiny: 3x stealth, 1x strenght, smaller than a letter,
-Small: 2.5x stealth, 1.5x strenght, size of a large letter,
-Medium: 2x stealth, 2x strenght, size of a short word,
-Large: 1.5x stealth, 2.5x strenght, size of a long word,
-Huge: 1x stealth, 3x strenght, size of a profile picture (seen near a post).
Predators cannot sustain themselved off prey which is two or more sized smaller than itself, unless they’re specialized to hunt small game.
Predators cannot hunt prey which is better than them in every statistic. If a prey item is lacking in every statistic against a predator, or if a predator cannot hunt anything, they’ll decline into extinction in 2 months unless an action is taken.
If two equal in statistics predator species hunt only the same prey species, they’ll both share the Overpopulated conservation status.
If a predator is worse than other predator in the same area and has nothing to fall back on, they will decline in conservation status based on amount of statistics in which they’re lacking. If they lack in all of them, they will fall down to Near Eradiated status and face near extinction.
Prey items will decline into extinction if they are hunted by predators and have nothing to fall back on. However, if they have a statistic advantage over predator and the predator has another statistic advantage over them, an equilibrium will be created.
Letters that have been damaged by herbivores and weren’t replaced by users will die and serve as potential food for detrivores.
By eating letters, creatures remove them as if they never existed and forum’s users have to manually rewrite damaged posts, so whereas in natural environment organisms can be only hunted by other organisms, in the forum users hunt them aswell in order to eradicate them.
Every 4 months (4 rounds) users will find a new strategy to hunt down the creatures, which will result in a temporary event decreasing your conservation status (severity will be randomized between 1 and 4) and a permanent increase of user hunting pressure by 2 points in every statistic (game begins with the pressure being 1 speed, 1 stealth and 1 strenght) First event will take place on month 4 (round 4).
If your creations have at least one statistic lower than the user hunting pressure, forum users will find a strategy to quickly eliminate your creatures and they will have a month to adapt or else they will be hunted to extinction the next month. If your organisms will be lacking in two statistics, they will go extinct within a month (your species will die instantly).
Rules might change.
Species
(First people to join this forum game will branch off from this starter.)
Starter - Limagriseus Forumvita, “The Letter Slug” - HO
- Tiny Herbivore
Limagriseus is a tiny creature seen eating letters. It’s small bodysize and lack of limbs make it nearly impossible for this organisms to spread to other posts or topics. It has a very simple digestive tract, but no specialized means of breathing or circulating nutrients. Limagriseus has muscles and simple, specialized cells for various senses which guide it’s Diffuse Nervous System. It is also a sexually reproducing species, and has to lay it’s eggs in shaded areas for them to not dry out.
Statistics:
-
Speed - 1
-
Stealth - 1*(3) = 3
-
Strenght - 1*(1) = 1
Preys On: Vegetation
Predated By: N/A
Mutations
- Digestive Tract
- Muscular Tissue (+1 Speed)
- Filter Mouth (+1 Strenght)
- Diffuse Nervous System
- Basic Sensory Cells (+1 Stealth)
- Sexual Reproduction (Increases mutations per month to 2)
I will give here some credit to Mitobox for inspiration for some things.
Also, this is my first forum game!
ROUND LINKS:
Round 1
Round 2
Round 3 (NEW RULES)
Round 4 (NEW RULE, EVENT)
Round 5
Round 6
Round 7
Round 8 (EVENT, RULE REVISION)
Round 9(NEW RULE)
Round 10
Round 11
Round 12(EVENT, RULE BUILDUP)
Round 13
Round 14 (SUB-EVENT, IMPORTANT NEW RULES AND MECHANICS)
Round 15
Round 16 (EVENT)
Round 17
Round 18 (SUB-EVENT)
ROUND 19
ROUND 20 (EVENT)
ROUND 21
ROUND 22 (IMPORTANT VOTE)
ROUND 23
ROUND 24 (EVENT)