LIVING WORLDS

You cannot make anything live.

LIVING WORLDS is an ecosystem god game. You can raise mountains and cut saddles, call down the rain, open the crust to the heat beneath, lean on a planet's tilt and nudge its moon. What you cannot do is place a single living thing. Life arrives as a thin crust of mats on a wet shore, and from then on it grows where it can, dies where it can't, spreads, adapts and changes its own world.

When the biosphere is ready, your powers recede and the world faces its resilience trial alone: a drought, a dimming star, a waking caldera, the king tides. One lush valley rarely survives. Separate refuges, a working loop of growth and decay, and water that stays where life needs it usually do.

Features

• A real simulation. Water, soil, salt, carbon and nutrients are conserved. Rivers carve canyons and build deltas, lakes fill and spill over their saddles, salt pans crack, glaciers flow, monsoons and cyclones come and go.
• Life you don't control. Ten guilds, from sun mats and vent mats to forests, grazers and hunters. Lineages adapt to cold, drought, salt and the seasons on their own, or with a nudge.
• 24 powers across land, water, air, life, the deep crust, the sky and the planet itself: eruptions, faults, plates, comets, axial tilt, orbit, a starlight veil and the moon's distance.
• Failure explains itself. The Chronicle names the refuge in trouble, the population, and what is killing it. Every overlay shows the numbers the simulation actually uses.
• Nine Living Worlds, from a gentle young shore to a sunless planet around a black hole, then nine Desperate Worlds: a binary planet, a 2.4 g super-Earth, a moon of a gas giant, a flaring red dwarf, a runaway greenhouse, a planet torn loose from its sun.
• A sandbox with deep-time tectonics and free editor brushes, challenges for completed worlds, and a planet you can cut open to look inside.

Requirements

The game runs on WebGPU: Chrome or Edge recommended on a desktop with a reasonably modern graphics card. Mouse and keyboard; not designed for phones. If the planet feels slow, lower Render quality in Settings.

Full manual (PDF): Living Worlds Manual

Check other games at waldtier.com/games.

Support

Living Worlds is free. If it gave you a good evening, a small donation keeps the next game coming.

I also write hard science fiction as D. B. Waldtier. The Consent Engines saga starts with Songs on Rocks.

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LIVING WORLDS by dbx — https://waldtier.com.