Petriarch — a god watching evolution boil
Petriarch
Imagine a petri dish the size of a screen. Inside — thousands of glowing dots, each living its own life: foraging, breeding, dying. Nobody controls them — they have genes, and the environment decides the rest. You are the god here: not a commander, but a perturbation.
What happens without you
Agents carry size, metabolism, sociability and aggression in their genomes. The hungry pack into groups, the fed trade: caravans haul surplus across dead zones, and roads literally appear on the map. Groups war over food, then reconcile and trade, then divide territories. None of this is scripted — it follows from simple rules and selection.
The most mesmerizing part is color. Lineages drift in hue: watch one blot split in two, watch the frontier between them first red with war, then cooling into a market.
What you do
Three god gestures:
- Bloom — a click drops food at a point. A starving colony gets a chance.
- Smite — right click or X strikes an area. Aggressors learn the price.
- Terrain — the B key paints ocean, Shift erases. Water changes everything: no passage where it flows.
Plus sliders: intensity (how much each agent thinks), cognition and time speed — crank to 8x and watch evolution fast-forwarded.
Why it hooks you
There is no victory here — there are stories. That colony you saved from hunger at tick 200 — by tick 2000 it became a trade empire. That lineage you smote three times — extinct, its color gone from the map forever. You do not play — you intervene, then watch consequences. It is meditative and slightly eerie: like looking through a microscope at the living.
Who will enjoy it
Players who love simulators for watching: SimEarth, Conway's Life, all kinds of ant farms. If you ever wanted to be a god-aquarist — here is the aquarium, here are the gods. Score is peak population; try growing more than last time.