Little Extinctions

Little Extinctions is a 2D natural-selection simulation.

On a warm planet, small round gray animals spread to every region. Over time they became three subspecies: the red subspecies grew larger and stronger, the blue subspecies learned to gather in packs and cooperate, and the green subspecies came to leave more offspring, more often. Then a drought shrank the land they could live on, and the three subspecies met again in a single region. They no longer knew that they descended from one ancestor. You observe them as an alien biologist.

Genes decide every creature

• Each species has a gene of three loci: Physical, Cognitive, and Reproductive, each from 0 to 255.
  
• The gene sets the creature's color, its name, and 19 traits, such as size, speed, vision, and the number of offspring.
  
• Offspring inherit a combination of their parents' genes, sometimes with a mutation. A new color is a new species.

Creatures act on their own

• Each creature looks across its field of view and remembers what it saw while it stays in range.
  
• It chooses between eating, breeding, cooperating, and resting at its nest.
  
• It hunts smaller creatures that are not its kin and carries food back to its nest.
  
• Creatures merge into packs. Packs claim hexagonal tiles as territory, build nests, change leaders, split, absorb other packs, and go to war.

Three ways to play

• Story Mode: Eight stages on different maps. Choose one pack to follow, read its news as it happens, and at the end of each stage choose the pack that moves on to the next stage. Later stages bring fire and snow.
  
• Laboratory: Choose a map and design one to three species locus by locus, splitting up to 381 points among each species' three loci.
  
• Terrarium: Watch runs on random maps with random species and no on-screen interface. When a run ends, its champion moves to another map against new rivals.

Features

• 12 maps made of hexagonal terrain tiles.
  
• Name the new species you find and keep them in your Discovered Species record.
  
• At the end of each run, read the records of the top packs and species and the reasons the champion won.
  
• English and Korean.