01 / Make yourself at home
Meet a grazer, follow a golden Aegis protector, or find a purple-swirled madcap. Tap any creature to see its menu, family and live neural network. Plant a garden for more living refuge. Bloom bursts turn existing dissolved nutrients into plant biomass; they do not create unlimited food.
02 / Herbivores, in balance
The balance control leaves unharvestable plant roots and propagules, slows breeding when local food is sparse or grazing crowds are dense, and makes predator breeding depend on local prey relative to competing hunters. It does not set population quotas, force deaths, or secretly spawn replacements. Move it to zero for unassisted competition. Balance is a designed game-model rule, not a guarantee of coexistence.
03 / Meet the Aegis
Golden protectors sense vulnerable neighbours, escort them when they have enough food, share their own reserves, and intercept attacks inside a visible shield radius. Deflections cost energy and can fail. Their presence helps active madcap episodes settle, without removing inherited susceptibility or completely erasing the acquired imprint. Protection and perception remain evolvable traits.
04 / A wonderfully strange appetite
Madcap creatures have a fictional trait that temporarily changes their appetite. An episode shifts expressed food preferences, sometimes across the food web. Purple swirls identify them. Three founders begin with episodes; further episodes arise spontaneously or through your interventions. Jaw size, body size and digestive efficiency still matter. Offspring can inherit a diluted, fading imprint alongside genetic susceptibility. This is not a model of real mental illness.
05 / Evolution, not a reset button
Compatible parents must meet and invest reserves into finite eggs. Offspring recombine traits and neural graphs. Weights, biases, hidden neurons, connections and recurrence can mutate. Selection occurs through survival and reproduction, not artificial fitness points. No season wipes the ecology. Extinct branches remain in the record; “Invite grazers” and “Aegis arrival” create explicitly logged immigrant branches, not resurrected lineages.
06 / Play has consequences
Planting adds a recorded quantity of external living biomass. Imported animals bring recorded body and reserve matter. Calming currents end local episodes but leave imprints. Existing gardens affect habitat and plant growth, and survive save/load. Adverse experiments are tucked into Environment: toxins can fade while accumulated scarring persists.
07 / A model, not a forecast
Time, size, depth and temperature are model units. Plants and microbes are aggregate fields; animals are individuals. Six founder clades remain reproductive compatibility groups, while diets, morphology, niches and brains can evolve. Ecotype branches are not proven species. Some branches can still disappear. The decorative coral art represents habitat; it is not an individually simulated coral colony. Appearance modes affect rendering only.
Small discoveries
Watch ten hatchlings arrive, witness an actual Aegis deflection, plant three gardens, observe eight madcap episodes, and inherit ten changed neural graphs. Each discovery is awarded from the simulation’s real counters, not a timer.
Controls & keeping your reef
Space pause or play · N next creature · [ ] slower or faster · Esc cancel a tool. Drag to pan; scroll to zoom. Tool buttons arm placement; tap the reef to use one. The 1–256× slider reports actual throughput separately. Save world exports portable JSON. The camera saves a PNG postcard. Sound is opt-in. Motion reduction follows your device setting.
Local, always
No network requests, tracking, external fonts or libraries. A Web Worker runs fixed 50 ms model steps; a bounded fallback supports restrictive browsers. Hidden tabs suspend the simulation. Checkpoints stay in this browser when storage is available. Version 1 PELAGIC saves can be imported, but continue under the new Bloom rules; version 2 saves resume exactly under this build.