TAP GRID TO TOGGLE CELLS  ·  ORANGE GLOW = STARVING  ·  RED TINT = LOCAL UNREST  ·  DASHED CIRCLE = DISASTER EPICENTER
Cell border color = sex (blue = male, pink = female); a white dot marks the ~10% who are same-sex oriented. Every cell gets one action per tick, in strict priority order: flee an acute disaster, then flee local unrest, then forage toward better food/water, and only then — seek a mate. Once a male and female are adjacent, they can conceive directly and place a child on a nearby empty tile — they don't need the old Conway "exactly 3 neighbors" rule too, which a lone couple could never satisfy on its own. Larger clusters can still birth via 3-neighbor tiles with mixed sexes present, as before. Survival is now 1-3 neighbors instead of the classic 2-3, so a bonded pair — each other's only neighbor — can actually stay alive together instead of dying from "underpopulation" the instant they find each other.
Cell color = skill level, earned by surviving ticks in a row: Sprout → Adapted (20+) → Veteran (55+) → Elder (120+). Brightness = inherited strength (genetics), averaged from the birth pair with small mutation.
UNREST is emergent: rises with crowding + scarcity, kills outright and suppresses births above Tense, and eases as the population thins. A small ambient regen keeps resources from bleeding to zero over hundreds of generations. If population hits zero, the run auto-pauses and the extinction generation is marked above.
Survive past generation 1000 and CIVILIZATION unlocks: cells at Veteran skill or above (age 55+), with at least one neighbor and a comfortable resource surplus, occasionally build a permanent structure (the little glowing huts), spending some of their own resources to do it. Structures outlast their builders and quietly boost food/water regen and ease unrest for the tiles around them. They also act like reservoirs: SEVERE-tier hardship (drought, heatwave) hits progressively softer the more developed the settlement is — Settlement → Village → Town → City → Metropolis each roughly compound the buffer, so a real city barely notices a drought that would've ended a lone hut. CATASTROPHIC-tier disasters (storm, flood, blight) barely care how developed you are, though — those can still seriously hurt or end even a City. Enough structures nearby and the settlement levels up automatically, and once one exists, cells with nothing more urgent to do (safe, fed, not chasing a mate) will drift toward it — people want to live near civilization.
ADAPT is a second heritable gene, independent of skill and strength: it's a food/water frugality trade-off, inherited and mutated the same way strength is. Cells toward the amber end sip less food but drink more water; cells toward the cyan end do the opposite. Whichever resource is locally scarce quietly selects for the lineage that conserves it, so isolated pockets of the population can visibly drift toward different ends of the ADAPT bar over time — real adaptation, not just cosmetic variation, tinting living (non-starving) cells amber or cyan accordingly.
Isolation (0 neighbors) and mild overcrowding (exactly 4) are no longer an automatic death sentence — a resilient, skilled cell now has a real if modest chance to tough it out alone or in a crowd, same as it resists starvation and hazards. Cells also don't live forever: past ~55 ticks old (Veteran age), a rising (but resilience-slowed) chance of death from old age kicks in, so even a maxed-out Elder eventually dies of natural causes rather than pure bad luck.
If a population goes 40 straight generations with zero births and zero deaths, it's not surviving, it's just stuck — a frozen little cluster that can neither grow nor die. Wanderers show up on the map when that happens (and occasionally when a storm or flood rolls through) to reseed a random spot with fresh genetics, so the board never idles forever in that limbo. Watch the WANDERERS ARRIVE banner and the "Migrant waves" record.