Awakening Stage

Previous stage: Aware Stage

Next stage: Society Stage

In a nutshell: You start with a creature beginning to discover the use of tools and must rapidly improve them to survive and outcompete competition. It ends upon the construction of your first Society Center.

Overview

Coming soon.

Transitions

The Awakening Stage begins when the player’s species achieves sapience. However, at this point, little changes, other than the ending of evolution for the player’s species. As the timescales have shrunk massively, only small evolutionary changes can happen anymore. Strategy Mode is still locked, the Nation Editor is locked, and Society Centers don’t exist. The initial transition is mostly symbolic (other than the greatly reduced species editing ability), and the substance of the change is gradual.

What is enabled, although not at first visible, is the Research Web. The Research Web cannot be viewed until Record Keeping is discovered. Interaction is also automatically discovered. Researchable technologies cannot be directly researched at this point. Instead, the actions that the player carries out, such as communicating or interacting with the environment, now provide progress towards discovering new technologies or Inventions, in effect developing your technology. This is the effect of having discovered Interaction. For example, using objects in the environment as tools (after crafting together raw materials found around the world) runs the chance of discovering the invention Tools (progress should be guaranteed to not subject players to a total random experience). Tech Editor will now be unlocked after Crafting becomes available. Tools allows Tech Objects made by the player in the Tech Editor, which are tagged as "Tools", to be equipped by members of their species.

The Language invention allows the player to task other members of their species to do more specific assignments. This feature builds on top of the pack commands from earlier stages (these are the signaling agents in the microbe stage). Every time a task is assigned (or performed), Cooperation progresses towards being discovered (as progress shouldn't depend on random chance, but there could be a chance for early lucky unlocks). Cooperation builds upon Language by allowing other species members, at this point advanced enough to be called tribe members, to discover technologies as a result of their own actions. Remember, before this, only the player’s organism could discover new technologies. This frees up the player to take more of a management role in their emerging tribe.

At this point Strategy Mode is still locked, but the player can use pack commands to assign members of their species to various tasks (most important being resource and food collection), made possible by discovering the Cooperation Invention. Once the player has assigned some resource gatherers and built structures, Collective Residence is discovered allowing the building of the Society Center building, which will establish a settlement.

The stage ends when the player builds their first Society Center. At this point the player's view will transition into the Strategy Mode really highlighting the change between the stages and the move to the strategy stages of the game.

Features

Coming soon.

UI

Coming soon.

Current Development

Work has not yet started on the Awakening Stage.