>In the 40th millennium, the God Emperor of Mankind sits astride His Throne on Terra, shackled in torment as He lights an inferno in the immaterium, fueled by a thousand psyker’s souls consigned to oblivion each day. Across the galaxy, quintillions of men and women struggle, suffer, and take their stand in His Name against the numberless horrors that threaten to destroy them from within and without. They are the Imperium of Man, their hearts filled with relentless hate, and over millions of bloodstained battlefields, they and theirs return the hostility inflicted on them tenfold. It is not the 40th millennium, and this is not their story.>This is the story of another species, risen to prominence on an alien rock that never has and never will know the nurturing warmth of Sol. They are Xenos, as far from the genetic legacy of Terra as the east is from the west. To the Imperium: Other, Anathema, an INSULT to Mankind’s existence that cannot and must not be allowed to endure. To themselves, they are the only thing they can truly count on in a galaxy gone mad. In time, the Great Crusade of Mankind will discover their existence and in a crucible of fire and fury, their right to be will be earned or it will be extinguished.In time… First, they have to evolve and before we can get into that, you’ll need to decide on their evolutionary context. The choices to follow are simple but fundamental and will shape every aspect of their eventual physiology. Choose one per category and the vote will be tallied after roughly 24-36 hours, barring a clear supermajority.>1/9
>>5394100>Sun RadiationThere are few species that can claim to have evolved without the light of a star and yours is not one of them. Almost more important than any other factor is how much radiation it’s outputting. How rough was your cradle?>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Average: The yellow sun is bright and energetic, much akin to Sol. This is the default for life, with no upsides or downsides on its own.>Gentle: The blue sun is pale and merciful, giving your homeworld a much welcome relief from the usual pain. Complex evolution will be much easier, at the cost of a lower tolerance for radiation and increased difficulty adapting to the predations of foreign stars.>2/9
>>5394101>Planetary SizeOne day your species will look back on its homeworld but whether those memories are fond or painful mean nothing to evolution. Far more relevant is the raw weight of its gravity well. How big is your planet?>Tiny: Your homeworld is a fifth the size of Terra and has an extremely low gravity. This means initial spaceflight and adjusting to zero-G environments will be trivial for your species but they are certain to be weak and fragile without evolutionary effort.>Small: Your homeworld is half the size of Terra and has somewhat low gravity. This is a middle-ground between the lighter side of the scale and statistically, most spacefaring species are likely to have evolved under similar circumstances.>Middle: Your homeworld is roughly the size of Terra and has a gravity that would be tolerable for human life. This is near the upper limit for easy spaceflight and has no major drawbacks.>Large: Your homeworld is twice the size of Terra and has strong gravity. This makes initial spaceflight vastly more difficult for your species but a higher strength and hardiness to carry their own weight can be expected.>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>3/9
>>5394102>Planetary MoonsIt’s easy to mistake for an aesthetic detail, a motif of art or to hold at its surface value, a resource to exploit when spaceflight has been achieved, but the moons of a planet are a major contributor to the eventual shape its lifeforms may take. How many moons does your planet have?>No Moons: Your homeworld has no moon. Only the stars lie above and nights will be dominated by abyssal darkness. If there’s water, the tides will be far calmer.>One Moon: Your homeworld has one large moon. It goes through regular phases and night illumination is familiar to Terran life. If there’s water, the tides will be strong and stable.>Two Moons: Your homeworld has two small moons. One is always in the sky and nights are in a regular twilight. If there’s water, the tides will be wild and unpredictable.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>4/9
>>5394103>Planetary HeatAnother critical factor of the sun is how near your species’ homeworld is to its embrace. This has a profound effect on every part of its ecosystem and plays a part in what planets and colonial preparation your species will need in the future. How hot is your planet?>Boiling: Your homeworld is extremely close to its sun and scorching hot. Moisture is always near the boiling point and evaporates quickly. Your species will need to evolve for very high temperatures.>Reasonable: Your homeworld is in the goldilocks zone of its sun and has an average temperature. It may vary from era to era but your species won’t need to worry much about extreme temperatures.>Frigid: Your homeworld is extremely far from its sun and freezing cold. Moisture is usually frozen and evaporates slowly. Your species will need to evolve for very low temperatures.>5/9
>>5394104>Planetary MoistureAlmost every biological lifeform requires water in some capacity and yours is no different. Its rarity or abundance will play an enormous role in their evolution and in its priorities. How wet is your homeworld?>Arid: Your homeworld has almost no water, with most of its reserves being underground or in scattered lakes. Most of its terrain is some variation of desert and your species will need to evolve to handle an extreme scarcity of water. >Balanced: Your homeworld has a moderate amount of water, with several continents and a regular rain cycle. Its density may vary from region to region but overall it’s equivalent to Terra and won’t have an extreme effect on the evolution of your species.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>6/9
>>5394105>Planetary TerrainThe tectonic activity of your homeworld has a significant effect on an evolutionary timescale but its most obvious impact is in the terrain it generates. This may vary over time but will always stay near to its baseline. How rough is your homeworld’s surface?>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Balanced: Your homeworld’s surface is average, with some rugged lands and some flat lands, all within conventional expectations. Its elevation fluctuates within reason and your species won’t be overly pressured by it throughout its evolution.>Flat: Your homeworld’s surface is smooth, with almost unnaturally calm tectonics and no significant mountains or shifts in altitude. Its elevation is constant and your species will need to capitalize on it.>7/9
>>5394107>Warp DensityBehind the material reality is another, where physical law is meaningless and whim and will alone reigns supreme. Occasionally, they overlap and in some rare planets, the line between them is blurred. How much of the Warp is in your homeworld?>Warp Isolated: Your homeworld is like most barren rocks, completely separate from the immaterium. Your species will evolve in a purely material existence and their Warp signature, their souls, will be dim and unable to produce psychic phenomena.>Warp Exposure: Your homeworld is average among living planets, with a faint but constant pressure from the Warp. Your species will evolve in a predominately material context and psychic phenomena will likely be too rare to have a major effect on its evolution.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.>8/9
>>5394108Now that that’s out of the way, let me explain the premise of this quest. This is a multi-stage evolution and civ quest hybrid set in what will eventually become the 40k galaxy, where, instead of being a part of any major faction, (You) are one of the many, many footnote alien species in a pitched struggle to survive in a galaxy tailor-made to eradicate their race. Unlike them, however, you have the opportunity to guide your evolution from their most distant ancestors to sapience, and then to unify their species under a single culture from the neolithic to the space age by any means possible, and then take a precious window of time to spread, advance, and exploit neighboring star systems before the Great Crusade arrives. From then on, escalating waves of the worst the Imperium can bring to bear will attempt to destroy everything that you’ve built and slaughter your species so utterly that its name is unknown outside of classified Inquisition lore. If a stable population of your species can survive until the Great Crusade ends, you’ll win the quest. If you lose, you’ll lose everything. Each stage will be using different mechanics, each building on the foundation you’ve made before and there is a massive amount of room for variety. You can evolve any species and instill in them any culture conceivable, but evolution is rarely predictable and unification will be a difficult undertaking at best. The “art” for this will be done in MS Paint, as per the classic Evo quests and I’m going to make a disclaimer now, my hands shake semi-constantly and I’m in no way trained or talented. This is for demonstrative purposes and later on I’ll be abstracting where I can. Each stage will take one thread, possibly two if things drag out. I hope you enjoy this as much as I plan to.>9/9
>>5394110>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>Frigid: Your homeworld is extremely far from its sun and freezing cold. Moisture is usually frozen and evaporates slowly. Your species will need to evolve for very low temperatures.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.The only overarching theme here is jacking up the planet’s inhospitality and complete unsuitability to any complex life whatsoever. Because our reaching the space age at minimum is guaranteed, I want to see whatever complete extremophile manages to defy miraculous odds and crawl out of this hellhole.If we’re really lucky, the Great Crusade might even assume that no planet like this could ever be inhabited by anything more complex than algae and daemons, and leave us alone for a while.
>>5394101>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.Born beneath a bleeding eye...>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.Torn by the furious gazes of its surviving kin...>Reasonable: Your homeworld is in the goldilocks zone of its sun and has an average temperature. It may vary from era to era but your species won’t need to worry much about extreme temperatures.>Balanced: Your homeworld has a moderate amount of water, with several continents and a regular rain cycle. Its density may vary from region to region but overall it’s equivalent to Terra and won’t have an extreme effect on the evolution of your species.>Balanced: Your homeworld’s surface is average, with some rugged lands and some flat lands, all within conventional expectations. Its elevation fluctuates within reason and your species won’t be overly pressured by it throughout its evolution.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.The cruel laughter of gods haunt our dreams
>>5394110>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>Frigid: Your homeworld is extremely far from its sun and freezing cold. Moisture is usually frozen and evaporates slowly. Your species will need to evolve for very low temperatures.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.Rise and grind
>>5394119>>5394132Eh fuck it, I'll switch my vote to align completely with this choice
>>5394101>Average: The yellow sun is bright and energetic, much akin to Sol. This is the default for life, with no upsides or downsides on its own.>Large: Your homeworld is twice the size of Terra and has strong gravity. This makes initial spaceflight vastly more difficult for your species but a higher strength and hardiness to carry their own weight can be expected.>No Moons: Your homeworld has no moon. Only the stars lie above and nights will be dominated by abyssal darkness. If there’s water, the tides will be far calmer.>Boiling: Your homeworld is extremely close to its sun and scorching hot. Moisture is always near the boiling point and evaporates quickly. Your species will need to evolve for very high temperatures.>Arid: Your homeworld has almost no water, with most of its reserves being underground or in scattered lakes. Most of its terrain is some variation of desert and your species will need to evolve to handle an extreme scarcity of water.>Flat: Your homeworld’s surface is smooth, with almost unnaturally calm tectonics and no significant mountains or shifts in altitude. Its elevation is constant and your species will need to capitalize on it.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.
>>5394101>Harsh>Large>Two Moons>Reasonable>Balanced>Jagged>Warp Isolated
>>5394132+1
>>5394132>+1This remainds me of that quest where anons domesticly abused a moon
>>5394101>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Middle: Your homeworld is roughly the size of Terra and has a gravity that would be tolerable for human life. This is near the upper limit for easy spaceflight and has no major drawbacks.>Two Moons: Your homeworld has two small moons. One is always in the sky and nights are in a regular twilight. If there’s water, the tides will be wild and unpredictable.>Reasonable: Your homeworld is in the goldilocks zone of its sun and has an average temperature. It may vary from era to era but your species won’t need to worry much about extreme temperatures.>Arid: Your homeworld has almost no water, with most of its reserves being underground or in scattered lakes. Most of its terrain is some variation of desert and your species will need to evolve to handle an extreme scarcity of water.>Balanced: Your homeworld’s surface is average, with some rugged lands and some flat lands, all within conventional expectations. Its elevation fluctuates within reason and your species won’t be overly pressured by it throughout its evolution.>Warp Exposure: Your homeworld is average among living planets, with a faint but constant pressure from the Warp. Your species will evolve in a predominately material context and psychic phenomena will likely be too rare to have a major effect on its evolution.Mostly balanced with a couple quirks, I don't want to evolve a orc tier rip off species but I didn't want to be very stale either.
>>5394119>>5394132+1It is time for us to make some space frost giants to defies all of the gods. Whether human man god or warp born soul eater gods. We will face them all. We will show them the might of the true Jotun. And we will build our thrones out of there divine bones so that we may rule the vary stars themselves.And all it will take is us getting off our frigid bitch of a birth world. While defying our mad father of a murderous sun.
>>5394132SupportGiant fuckoff ball of irradiated ice and rock, lets go!
>>5394242>orc tier rip offThis planet is going to be way too inhospitable for an ork ripoff.
>>5394256I voted for that world thinking we will make a civilization of Evangelion angels, but the idea of lovecraftian jotuns(probably will have to call them Yothuns in a true 40k fashion) is wonderfull, have a singing giant for that.
>>5394391We shall bring forth the twilight of the gods. As well as the twilight of anyone that trys to stop us as well. So the Eldar had better watch there asses.
>>5394120>+1>>5394328Tbh I was more worried about us being a Nid rip off, but seeing everyone's thoughts on it, it puts my mind at ease.>>5394391>
>>5394100It’s tau ripoff build time>>5394101>Gentle sun>Tiny planet, to get to space super quickly. The small land area is offset by low gravity making skyscrapers and apartments extremely easy to build>No moons, this way we can go for flat terrain without flooding>Reasonable temperature>Balanced moisture>Flat terrain. This makes it far easier to build a massive civilization >Warp isolated. No religion and miracle shit to set progress back, only S-CI-E-N-C-E
>>5394407>>5394412The two of you make me wonder, how would Chaos react to minds that are litteraly 2Deep4Them? The 4 dipshits and were created by the Eldars and the humans sustain them due to being similar, but what would happen if a race totally different psychologically speaking rose to prominance? How would Korne deal with a civillization who doens't have a concept of neither honor nor bloodshed? To this I say that to defeat Chaos we must become the apex of the galaxy by exterminating Chaos' source of food, manking and the Eldar, only then may the tides of the Warp calm into soothing ice.
>>5394110>Average: The yellow sun is bright and energetic, much akin to Sol. This is the default for life, with no upsides or downsides on its own.>Middle: Your homeworld is roughly the size of Terra and has a gravity that would be tolerable for human life. This is near the upper limit for easy spaceflight and has no major drawbacks.>One Moon: Your homeworld has one large moon. It goes through regular phases and night illumination is familiar to Terran life. If there’s water, the tides will be strong and stable.>Reasonable: Your homeworld is in the goldilocks zone of its sun and has an average temperature. It may vary from era to era but your species won’t need to worry much about extreme temperatures.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>Flat: Your homeworld’s surface is smooth, with almost unnaturally calm tectonics and no significant mountains or shifts in altitude. Its elevation is constant and your species will need to capitalize on it.>Warp Exposure: Your homeworld is average among living planets, with a faint but constant pressure from the Warp. Your species will evolve in a predominately material context and psychic phenomena will likely be too rare to have a major effect on its evolution.balance lol>>5394110i like the idea
>>5394444Pretty sure that unless we are basically animals, there'd be at least one god that is able to deal with us. Personally, i'd be happy to sip our ice and chill with a small empire.
>Average: The yellow sun is bright and energetic, much akin to Sol. This is the default for life, with no upsides or downsides on its own.>Middle: Your homeworld is roughly the size of Terra and has a gravity that would be tolerable for human life. This is near the upper limit for easy spaceflight and has no major drawbacks.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>Reasonable: Your homeworld is in the goldilocks zone of its sun and has an average temperature. It may vary from era to era but your species won’t need to worry much about extreme temperatures.>Arid: Your homeworld has almost no water, with most of its reserves being underground or in scattered lakes. Most of its terrain is some variation of desert and your species will need to evolve to handle an extreme scarcity of water.>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.The simple truth is that with STC tech, Space Marine Legions and Titans, there is functionally no feasible way we can hope to win a conventional ground war against the Imperium. Thus, the best course is to optimize for void combat, which will inevitably result in boarding actions, that's just the galaxy we inhabit. The closest terrestrial precursor to that is tunnel fighting, so create a planet that has most of its resources underground or in deep ravines.And if it matters, I was envisioning this planet as having all the water in jungley canyon rivers, so from orbit the planet looks like a ball of rock with veins of plantlife all across it.
>>5394119+1
>>5394444Let’s not get ahead of ourselves; just keeping our grip of the solar system would be a feat worthy of Dagon by the end of this.Great Crusade OP.
>>5394110>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>Frigid: Your homeworld is extremely far from its sun and freezing cold. Moisture is usually frozen and evaporates slowly. Your species will need to evolve for very low temperatures.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.WHAT IS A XENO WITHOUT HIS TRIALS?
>>5394110>Harsh: The red sun is ancient and cruel, bathing your homeworld in constant radiation. Complex evolution will be difficult but in return, your species will have an extreme tolerance for radiation and later, much greater ease of adapting to hostile stellar and atmospheric conditions.>Huge: Your homeworld is five times the size of Terra and has crushing gravity. Conventional spaceflight is effectively impossible and the sheer pressure they’re used to will make the void a nightmare, and if they want to move with any efficiency, their evolution will have to be very stubborn or creative.>Many Moons: Your homeworld has numerous tiny moons. Some are always in the sky and reflect the sun for constant, blinding brightness. If there’s water, the tides will be frenzied and chaotic.>Frigid: Your homeworld is extremely far from its sun and freezing cold. Moisture is usually frozen and evaporates slowly. Your species will need to evolve for very low temperatures.>Aquatic: Your homeworld has an extreme amount of water, with its land consisting of rare, small islands. It can be classified as an ocean world and it’s likely your species will spend most, if not all of its evolutionary lifespan below the waves.>Jagged: Your homeworld’s surface is rent with crags and caves, mountains far higher and gorges far deeper than can be found on Terra. Its elevation is inconsistent and your species will need to compensate.>Warp Saturation: Your homeworld is a rarity, where the Warp and realspace freely mingle and intermix. Your species will evolve under constant exposure to psychic phenomena and this will inevitably have an overwhelming effect on its evolution.Every one of our species will have an ego and psykic power so large that they have convinced themselves that there is no line between God and Mortal. No worship except to one's self.
>>5394635Why was it that the giants hated the Norse gods so much? Was it just because Thor fucked with them so much and Odin was a backstabbing prick?
>>5394635I don't think that's how it works. I mean, our evolution is basically gonna be a death march, and it's very likely that 99% of things will die.It also depends on how we'll "adapt" to those. Are we going to adapt by having a kajillion spawn, or are we going to adapt by having a few absurdly strong spawn?If we go with 'ice giants', then i suppose it'll be the latter.
>>5394132Supporting HellHole
imagine some elite-like aliens making a theocratic empire like the covenant, ngl that would be based.....
https://youtu.be/PCpi1sZEZ1U
>>5395029Time to RagnaRockAnRoll.
>>5394119>>5394132>>5394139>>5394140>>5394166>>5394172>>5394237>>5394242>>5394256>>5394303>>5394309>>5394412>>5394443>>5394456>>5394464>>5394581>>5394625>>5394635>>5394956>Sun Radiation>Harsh14 Votes>Average3 Votes>Gentle1 Vote>Planetary Size>Tiny1 Vote>Small0 Votes>Middle3 Votes>Large2 Votes>Huge12 Votes>Planetary Moons>No Moons2 Votes>One Moon1 Vote>Two Moons2 Votes>Many Moons13 Votes>Planetary Heat>Boiling1 Votes>Reasonable6 Votes>Frigid11 Votes>Planetary Moisture>Arid3 Votes>Balanced3 Votes>Aquatic12 Votes>Planetary Terrain>Jagged13 Votes>Balanced2 Votes>Flat3 Votes>Warp Density>Warp Isolated2 Votes>Warp Exposure2 Votes>Warp Saturation14 VotesAn intriguing set of choices, one that will have some enormous implications on your evolutionary path. I'm surprised that Warp Saturation was so popular. That'll be an interesting bag of hammers to juggle later on.
>An eternity away from Sol, a bloodred star which has no name in earthly tongue lays, a swollen tumor on the cosmos, throbbing with malice. Caught in thrall of its orbit are five satellites, two near, three far, and not one in the goldilocks zone. The farthest is an eyesore: a gargantuan lump of ice broken by peaks high enough to scrape the upper edges of even its atmosphere. Rather than stay still, the sheets of ice are shifting, forever crashing and surging in a hateful rhythm, dancing to the noiseless tune of half a dozen and one petty moons. The surface is scoured with radiation and below, where the ice thins and droplets thicken, it reaches deep, scorches the stones and taints the ripples there. Though the immaterium is becalmed in an age without feeling, the boundaries between dream and reality are hazy here and an unmistakable nausea lingers.>This planet is inimical to higher life as Terran scholars know it, by no right should it be any more than another dead rock in billions, and yet… Life has found a way. Deep beneath the ice, where the waters are just warmer than freezing, the radiation field is weak, and light is faint where it is at all, life endures. Epochs ago, a singular, impossible single-celled microorganism emerged from the murk, its primitive genome shredded and its remains decayed without a trace in the span of just under ten Terran minutes. Against the odds, it managed to reproduce just before dying without note and its offspring did the same, setting a pattern for millions of years to come. Now, numberless generations later, among the countless blind, pale, sickly and frozen wretches clinging to momentary existence, a species with true evolutionary potential has emerged.>Your species.Before you can evolve in earnest, you’ll need to determine which species is yours. To do that, you’ll make three more simple choices and in the doing, narrow infinite possibilities to a lone certainty. After roughly 12-24 hours, your gauntlet of evolutionary strife will begin.>1/4
>>5395153>Species MotilityThe sheer WEIGHT of your homeworld is a permanent shackle on the nonexistent neck of every one of its children. Quick, effortless movement is a novelty that won’t be seen for a very, very long time but there are a few that dare to squirm and flounder in the glacial tide. How much of its lifespan does your species spend on the move?>Ambulatory: Your species never settles down and is always moving. This is a risky strategy that leaves them at the mercy of the waters and exposed to predators. At the same time, they are less likely to go hungry for lack of feeding opportunities.>Sedentary: Your species is completely inert, latching onto the rock and waiting. This is a cautious strategy that grants them a large degree of mass and stability against the waters, though it comes at a cost. Most strategies of consumption require patience and creativity.>Multi-Phasic: Your species is a rarity, with multiple phases of its lifespan, one nomadic, one rooted. This is the best of both worlds in the immediate scale but on an evolutionary timespan, there are multiple points of failure and developing each phase will split your focus.>2/4
>>5395154>Species ReproductionSelf-propagation is so fundamental to life that many scholars, Terran or otherwise, don’t consider organisms that can’t reproduce on their own to be truly alive. Perhaps they are right. There are many, many methods but they can be sorted into three separate categories. Which does your species rely on?>Sexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by exchanging genetic material between two individuals to produce offspring that are a mix of their immediate ancestors. This is the tried and true gold-standard the galaxy over but it can be inefficient and vulnerable on a population-scale. In particular, it’s the method most prone to intraspecies divergence and overspecialization.>Benign Asexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by gestating their offspring and releasing them when they’re capable of surviving on their own. This is dependable but the gestation period can leave their parent vulnerable. Normally, these offspring are nigh-identical clones of their parent but the violent radiation causes slight drift with some meandering regularity.>Fatal Asexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by consuming a large amount of nutrients and dividing into several offspring, killing their parent in the process but having a much swifter period of weakness. This is the fastest method of reproduction and can rebuild populations very quickly, though it suffers from the same near-stagnancy as the above.>3/4
>>5395159>Species DietFor any organism to grow, it is a requirement that it takes in nutrients. Where those come from and how they’re taken is much more variable. How does your species eat?>Autotroph: Your species is on the bottom of the food chain, in that it relies on its environment alone to survive. This strategy is extremely stable and inefficient for growth if unrefined.>Herbivore: Your species consumes autotrophs to further process the nutrients they’ve already generated. This strategy is consistent but can be risky between adaptations in the food source and in predators.>Carnivore: Your species consumes herbivores to further process the nutrients they’ve already processed. This strategy is dangerous but has a high-reward in intake and in selection pressure.>Scavenger: Your species consumes the carcasses of dead organisms to subsist on what scraps remain before microorganisms can finish the job. This strategy is low-risk with some reward and a massive amount of competition.>4/4
>>5395154>Ambulatory: Your species never settles down and is always moving. This is a risky strategy that leaves them at the mercy of the waters and exposed to predators. At the same time, they are less likely to go hungry for lack of feeding opportunities.With the chaos of the planet, it seems unwise to stay in one place>Sexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by exchanging genetic material between two individuals to produce offspring that are a mix of their immediate ancestors. This is the tried and true gold-standard the galaxy over but it can be inefficient and vulnerable on a population-scale. In particular, it’s the method most prone to intraspecies divergence and overspecialization.We need to evolve a lot if we want to survive. We cannot stagnate>Carnivore: Your species consumes herbivores to further process the nutrients they’ve already processed. This strategy is dangerous but has a high-reward in intake and in selection pressureMeat is better for calory per gram.
>>5395153>Sedentary>Benign Asexual Reproduction>AutotrophA far cry from a galactic terror, but a stable build, with potential for stable growth of both population and larger, hopefully tougher individuals, parent cells birthing entire colonies around them as they themselves grow older, maybe mutating further from the radiation.No need to rely on another organism to kickstart a colony, and the sheer amount of radiation will ensure some genetic diversity. Among the survivors, that is.A single organism stranded somewhere could turn most parts of the habitable zones of this planet into a somewhat thriving colony with little outside help given time. And barring predation by the rest of the food chain. For now.
>>5395154>Multi-Phasic: Your species is a rarity, with multiple phases of its lifespan, one nomadic, one rooted. This is the best of both worlds in the immediate scale but on an evolutionary timespan, there are multiple points of failure and developing each phase will split your focus.Fuck you Tzeentch and Nurgle>Benign Asexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by gestating their offspring and releasing them when they’re capable of surviving on their own. This is dependable but the gestation period can leave their parent vulnerable. Normally, these offspring are nigh-identical clones of their parent but the violent radiation causes slight drift with some meandering regularity.Fuck you Slaanesh>Carnivore: Your species consumes herbivores to further process the nutrients they’ve already processed. This strategy is dangerous but has a high-reward in intake and in selection pressure.Fuck yo-Actually... you win this one KhorneSeriously though, my idea is to have our specie work on 2 modes, hunting mode, whej the organism is mobile and in search of food, and Division mode, when the organism, after devouring enough, becomes rooted and reproduces before going into Hunt mode again and the cycle repeats.
>>5395171+1.We will face our home, and seize every moment, instead of simply pray for opportunity to fall into our laps. If you cannot learn, you cannot live; if you cannot change, you are a corpse.
>>5395171+1
>>5395153>Species MotilityAmbulatory>Species ReproductionSexual Reproduction>Species DietCarnivore
On the side, fatal asexual reproduction means that parents cannot directly teach their children; they’d need to rely on a community to do so. That isn’t necessarily bad, but will raise issues if we develop intelligence and wisdom before social bonds.I dislike all of the asexual reproductions, because on Earth the warp means our environment can change blisteringly fast without rhyme or reason. There is no mortal species alive that can survive that without change and adaptation.
>>5395154>Ambulatory>Sexual Reproduction:>Carnivore:Fuck the Predators! We're the Predators now.
>>5395171supportlet's go weird meat eating marine creature !
>>5394100https://www.genome.gov/12511476/2004-advisory-dog-genome-assembledvesicular monoamine transporter 2 (VMAT2)Adam Mitchell Lambert January 29, 1982 (age 40 years), Indianapolis, INZoo food
>>5395154>>Multi-Phasic>Sexual Reproduction>Carnivore
>>5395171Support
>>5395154>Ambulatory: Your species never settles down and is always moving. This is a risky strategy that leaves them at the mercy of the waters and exposed to predators. At the same time, they are less likely to go hungry for lack of feeding opportunities.Fatal Asexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by consuming a large amount of nutrients and dividing into several offspring, killing their parent in the process but having a much swifter period of weakness. This is the fastest method of reproduction and can rebuild populations very quickly, though it suffers from the same near-stagnancy as the above.Scavenger: Your species consumes the carcasses of dead organisms to subsist on what scraps remain before microorganisms can finish the job. This strategy is low-risk with some reward and a massive amount of competition.
>>5395154>Ambulatory: Your species never settles down and is always moving. This is a risky strategy that leaves them at the mercy of the waters and exposed to predators. At the same time, they are less likely to go hungry for lack of feeding opportunities.>Sexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by exchanging genetic material between two individuals to produce offspring that are a mix of their immediate ancestors. This is the tried and true gold-standard the galaxy over but it can be inefficient and vulnerable on a population-scale. In particular, it’s the method most prone to intraspecies divergence and overspecialization.>Carnivore: Your species consumes herbivores to further process the nutrients they’ve already processed. This strategy is dangerous but has a high-reward in intake and in selection pressure.
>>5395171>+1As much as I like the sound of Multi-Phasic, I just don’t know what it will I tell in the long run.
>>5395160>Ambulatory>Sexual Reproduction>Autotrophlittle bit of reading comprehension : any other pick doom the quest. A fluke created our organism; I'm pretty sure the preys are inexistant
>>5395482You seem to misunderstand, speciation has already occured and now we are choosing which of the species will eventually achieve dominance. Or rather, what traits the species that will eventually achieve dominance has.
>>5395171+1Hopefully we can evolve into true omnivores with time so as to diversify our diets and not fall into a dead end. But in this type of world and at this point in our evolutionary lifecycle this may well be the gold-standard of both survival and evolution.
surely there should be some warp-based options, e.g. gaining sustenance from the warp itself?
>>5395652That is unlikely all things considered. What with the warp being so fucked up of a dimension and how its laws do not mesh well with our laws of reality. But i do have hope that when we reach sentience we will be able to use the warp to communicate with each other. And maybe even communicate with other species off world one day.
>>5395652That would require some manner of lifeform smart enough to be able to even feel something psychic. Right now we basically have bacteria and cambrian-era creatures.
>>5395160>Carnivore: Your species consumes herbivores to further process the nutrients they’ve already processed. This strategy is dangerous but has a high-reward in intake and in selection pressure.>Benign Asexual Reproduction: Your species reproduces by gestating their offspring and releasing them when they’re capable of surviving on their own. This is dependable but the gestation period can leave their parent vulnerable. Normally, these offspring are nigh-identical clones of their parent but the violent radiation causes slight drift with some meandering regularity.>Multi-Phasic: Your species is a rarity, with multiple phases of its lifespan, one nomadic, one rooted. This is the best of both worlds in the immediate scale but on an evolutionary timespan, there are multiple points of failure and developing each phase will split your focus.
>>5395171supportpsyker ice sharks let's go
>>5395171+1, cool ideas!
>Species Motility>Ambulatory13 Votes>Sedentary1 Votes>Multi-Phasic3 Votes>Species Reproduction>Sexual Reproduction13 Votes>Benign Asexual Reproduction3 Votes>Fatal Asexual Reproduction1 Votes>Species Diet>Autotroph2 Votes>Herbivore0 Votes>Carnivore14 Votes>Scavenger1 Votes
Your species is the Flounder Feeder. Of the current food chain, it is the least effective of the major predators, small, clumsy, and fragile by the standards of an already small, clumsy, and fragile ecosystem but that is precisely why it has true evolutionary potential. If the Flounder Feeder doesn’t evolve and reach efficiency in its niche, its population will decline and eventually go extinct. The Flounder Feeders must take great strides to improve because the Flounder Feeders have no choice. Of course, the Flounder Feeder can’t choose to start with, it doesn’t even have a brain. That’s where (You) come in, to guide the Flounder Feeder’s evolution to excel, dominate its ecosystem, and eventually… reach for the stars. But first, you have to look at the waves beneath the ice.The Flounder Feeder is a pale, boneless blob the size of a Terran tennis ball with three major body parts. It has a mouth, a tail, and a stomach. The mouth is toothless, the tail is feeble, and the stomach is inefficient. The Flounder Feeder spends its days flapping its tail against the waves to propel itself aimlessly. The front of the Flounder Feeder, that is, the opposite of the tail, has several sensitive nerve endings that can detect vibrations up to a yardstick away. On sensing vibrations, a Flounder Feeder will attempt to flop in its direction, its mouth will latch on to the first solid it bumps into, and will then force it into its stomach, where it can be dissolved into nutrients to sustain the Flounder Feeder.>1/5
>>5396076The Flounder Feeder has no means of identifying what is and is not food, only to vomit stones when they are ingested. The Flounder Feeder’s primary source of food is the lowly Lump Grazer. The Lump Grazer is half the size of the Flounder Feeder and is slightly more complex. A Lump Grazer has a mouth, a stomach, and unlike the Flounder Feeder, doesn’t dare to swim with the tide. Instead, it uses a very weak muscle to grip the stone below and push itself forward, trembling until it can find its source of food. The humble Growth Lump, a tiny wad of unicellular life that have clumped into a single mass to more efficiently photosynthesize the very, very little sunlight that gets through the ice. Luckily for the Lump Grazer, these Growth Lumps are abundant and tend to cluster together.Unluckily for the Lump Grazer, its trembling means of movement alert the sensitive nerves of the Flounder Feeder, leading to its consumption. The Flounder Feeder isn’t always able to flop in the right direction and very frequently has false alarms but occasionally, the Flounder Feeder is able to catch a Lump Grazer and digest it. One Lump Grazer can sustain a Flounder Feeder for almost half of a local day, or three Terran days. The Flounder Feeder has no way to store surplus nutrients or recognize regular feeding grounds. It is blind, mindless, and driven completely by impulse. For now, this is enough to hunt its prey.>2/5
>>5396080The Flounder Feeder’s primary competition are two predators, the Double Mouther and the Shuffler. The Double Mouther is mobile above the rocks, much like the Flounder Feeder, but is twice the size and has taken a bold strategy. It has two tails and two separate mouths for twice as much movement and twice the chance of latching onto food. Even more dangerously, each of the Double Mouther’s mouths has a slim, weak tongue that can grasp onto prey to ease the consumption process. The Double Mouther is the current apex predator. It consumes the Lump Grazers, Flounder Feeders, and Shufflers without discrimination, and it is a menace. Once one of its mouths has sensed the vibrations of a Flounder Feeder, if the tide isn’t at its tail there is no escape.The Shuffler is much simpler. It resembles a longer, wider Lump Grazer but is in fact a predator which uses a similar grip muscle to move on the rocks. Its muscle is stronger and makes a different kind of vibration, and its mouth is deadly, with a weak muscle that can clamp down onto a Lump Grazer and pull it inside instead of swallowing and hoping for the best. Occasionally, a Flounder Feeder mistakes a Shuffler for a Lump Grazer and attempts to swallow it, resulting in a dangerous struggle that the Shuffler wins more often than it loses. Both the Double Mouther and the Shuffler are more efficient than the Flounder Feeder and could become a terrible danger in the future.>3/5
>>5396081Besides the Flounder Feeder’s prey and its competitors, the environment itself poses an extreme challenge to its survival. The overwhelming majority of multicellular life on this planet exists in a narrow band where the radiation above is dampened and the pressure below isn’t too crushing to move. This narrow band consists of many mountain ranges and slopes that regularly suffer earthquakes and mudflows, both lethal to life. Worse, these generate large amounts of vibrations, which cause Flounder Feeders to flop towards them when they aren’t directly slammed into the rock by the flow. Even deadlier is the inescapable radiation that causes inevitable, lethal cancer in every Flounder Feeder that lives longer than two local weeks, or roughly eighty-four Terran days. The Flounder Feeder’s slow metabolism tends to cause very gradual growth but in most circumstances, this only delays death long enough to reproduce once or twice and fast growing cancers are common. The cold and gravity also cause regular deaths by frostbite and compression when a Flounder Feeder ventures too high or too low but luckily, neither are major problems in most of the ecosystem’s narrow band.>4/5
>>5396083One advantage the Flounder Feeder has is its method of reproduction. Unlike many species, Flounder Feeders have two distinct sexes, the releaser and the vomitor. The releaser constantly releases small clouds of genetic material into the water which the tide moves quickly. Sometimes, a vomitor has its mouth open in the right direction, catches it, and processes the genetic material to create from one to three new Flounder Feeders that are a mix of both. These offspring are held in a crude pouch at the roof of the vomitor’s mouth for three local days, or roughly three Terran weeks, until they grow enough that the crude pouch bursts and the vomitor instinctively vomits them into the tide. These newborn Flounder Feeders are a fourth the size of their parent and most don’t survive the Terran month it takes to grow and reproduce on their own.A handful do, and this continues the species. There are several problems with the Flounder Feeder’s method of reproduction. A releaser has no way of ensuring that its cloud reaches a vomitor and isn’t dispersed to nothing by the tide, a vomitor has no way of sensing a cloud outside of its vibration or detecting where a cloud may be, and due to the crude pouch’s location at the roof of the vomitor’s mouth, it is occasionally ruptured too early by a Lump Grazer’s muscle as it is consuming its prey. Even with its problems, the Flounder Feeder’s method of reproduction works and isn’t an urgent issue. All in all, the Flounder Feeder suffers a miserable existence but is not burdened with a consciousness that can understand it.>How should the Flounder Feeder evolve?Remember, the simpler it is, the less likely it is to go wrong! The harsh sun punishes extreme innovation. Once enough of you have weighed in after roughly 8-12 hours, I’ll explain how the system for this works by showing you firsthand and we’ll roll some dice. I would’ve done it in this update but one infodump per post seems like a reasonable benchmark. The Flounder Feeder is a very simple organism and there are millions of directions you can try to take them.>5/5
>>5396084Better senses. Specifically smell.
>>5396084Some kind of armor that can hopefully help against predators and has at least some radiation resistance.
>>5396084>form light sensitive near the mouth. (the start of primitive eyes)>some bones/spine so they can more easily move.>chemical receptors on the females sides so they can more easily detect the males genetic material.
>>5396084>>5396093 +1
>>5396084there should be a way for releasers and vomitors to find eachother and "kiss" in a way, perhaps by believing the other is food, and releasing the big cummo straight into the burst pouch.I can't think of an idea of how this could be feasible, so im dropping this for anyone imaginative.
>>5396087this
>>5396087>>5396111That can evolve from smell.>Create smell>Create pheromons poach.Smell can detect preys and differentiate eatable blobs from murder blobs. Smell can detect two-mouther and create a motionless defensive reflex. Pheromons can improve sexual transmissions by creating a grouping reflex. A school of our species can regroup in hunt spots, and maybe take down the dreaded two-mouther by swarming them.
>>5396128but these creatures work by vibration, which they could easily capitalize upon rather than evolve two entirely new different things, aka I got my method now ty.>>5396111they manage it by vomitors "evolving" dampened recognition for vibrations, which causes them to go after releasers of releasers as potential prey, causing mouth showdowns that facilize the sharing of genetic materials between the two sexes.
>>5396147*after releasersI don't know why I typed "releasers of releasers"
>>5396084Better senses is vital, so we can identify threats and opportunities. We can’t really learn anything without information.
Once we are more conscious, with animalistic survival instincts and the ability to plan ahead to find food, mates or defend kin, I’d like to start our psionic journey by improving our keen senses even more until we can hear echoes of the warp, to gain a sense for living things and a premonition of threatening warp phenomena.But that’s a long ways off.
>>5396087This
>>5396084Support >>5396087
I have an idea that might work well with the Jotun themed spiecies some anons want to go for. We might be able to create something similar to Gen'dai from star wars. None of those pussy bones, just pure muscle mass, super regeneration and hate.
>>5396087+1Hopefully with the better senses we get better vibration nerve endings so that we can better understand the dangers around us and work to protect our selves more. Being able to protect our selves from earthquakes and mudslides alone will really make our lives easier right now.
>>5396202worm warriors, elites, jotuns ...interesting ideas
>>5396202isnt that a Quirk of older Gen'dai that they go full psycho?The Idea itself though sounds pretty great. capable of enveloping prey and quickly regenerating from nearly any damage will be needed anyway to survive on this piece of junk Rock.
>>5396235It was something like that.And yes, spiecies like that could have a great potential to survive or even thrive in this hellhole. There are no bones to break. Very few vulnerable organs that could be targeted by deadly predators and much later, by space marines or Admech cyborgs.Plus Imperial Army might not be a problem because normal humans can't even hope to be able to fight on our homeworld.
>>5396257Pretty sure invading our Homewolrd would evolve into another Murder Situation for the Space Marines involved. If they make Planetfall next to none will make it back i am sure. And we would not have to do most of the fighting. So yeah. If i were an imperial Commander seeing this shit i would just bomb it to the ground and Crack the Planet. Then Virus Bomb it before cracking whats left into pieces smaller than Nostramo after the Nightlords were through with it.
>>5396257I'm still afraid of Exterminatus
>>5396260That's why you gotta find a way to spread like crazy. I mean, we're gonna be able to survive basically anywhere, right?So as long as we're able to spread, we might not die out.
>>5396262anywhere else will be fucking paradise in comparison to this Hellhole of a Planet. Food everywhere much less risk of getting cancer and shit like that.So yeah. as soon as we have Faster Than Light Speed Travel we can just shoot for the next stars and start going nuts with expansion.
>>5396266What about... Doing that but not really?We are able to survive anywhere. So let's build bases in the more inhospitable place possible of target planets. Volcano rift, under the polar ice sheets, whatever to try to stay as low profile as possible.Also, my "smell and pheromones" proposal would orient us toward a grouping, collaborating species since a young development. The plan is to start grouping and communicating as soon as possible. This benefits our sexual reproduction, and lay ground for advanced communication to start a real civilization.
>>5396269oh sure that is good. We still need food though.So maybe those habitable Worlds become our Agri Worlds and we just continue to colonize systems, crack apart Planets for Ressources and barely hospitable worlds become our Equivalent to Hives.
>>5396271When we get to the point of Faster Than Light Speed Travel we are going to have tons of cultural splits going on all the time. The two big factions i see arising are the Heaven faction and the Hell faction. The Heaven faction will believe that they have grown as strong as they can from hardship and brutality. And that to grow stronger at this point in time will rely on finding heaven worlds to colonize for the sake of there people. The Hell faction will believe that to grow even stronger they will need to suffer and struggle even more for the right to live. And that there race should be colonizing worlds that will give them new struggles and burdens to overcome.
I really like the idea of better senses + pheromone segregation. The one species I can think of are the ants that use chemicals to communicate and coordinate, if we develop this so early and drop it once we are inteligent enough we already have a species with social skills and unionship between them.
>>5396335Thanks, but why dropping it? We can develop some smell-encoding-by-radiowave! a first in the grim dark universe, plundered by adeptus mechanicus to fart on knights they don't like!
>>5396343I mean... Either we spend so much time into evolving our pheromone senses to be over the top, maybe even using something from the Warp if we are smart enough to control it, but... Idk, from the Ants, if you brush your finger to their trail they don't no what to do next and start to walk aimlessly until they make the pheromone trail again.That mixed with some really nasty Nurgle farts and other things, maybe the enemy could fuck with our pheromone system and get the upper hand. An alternative could be maybe some fear-inducing pheromones, but that could only work on Guardsmen or any unit that doesn't wear mask or is inside some mechsuit or special armor like the space marines.
>>5396327You could also call them the ice giants and the fire giants, you know, like the Norse Jotunn? (Was there ice and fire giants??? Or was that just made up?)
>>5396084>Evolve the sense of smell>Improve on our vibration sense by making it so that the Flounders can differentiate between different types of vibrations, developing a sort of instinctual genetic memory that lets the flounder know that this particular vibration is a Lump Grazer and that vibration is a rock slide or a Double Mouther and so on.We should improve on what we got for now, and not go too crazy with developing brand new senses and abilities.
Rolled 69 (1d100)>>5396087>>5396113>>5396128>>5396187>>5396193>>5396211>>5396418You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder’s sense of smell, to improve their success at hunting Lump Grazers and catching genetic material before it disperses.To explain the mechanics of evolution, it is done in two phases. The consequence phase, where I explain how your latest evolution has fared and the shorter development phase, where I ask for rolls for your newest evolution. When you attempt to evolve a new trait or improve an already present evolution, you roll three 1d100. The first 1d100 is to determine the success of your evolution, lower is better, on a sliding scale: a 1 is game-changing, 2-11 is overwhelmingly positive, 12-40 is moderately positive, 41-80 is a partial development, 81-90 is moderately negative, and 91-99 is overwhelmingly negative, and 100 is crippling. The scale is tilted toward positive outcomes because failures usually fail to reproduce and this applies to your species as a whole. If you attempt to evolve too much too quickly, this scale will temporarily shift toward the negative as the harsh sun punishes you for innovation.The second 1d100 is to determine your species’ genetic drift from radiation, again, lower is better, on a sliding scale: 1-20 is negligible, 21-40 is mild, 41-60 is an unplanned mutation, 61-80 is a new, offshoot competitor species, and 81-100 is an overall population decline. If your species grows more resilient toward radiation or finds a method of preserving its genome, this scale will change, and high results aren’t always negative in certain contexts. The third, final 1d100 is to determine the success of your deadliest competitors in their own evolution. Unlike your species, you want to roll high here, and the same scale is applied, though you won’t be aware of what their attempted evolution is until you see it in action.In addition to the 1d100s you will be rolling, for every development phase, I will be rolling a 1d100 for the environment. This is a much narrower scale and lower is better for (You). 1 is an extreme positive change that leaves your species in a highly advantageous position, 2-11 is a positive change for the better, 12-89 means no change, 90-99 is a negative change that harms your species, and 100 is a mass extinction event. This will continue until your species has evolved to sapience or has fallen to extinction. As a predator, you will need to be cunning and ruthless to not only survive, but thrive.Now… Let us begin. Give me three 1d100s.
>>5396084I really think we should focus on a better tail with finer motor control. Smell let's us detect problems better, but not do anything about them. A tail with fine motor skills will:1. Greatly enhance our ability to catch prey2. Greatly enhance our ability to escape predators, thus starving them, thus making more prey.3. Set us up for escaping environmental hazards when we can detect them better.Better senses are great, once we can do something with the knowledge.
Rolled 7 (1d100)>>5396430
Rolled 29 (1d100)>>5396430
Rolled 12 (1d100)>>5396430LIMP WRISTED, INNEFECTUAL, WRONG HEADED AND PITIFUL.
>>5396438>>5396439Great jobs, both of you>>5396445At least you hit one tier lower...
Well, at least we'll have a very clear idea of how the apex predators are killing us.
>>5396451It's fine, now we can detect them and flop away.
keknice>>5396260Dw, is not going to be a problem for a long time. Some choices might change things for the better to. Say being a species with larger population, more war like, creative, industrial, with a more suited government to them, integrating other aliens in their state and so on. There might be things or other aliens that slow down, the inevitable contact too. Say a system goes super nova and the imperium fleet we will get in contact needs to travel 100 more systems or something.But, it's possible an harsher type of planet will need more time for us to see the beginning of a basic civilization.
>>5396450>>5396445I will have to make more dark invocations and sacrifices to the dice gods, for though they are fickle, their hearts palpitate at the highs and lows of rolling.
Well, now we have better senses, better locomotion would be some pretty good synergy.Then we might even be able to move on to object permanence and short term memory, be the coolest kid on the block.
What to do next. Possibilities I'm thinking of are:1. A better tail. Speed, agility, accuracy, all things we could use.2. Pheromone production. Not sure if we get this with our enhanced senses, but if not we could use it for rudimentary communication, which could start us as pack creatures.3. Horns, poisons, and other predator deterrents. I'm thinking horns, we can also use them offensively to assault other predators and make them prey.
>>5396478Maybe taste buds to go with our new noses to help us stop eating rocks all the time.
>>5396480No, digest the rocks and use the minerals from them to create radiation resistant armor.
>>5396483but not right now, right now fins would be better.
>>5396430>>5396438>>5396439>>5396445>Deep beneath the ice sheets, a small Lump Grazer lies in a vegetative state, this underdeveloped ecosystem’s equivalent of sleep. Above, a Flounder Feeder flops with the tide. Under normal circumstances, the Lump Grazer’s lack of vibration would see it survive but the Flounder Feeder has a new adaption: the nose flap. As it passes, the Flounder Feeder catches the faint smell of its prey and just like that, the Lump Grazer’s fate is sealed. The Flounder Feeder’s stomach won’t be empty tonight.The Flounder Feeder has successfully developed a basic sense of smell and a new organ to support it, a narrow hole just over its mouth, protected from rocks by a small, semi-permeable flap that permits the passage of scent. Usually. Occasionally, chunks of meat get stuck in the hole and cause the Flounder Feeder to flop in circles trying to catch nonexistent prey but this doesn’t wipe out a significant percentage of the population. Almost more important than more easily catching prey is smelling predators, which the Flounder Feeder starts to recognize as not-prey and tries to flop away from. This isn’t infallible and mistakes are made but many less Flounder Feeders are diving into rockslides and picking fights with Double Mouthers than their ancestors. This in combination with sensing clouds of genetic material as “prey” have caused their population to grow significantly. Now, they are a major contender with the Shuffler in terms of efficiency.>1/2
>>5396487Luckily, the environment hasn’t changed and the ambient, searing radiation hasn’t yet caused enough divergence to make a new species. The Flounder Feeder is in a much better spot than before. Unluckily, the Flounder Feeder isn’t the only species that’s been improving. The Double Mouther has started to grow a tail fin and sturdier core muscles, allowing it to swim with the tide much swifter. This hasn’t improved its survivability but in terms of catching Lump Grazers and Flounder Feeders, it has become much deadlier. This is a significant problem that could worsen over time if a countermeasure isn’t made. For now, the Double Mouther isn’t devouring every Flounder Feeder that isn’t killed by the rocks and many more manage to age enough to die of cancer, which is a major improvement. Overall, the Flounder Feeder is in a much more stable position than they were several hundred thousand generations ago.>How should the Flounder Feeder evolve?>2/2
I'm tied between mobility and radiation resistance.Sell me your favorite option.
>>5396489Rudimentary tail and pelvic fins
>>5396489we must improve our digestive system and our tail
>>5396494rad resistance would help some of us live longerA tail would help avoid predators and make us faster.Both are good because we're probably going to be doing both at some point soon.>>5396489but I vote for speed and mobility with a tail and stronger muscles to use the tail because it synergizes best with smell
>>5396489I really want fins, but I'm going to put my vote as> Defensive horns that badly wound or kill predators that try to eat us.Ideally this would deter the double mouth, and the shuffler both, and double as a weapon down the road.
I kinda wanna say radiation resistance is the way to go right now cause those unplanned mutations are gonna be getting in our way in the long run as we arnt always gonna get low rolls. Also perhaps to help our species live longer since they are currently dying of cancer as old age.
>>5396489two spiky pincers form at the start of our mouth, for cut and grab preys>>53964944 small fins along our bodyprimitive earsprimitive eyesbetter reproduction system (make more offsprings, keep them inside a sack ecc)communication for act together instead of alonetwo horns form on the top of our head, for attack and defendour tail becomes more stronger and longer, for better movement
I think we should get mroe mobility
>>5396489Cartilaginous bones located around the body to provide greater stability.You guys, we won't be able to have proper fins if we don't have bones. If we don't have bones they'll just be meatflaps.
>>5396531nah, we should eventually get an exoskeleton that also protects against radiation
>>5396489>Develop a poison sack within the Flounders bodies, warding off any potential predators that would eat a Flounder by poisoning whatever eats it.>Develop a stronger tail with a design that is better suited to swimming in the crushing depths.
I don't think growing horns is going to help much when we don't have the strong muscles necessary to really gore our predators, although I would be supportive of just growing general bony spikes all over our bodies, I feel like that would be a better alternative for now.
also things like becoming bigger, longer. Or gaining resistance against temperatures or resistance against pressure, would allow us to move farther away really.
>>5396538>>5396503Brittle but nasty sharp spines/spikes seems like a good defense, I'll switch to that from horns. Probably won't help individual survival, but taking out one predator saves many lives.
>>5396489Improve mobility/agility overall by flattening tail and increasing Core Strength.Allows us to avoid predators better and kill prey easier.
>>5396489We have so many things we need right now but can only get one a a time. So what we need is something vital. I say what we need is true sexual organs so we can breed properly at this point. It may come to a point where we need to out number our enemy's to out last them.
Rolled 9 (1d100)>>5396496>>5396501>>5396502>>5396522>>5396535>>5396576You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder’s tail, to improve its mobility and increase its chances of survival. Despite being one of the Flounder Feeder’s most vital body parts, it is weak and delicate, barely able to adjust the direction that the waves are throwing a Flounder Feeder. The status quo cannot continue if the Flounder Feeders are to survive.>Roll 3 1d100s
>>5396614Forgot the photorealistic anatomic diagram. Although, it looks like you're in luck.
Rolled 89 (1d100)>>5396614
Rolled 34 (1d100)>>5396614
Rolled 66 (1d100)>>5396614
Agh those rolls
>>5396625well our competitors will not be too succesful. But our own Mutation is not too great either......But the Enviroment favors us for the moment and only slight genetic drift as well.
>>5396628At least that. Time for more evolution
>>5396614>>5396617>>5396618>>5396619>Alone in the darkness, a Flounder Feeder catches the scent of a potential Growth Lump. Driven by the prospect of food, it turns and starts to swim in its direction but between the curve of its tail and the strength of the water, it is unable to resist being spun end over end and flung far away from sustenance.The Flounder Feeder’s tail has changed, arguably for the worse. The emergence of a dominant curving motion has warped its body, to go from a straight line supporting a wide mouth into a top-heavy oaf, even clumsier than its predecessor! It’s become difficult for a Flounder Feeder to catch Growth Lumps by swimming directly as its own tail shape fights it. Some have found success by flipping their tails upward and their front downward at the same time, to tumble at prey, but this is inefficient and disorients their sense of vibration to make it a gamble. Occasionally suicidal, as the increased movement attracts Double Mouthers who are quick to take advantage of their decreased agility. If there is one upside, it’s that sheer natural selection has increased muscle mass in the tail.>1/3
>>5396644Due to the Double Mouther’s success, the Shufflers have started to undergo a change. With those too small to resist the Double Mouthers being eaten easily, only larger Shufflers survive to reproduce. On average, this means that their size has increased, making them much more dangerous prey but also changing their vibrations, making mistakes much rarer from the Flounder Feeders. The Double Mouther predation of the Shufflers hasn’t slowed and only fate knows what the future may hold.>2/3
>>5396645Environmentally, there has been a significant change. Rather than sit and accumulate over time, some Growth Lumps have taken a major step to develop buoyancy and flow with the waves to hopefully bounce into brighter reaches! This has caused an explosion in the Growth Lump population and consequently, the number of Lump Grazers has grown tremendously! This means there is more food in more places, offsetting the inefficiency of the Flounder Feeder’s movement. Of course, the Flounder Feeder’s rivals are benefitting just as well. The radiation hasn’t dimmed but apart from an increase in tumors, nothing too notable on that front has happened.>How should the Flounder Feeder evolve?>3/3
>>5396646Hmm, increased muscle mass? Might be wise to evolve it in a way so as to be able to...you know, get an more even out body?
>>5396646>Grow stabilizers to assit with movement and make it smoother by taking more advatage of the currents.>Generally BULK UP
>>5396651+1
>>5396646The more senses we have the better. So taste, increased touch, hearing, or even eye balls will help a lot.
>>5396646Oh god, we're tumbleweed monsters. Anything to enhance our stability and become proficient swimmers.
>>5396646>>5396651 +2
>>5396651+1 to this but also grow bony spikes all over our bodies to dissuade predators from taking a bite.
>>5396531Bones are for pussies
>>5396646We are on a warpy planet and we haven't used any of that yet, so how about some kind of warp sense, to sense other living creatures through the warp.
>>5396680We're too stupid for warp stuff
>>5396685You don't need a brain to use the warp, just a soul.
>>5396691Are you suggesting our wiggling meat sock has an immortal soul?
>>5396700We're on a planet so terrible it shouldn't have any life on it, but it does. The only thing that would cause that is the warp, so yes.
>>5396651Support though the other ideas are cool
>>5396651Support. We need to fix the last turn's fuck upped roll
>>5396651+1Proper mobility of some sort is kind of a must. Especially as a predator.
Now that I think about it, the easiest way for us to get off this rock is teleportation, instead of rockets.
>>5396750Or gravity manipulation tech.
>>5396750Telerocketation.
Rolled 94 (1d100)>>5396651>>5396654>>5396666>>5396667>>5396694>>5396711>>5396723>>5396736You choose to evolve assisting stabilizers and increase muscle mass to improve the Flounder Feeder’s mobility. The abundance of Lump Grazers from the buoyant Growth Lumps can’t be counted on to keep the Flounder Feeder population stable forever.>Roll 3 1d100s
Rolled 33 (1d100)>>5396757
>>5396757
Rolled 64 (1d100)>>5396757
Rolled 41 (1d100)>>5396757
Rolled 20 (1d100)>>5396757>>5396761I fucked that one up.
>>5396766And there goes a random mutation
More grazers floating means less food for shufflers, who already need more calories to support their large size. I'm guessing double mouthers will develop mouths or tongues with more surface area to catch more grazers. With any luck, it could prey on them exclusively, or at least stop hunting us actively.
>>5396759>>5396766>>5396767>A Flounder Feeder catches the scent of a Lump Grazer on the tide. It turns against the flow, angling itself toward the smell. The wave buffets it further but stiff, fleshy protrusions disperse the impact and a powerful, relatively speaking, muscle in a much thicker tail pushes, slowly but surely flopping the Flounder Feeder toward what will be its survival.Rather than try to backpedal, the Flounder Feeder has doubled down on the curve in its tail to grow critical muscle mass and three small, inert but vital stabilizers to ease its motion. This has improved the Flounder Feeder’s movement considerably. It may not be as swift as its ancestors were when the tide was in its favour but unlike them, it is capable of defying it to move sideways if it smells prey. The Flounder Feeder’s stamina can’t keep up energetic movement for long and it’s still prone to tumbling but it is a major improvement.>1/4
>>5396826However, due to constant radioactivity all is not well. A major population has broken away from the Flounder Feeders to take the opposite approach to preserving its mobility: to slim down and reduce the little weight it has. These Skinny Flippers are nimbler than Flounder Feeders, can match the speed of their pre-curve ancestors, and are able to reliably tumble in the direction of where a Lump Grazer can be smelled. Now, the Flounder Feeders, Skinny Flippers, and Shufflers are all competing for the same Lump Grazer population. If not for the increased number of Growth Lumps for them to subsist on, it’s likely the Lump Grazer population would drop and encourage fierce natural selection among its predators. For now, things are at an equilibrium.>2/4
>>5396828The improved strength, agility, and size of its lesser predators have caused selection pressure to escalate for the Double Mouther population. Luckily for them, their large size, dual mouths, and tail fin are powerful adaptions and its status as apex predator is still unchallenged. Unluckily for their prey, their tongues have grown in length and flexibility, which makes escape an even narrower possibility for those they’ve caught. If the Flounder Feeders were capable of thought, it’s likely they would be frightened of the Double Mouthers’ sheer reach and speed.>3/4
>>5396829Far, far away in the void, the planet’s star has begun to undergo a (astronomically-speaking) brief period of turbulence. This means the radiation that’s already been killing the most successful Flounder Feeders has intensified and is giving them cancer in half of the time on average. Their lifespan has dropped massively and the Flounder Feeder population is struggling to reproduce enough to outpace the lethality. This is an even greater problem when it’s considered that it’s affecting everything, from the lowly Lump Grazer to the proud Double Mouther. The only population left largely unscathed are the Growth Lumps themselves, already resilient to the risk of tumors due to their unicellular nature. Life beneath the ice needs to adapt fast or risk being left behind.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>4/4
>>5396830We need to get radiation resistance NOW
>>5396830Radiation resistance is a must now to adapt to these changes
>>5396830Radiation resistant exoskeleton. Not only will it act as armor and protection from the sun, but also a solid structure to better utilize future muscular growth.
>>5396830Rad resistance and or teeth
>>5396830Rad resistance armorandtwo spiky pincers form at the start of our mouth, for cut and grab preys
>>5396830Rad resistance
Can’t help the dice, but good choices so far.>>5396830Rad resistant exoskeleton, made of the minerals from all the rocks and silt we ingest.
>>5396830Cellular stability may be the only way to survive this in any way shape or form.
>>5396830Rad res. Rad res NOW. >Inb4 we turn into crons.
>>5396833>>5396835>>5396836>>5396842>>5396845>>5396871>>5396880>>5396884>>5396903You choose to evolve radiation resistance but there are many ways to increase resistance to radiation.>Which do you want to evolve for your species?>Slower Metabolism: Slower cell division makes cancer less likely to occur and less dangerous when it does. This decreases the amount of food necessary to sustain the Flounder Feeders and means they spend less time in a vegetative state but their overall activity is reduced. They also heal more slowly but at this point almost any injury is already fatal.>Genome Fortification: Making the genome sturdier makes lethal changes from radiation less likely to occur. This is the most direct and immediately effective option if all goes well but can very slightly reduce the speed of evolution due to a static gene sequence.>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct trauma.If you have a fourth or fifth suggestion, you can also go down that route. These are just the most obvious.
>>5396912>>Genome Fortification: Making the genome sturdier makes lethal changes from radiation less likely to occur. This is the most direct and immediately effective option if all goes well but can very slightly reduce the speed of evolution due to a static gene sequenceOf the provided options this is the least bad.
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct traumaWant this cause i saw people suggesting exo skeleton and this is a step in that direction
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding
>>5396912>>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct traumaWe have lots of food (the lump growths are fine), especially if our competitors die out to radiation, so we can survive being slower.
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct trauma.
>>5396912>Genome Fortification: Making the genome sturdier makes lethal changes from radiation less likely to occur. This is the most direct and immediately effective option if all goes well but can very slightly reduce the speed of evolution due to a static gene sequence.Can we attempt two innovations? Fortification and Shielding would both be beneficial.
>>5396912>>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct traumaGooo
How about an aggressive immune response where we physically eject tumors from the body? We can co-op it later for expelling poisons too.
>>5396912>Genome Fortification: Making the genome sturdier makes lethal changes from radiation less likely to occur. This is the most direct and immediately effective option if all goes well but can very slightly reduce the speed of evolution due to a static gene sequence.Anti-Radiation Shielding doesn't actually cure the cancer, it just makes it slower. Anti-Genome means you get to have way less chance of cancer.
>>5396938Doesn’t that also just make the cancer slower, then, through a different mechanism? Neither cures cancer, they’re preventative measures.
>>5396948Yes it does. Same time, are we going with Exoskeleton or endoskeleton? cuz if we are going exoskeleton the anti-rad armor is better, if endoskeleton genome fortification is better.
>>5396948Genome Fortification reduces the chances of cancer, anti-radiation shielding reduces the effects of cancer by making it so it starts on the slow-changing armor.
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct trauma.Time for shellfish
>>5396912>>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct trauma.
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder F
>>5396912>Anti-Radiation Shielding: A sturdy layer of cartilage encasing the fleshy bodies of the Flounder Feeders, it stops ambient radiation from penetrating deeper than the very slow dividing surface. This still causes cancer, only slower, requires increased nutrients to sustain, and increases the weight that the Flounder Feeders need to move but has the added bonus of higher resilience to more direct trauma.Just too cool to pass up.
>>5395652Like some of you said, intentionally using the Warp to do something requires one of two things: a conscious mind capable of sensing the immaterium or emotions, the stronger the better, to channel it instinctively. At the moment there are no life forms with a higher consciousness. Everything is operating on the unconscious instinct to reproduce, consume, and avoid danger. Some only have the urge of consumption and have no sense for danger. In the beginning the Flounder Feeders didn't have a sense of danger but you lucked out on the nose flap and gained the instinct to use your new sense of smell to the maximum. To unintentionally use the Warp only requires that the Warp exists in your species' proximity. This is very unstable and extremely dangerous, to put it lightly, but evolving some kind of organ to get a headstart is very doable. Physical solutions are reliable and efficient but with maximum Warp Saturation they aren't the only option.>>5396921You can attempt both at the same time but it increases the complexity, which is dangerous. The safest way to evolve is to do it incrementally but that's also the least dynamic way to evolve, which can be risky if the environment changes unexpectedly. There's also nothing stopping you from evolving different forms of radiation resistance and stacking them later or doubling down on one method to improve it.>>5396933You can try to evolve an aggressive immune response to preemptively target tumors. There might be some complications but it might turn out fine. There's no way to be sure.
Rolled 72 (1d100)>>5396914>>5396916>>5396917>>5396918>>5396923>>5396956>>5396962>>5396968>>5396987You choose to evolve Anti-Radiation Shielding, to have a thick protective layer between the tender flesh of the Flounder Feeders and the hateful glare of your planet’s harsh sun. If successful, this will make the Flounder Feeders less swift and require them to take in more food but will also reduce early deaths by cancer and serve as an early foundation for future improvements.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 29 (1d100)>>5397013
Rolled 72 (1d100)>>5397013lets hope for a good roll.
Rolled 84 (1d100)>>5397013
>>5397013>>5397014>>5397018>>5397020>Beneath the searing radiation from above, the Flounder Feeder tumbles forward almost unharmed. Its latest adaption, a layer of cartilage the width of a human finger, shields it from the consequences of immediate exposure. While many species are wracked with cancer, its damage is limited to two flecks in its hide. They will kill it, eventually, but by then it will have spread its genetic material and kept its species from extinction.The Flounder Feeder has managed to develop rudimentary anti-radiation shielding. This is a stopgap measure but it is something where many more species have nothing. The handful of local days its layer buys are more than worth its weight in nutrients. It is weak, delicate, easily broken by stones. It is also far less critical to the Flounder Feeder’s continued survival than its even softer tail and fragile stomach. Thanks to it, the Flounder Feeder population has stayed stable despite the increased radiation.>1/3
>>5397063Extreme natural selection tends to cause population divergence quickly. One example of this is the Lazy Feeder, a wide range of Flounder Feeders that opted to dramatically slow their metabolism instead of investing nutrients into a protective layer. They barely swim any more, bobbing in the water without reaction to their surroundings. This makes them less likely to catch prey but they don’t need to catch as much as their evolutionary brothers. They simply take what they can get and are largely harmless. In time, they might even transition into an omnivorous or scavenger species. Their cousin, the Skinny Flippers, are faring no better than most.>2/3
>>5397064The most immediate impact of the increased radioactivity is in the Double Mouthers. With their reproduction strategy of budding, they’ve been dangerously slow to adapt to the threat of cancer and their population has started to plummet. Where they were once a constant threat to the Flounder Feeders they are now an uncommon, if deadly encounter. This has left a small gap in the food chain. The Double Mouthers might recover but this might present an opportunity worth taking. At the same time, there's no risk in exclusively feeding on Lump Grazers. Far away, the red sun burns without a care for its children.>How should the Flounder Feeder evolve?>3/3
>>5397067>A more efficient digestive system.
>>5397067>Genome Fortification: Making the genome sturdier makes lethal changes from radiation less likely to occur. This is the most direct and immediately effective option if all goes well but can very slightly reduce the speed of evolution due to a static gene sequence.Rads are lasting WAAAAAAY long. Lets go for double or nothing and (probably( never fear rads again. Dont really want to become crons.
>>5397067Im going to say try to improve our tail or movement overall since we suffered a bit of a penalty due to our sheilding
>>5397067Chelicerae (mouth pincers) to be used offensively and to tear food up so we can eat things too large to fully fit in our mouth.
>>5397088This.
>>5397067Improve Our manuverability
>>5397067>>5397085I'll change to improved movement.
>>5397067Improved movement, take advantage of the sudden dearth of competition.
>>5397067>that one anon's cancer ejecting immune system ideaMaybe we could eject and then eat our own tumors for maximum nutrients
>>5397067>Mouth Pincers+Pack mentality. The idea being that with the Double Mouths now weakened and their population dwindling, the Flounders will begin to add them to their prey, by way of naturally being inclined to group together into hunting packs and along with their new mouth pincers, can overwhelm the solitary Doubles they find with sheer numbers and tear them to shreds with their pincers.More important than the pincers is the pack mentality I think, if we roll well it will not only let us gang up and easily defeat the naturally solitary Doubles but also protect against more deadly and numerous predators, as well as getting us started on the absolutely necessary species trait of sociability, a must if we are to advance and form strong communities and societies later down the line.
Once we’ve taken advantage of the chaos to establish ourselves as the most successful predators, I think pheromone communication- to find mates, avoid over hunting or warn others of danger- would be good.After that, maybe the beginnings of intelligence, or organisms protecting their children?
>>5397113Just don't have cancer.
>>5397090>>5397096>>5397100>>5397111You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder's mobility, to improve its survivability and make the most of the Double Mouthers' population decline. >Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 49 (1d100)>>5397166
Rolled 34 (1d100)>>5397166THE SMELL OF BLOOD, THE TASTE OF GASOLINE, MILLIONS OF YEARS OF LIFE REDUCED TO FUEL
Rolled 37 (1d100)>>5397166
Rolled 26 (1d100)>>5397166
Rolled 59 (1d100)>>5397166I forgot the environmental roll. I'll be posting the update in roughly 8-10 hours. I won't be able to update as frequently as this for most of the week as I'm off on wednesdays but I'll be updating at least once per day. Twice if I can.
These rolls... oh no...
>>5397224np thanksman those rolls lmao
God we cannot roll to save our life.
>>5397167>>5397168>>5397171>The moons make the ice crash and shatter on itself, just as they turn the waters below turbulent and violent. A Flounder Feeder struggles against the tide to avoid being dashed on the rocks. It turns and pushes its tail, normally a doomed effort, but the long, thin spokes jutting from its cartilage make it possible. They catch the water, slowing its momentum just enough to flop forward. It misses a ridge by half its body length and will never know how close to death it came.The Flounder Feeder’s stabilizers have grown longer and noticeably more effective, letting them turn more efficiently. At the same time, they’re prone to catching on passing objects and their thin width and soft material makes them brittle. It isn’t uncommon for a Flounder Feeder to have one of its stabilizers snapped and missing but it’s uncommon for them to die from this alone. It is possibly the quickest turning predator in the narrow band ecosystem, though this isn’t by an enormous margin.>1/2
>>5397457The merciless radioactivity has exterminated vast swathes of the Skinny Flipper population. It has even been brought to the brink of extinction but sheer natural selection has held death at bay. Because so many of the Skinny Flippers are dying earlier than they can reproduce more than once, they’ve adapted to make the most of the one chance they have. Now, instead of only two or three offspring, a Skinny Flipper’s burst pouch releases an average of three or four. This has a major impact and allows its population to crawl back from the abyss. It isn’t yet dominant by weight of numbers but that is a dangerous possibility. The Double Mouther is undeniably the apex predator but with its low population, there is no one dominant species for now.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>2/2
>>5397460>Mouth Pincers to shred larger potential food sources>increased muscle Strength to deal with the extreme tides.
>>5397463+1I would vote for developing group behaviour, as it would probably be the best way of ensuring we stay ahead of the competition, but if we can only swallow prey there is little room for cooperative hunting. Once we have pincers multiple Flounders could shred prey apart together. And mobility is always good
>>5397460No emergency for now... Let's progress toward a smart species>Grouping instinct. Stay around lump grazer population, better reproduction, less wandering of the band.>Op promised 8 hours update. Op delivered. Op is a good Op
>>5397460>Eyes, to properly start hunting prey>Teeth and a more efficient digestive systemNext we should should focus on regeneration, potentially just cellular regeneration.
>>5397468 Support
>>5397469Supporting Lump Grazers are easy enough, but we’ll need to work as a group to take down other predators
>>5397481+1This struggling to stay alive thing is for the dogs. Its time we tried to fix that so our lives will be easier at some distant point in time.
>>5397460Mouth parts to bite things
>>5397460>Turbo anti-cancer immune system It'll pay off the most in the long run
>>5397463support, cut and grab time
>>5397463>>5397468>>5397482>>5397497>>5397502You choose to evolve mouth pincers to make the consumption of prey too large to fit into a Flounder Feeder’s mouth possible. Combined with their sense of smell, this could make them a truly dangerous predator.>Roll 3 1d100s
Rolled 14 (1d100)Maybe I'll put up a post-it note to remind me.
am >>5397469, ID might have changedAlright, I've done a bit of thinking : What is necessary for our long-term survival? colonising planets. So we need our species to navigate space. I'd love it to be intelligent technology-developping species. Based on what we have on earth, we need :>Dexterous movement : Hands for humans, tentacles of octopi, elephant's trump...>Cultural transmission : what octopi lacks imo to create a civilisation>Advanced intelligence.The mouth-pincers that seems to win can evolve into tentacle-shaped face horrors, that would grind towards our goal. I think each turn, we should either solve an immediate crisis (movement, radiation...) or grind toward sentient civilization.What's your thoughts, anons?
>>5397463Supporting rip and tear. We need some way to eat things bigger than our mouth. If we're lucky this will push the double mouth right into extinction.
Rolled 82 (1d100)>>5397507
Rolled 30 (1d100)>>5397507
>>5397507did you forget enviorment again?
>>5397510>>5397514Alright, dice have spoken. I am forbidden to make plans now.
Rolled 98 (1d100)
>>5397514>>5397515>>5397521Well, at least our competition is failing even harder then us and the environment isn't fucking us over. We can probably just try again
Well atleast someone else has it worse than us with this round of evolution
>>5397521What have you brought upon this accused land?
>>5397525Here's hoping the double mouth evolves a triple mouth on it's tail, but none of the heads can agree on a direction.
>>5397529Anon they don’t have a brain, they’re going to, and in the most literal sense possible, rip themselves apart.
>>5397510The thing is that when we hit sentience, physical evolution mostly ceases. It goes from getting more physically fit to getting more mentally fit. If we become sentient too early, we might end up like the fucking TAU. Do you want that anon? Do you want to become TAU???
>>5397529Personally I thought the two heads would make their movement so inefficient that it would either revert to one or die out. I guess at that scale and level of competition, you can get away with not having a streamlined body.
arghh!! >>5397510For the moment i am just thinking about survival of our fish ancestor desu trying to have every advantage and evolutions we can get, we may evolve our fins in something else when we are out.
Skinny Flounders breed quickly -> More food for us, their distant, faster, larger, better armoured cousins.I see this as an absolute win.>>5397525It had to happen at some point, we just got lucky so far.Can’t win them all.
>>5397509>>5397514>>5397515>>5397521>A Flounder Feeder swims away from its latest meal, a successful hunt resulting in the death of two Lump Grazers. Its stomach is full. If it had a consciousness, it would be content. Its triumph was in part due to its new pincers, made of the same cartilage as its spokes, their blunt edges and weak mouth muscles snatching Lump Grazers before they can crawl away that much easier. However, it is those same pincers that will be its undoing. Already, they are cracked and the rot has begun to set in…The Flounder Feeders have developed mouth pincers, loosely analogous to Terran mandibles, they are wide and hooked. These make hunting easier for them and for the first time, enable the consumption of larger prey, but they are no less fragile than their stabilizers and are very prone to cracking on stones during feeding frenzies. This often causes a lethal infection due to its constant exposure to the Lump Grazer’s rotting internals. Overall, this has caused a reduction in their population but on average, individual Flounder Feeders are eating more now that they don’t have to spend time swallowing their prey. Their instinct to avoid Shufflers and Double Mouthers hasn’t quite disappeared yet and it may take some time for them to adapt.>1/2
>>5397554The ambient radiation hasn’t changed and neither has the Skinny Flipper’s aggressive strategy to reproduce faster than they’re being killed by cancer. Unluckily for them, natural selection for an increased metabolism and rapid maturation has only caused them to suffer tumors much larger, much sooner. It is a very slow and painful process, but eventually, the Skinny Flippers are driven to extinction. Not even bones lay in their wake and their legacy is soon to be forgotten. Only the Lazy Feeders remain of the Flounder Feeder’s evolutionary offshoots. The Double Mouthers and Shufflers have reached an uneasy equilibrium with their environment and unless there is a significant change, their populations will remain stable. In particular, without clusters of Skinny Flippers devouring the Lump Grazers en masse, the Double Mouthers show signs of rebuilding their pre-radiation numbers. The Flounder Feeders are doing what they can but only time can tell if it will be enough.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>2/2
>>5397556Strengthen and armor up the mouth pincers and the stabilizers
>>5397558>+1Sounds good to me.
>>5397556Support >>5397558For increased defence all around and tougher bodys
>>5397558Normally I'd vote for a better immune system but shit, this is the easiest solution
>>5397558Support
>>5397558+1Was just about to propose this. This would make us less prone to cancer too I imagine
Adjust our pinchers to be ejected and regrown, so damaged and cracked mandibles are replaced by new ones.
Rolled 57 (1d100)>>5397558>>5397560>>5397561>>5397563>>5397564>>5397565You choose to strengthen and toughen the Flounder Feeder's mouth pincers and stabilizers to stop them from being cracked and broken so regularly. This should improve their general survivability.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 42 (1d100)>>5397577
Rolled 29 (1d100)>>5397577
Rolled 30 (1d100)>>5397577
I'll be gone for the next 8 hours but will update once I get back. I'm very curious to see what your species will look like once it reaches sapience. Everything you evolve will have very significant consequences on the end result, or not, if you evolve it away. Remember that consciousness isn't necessarily an immediate precursor to sapience and there are many more ways to achieve it than a central brain in a designated skull.
>>5397583I regret rolling double mouthers bout to make a comeback
Evolution Ideas (stuff i have read from others and a bit mine)- More Radiation resistance - Resistance temperatures- Resistance pressure- new organs inside ?- More muscles- develop gills- develop fangs inside the mouth- new fins along our body- nose protection- improve taste, tongue/s ?- primitive ears- primitive eyes- better reproduction system (make more offsprings, keep them inside a sack in the female for avoid they die quickly outside ecc)- communication for act together instead of alone. group tactics- two horns form on the top of our head- cartilaginous bones located around the body to provide greater stability.- full exoskeleton- Develop a poison sack within the Flounders bodies, warding off any potential predators that would eat a Flounder by poisoning whatever eats it.- Develop a stronger tail with a design that is better suited to swimming in the crushing depths.- color changing for intimidate, communicate and stealth- general bony spikes all over our bodies- Becoming bigger- Becoming longer- Needles shooter
>>5397590don't forget bones/spine. makes us tougher especially with an endoskeleton.
>>5397590Honestly I think this is a bit lame since we're in 40k and real life nature produced some crazy shit.We could have better control over gene expression to minimize the negative impact of mutation while maximize their positive effect.We could develop the ability of parthenogenesis to allow members of the species to quickly bounce back from extinction events.We could develop into hivemind colonies to develop intelligence.We could do so much.
>>5397598I don't like hive minds
>>5397584cool, i am also curious. If we can become the apex predator it would be quite nice>>5397593added>>5397598eh is more of a list, it doesn't mean we are going to do everything in it, like i said is stuff i have read from others and what i added.
also RIP Skinny Flippers, our little cousins are now gone.
I'm thinking a pheromone production organ that enables us to form into packs, communicate easy kills, even mark relatively safe areas for rest or child bearing.
>>5397632This is a good step toward working together.I also like the often-bringed point of better healing system and the idea to regrow body parts, as it fits the Gen'dai target
I would have opted for having regenerating pincers and stabilizers, the stones could have been a boon to us.I think an easy way to improve mobility is to develop a membrane between the stabilizers. Very cheap, and no extra muscle necessary. Double Mouthers have done it generations ago.>>5397632In the ocean? Which already has really strong tides? For finding mates maybe, but you couldn't mark anything without having the pheromones dilute into nothingness within minutes.
>>5397662Know what'd be better than pheromones? Electroreception. Sense electricity and electrical currents, like what sharks do. Maybe we could even develop it into a shocking organ. And with the Warp? Who knows, maybe we can throw lightning bolts eventually!
>>5397710What about... Warp-pheromones and warp-smell?
How big are we right now?
>>5397807Well our sheilding width is that of a fingerSo uh fairly small
>>5397662Maybe a sticky mucus we could mark areas with that releases pheromones over time? Or a bioluminescent one? We'd need proto-eyes first of course.This is probably something we'd need to approach in stages, but what if we developed a symbiosis with the autotrophs where we carried them in a sack and planted them in places, and we planted different ones to indicate different properties of the area.
>>5397713Anon I think you're high on warpstone
>>5397840>This is probably something we'd need to approach in stages, but what if we developed a symbiosis with the autotrophs where we carried them in a sack and planted them in places, and we planted different ones to indicate different properties of the area.I really like the idea. We could even make a change like the starting votes and make ourselves multi-phasing, like actually spewing the mouth-sacks with babies and stick them to the ice glaziers, and the autotrophs to take care for them in exchange of giving them some food
>>5397807I think at the moment you could easily hold a Flounder in a human hand. So about that small.
Also I think next we really need to do the pack mentality idea, of course it could go bad if we roll poorly, i;e we starve each other out by overfeeding due to being in groups, but that could happen with any evolution. Grouping into packs will set the foundation for an eventual community and society of sapient xenos, as well as protecting us in the here and now due to strength in numbers.
>>5398034I think we should build to that first, I'm not sure we have enough brain power, or senses for it to be feasible.
>>5398035If schools of dumb fish IRL can figure out that staying in packs helps with survivability, then our Flounders definitely can. IC it could just be that Flounders that group up by accident end up surviving longer and producing more offspring than those who stay solitary, leading to all Flounders instinctually staying in packs over the course of a couple million or hundred thousand years. Not much brainpower really needed honestly.
>>5398041dumb fish irl have eyes and hearing and brains.
>>5398043Eh we'll figure it out. When you think about it, we've already grouped up in a way. From single cell organisms, with even less senses and brains than we got now, grouping together to form multicellular organisms and finally the modern Flounder.
We look more like a real sea creature every day, so I’m sure in a week we’ll be arguing whether we should have hands or tentacles.(I’m leaning towards tentacles, personally.)
>>5398063Hands are way more useful than tentacles
Thinking about it now I'm gonna feel bad a couple weeks from now when we finally reach a warp traveling civilization, just to get splatted and decimated by the Imperium. Seeing all of the Flounders struggles on this Hell planet has really made me root for them.
>>5398063Why not both?
>>5397710Wouldn’t radiation absolutely screw that?Once we have better armour, I want intelligence, personally. We’re already fast and strong, so I favour being able to plan ahead and identify threats.Eyes are nice, but only questionably mandatory, so far as we are from the hateful sun.
>>5397577>>5397579>>5397580>>5397583>As a gentle wave brushes its front, a Flounder Feeder snaps its pincers together and presses them there, tensing for a minute. There’s nothing to swallow, so it stops and goes back to floating. Its pincers show no signs of damage, where many generations ago, even this little stress would cause a visible fracture. They are still riddled with chips and dents from its predatory lifestyle but they are smaller, shallower than before.The Flounder Feeder’s success in avoiding starvation long enough to reproduce leaves very little selection pressure on their pincers. There is some, naturally, as the weight of time hangs heavy on nonexistent shoulders, but it comes gradually and the change is only minor. More time is needed to finish thickening the cartilage, more generations, more incremental improvements built on millennia of strife. Such is life beneath the ice, in the hateful glow of the crimson star.>1/2
>>5398109As the Flounder Feeders adapt to grow more resilient cartilage, the Double Mouthers have been under extreme selection pressure. In the most common method for budding creatures, they’ve taken the easiest path and fortified their genome against the radiation. This turns the cancer that was driving them to endangered status into a nuisance and soon, their numbers have begun to climb. Although they aren’t in abundance, their population is at little risk and at the current rate, will inevitably grow to reclaim their place at the undisputed top of the food chain. This means more Flounder Feeders are being eaten, putting some strain on their population, but with their pincers, they are sometimes able to fight back and rarely, even damage their tongues! This balances out some of the danger they pose. For now, the Flounder Feeder population is very slowly declining.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>2/2
>>5398112Poisonous skin, to keep any who would attack and eat them away.
>>5398112We should get group thought. With numbers, we can take down the mouthers.
>>5398112>Pack mentality, Flounders instinctually group up both for protection and to aid in hunting more dangerous prey.
>>5398112Large predators trying to kill us one by one, in a time in which we have a plethora of food?That’s an opportunity.> Flounder Feeders learn to move in packs unless they are starving, actively herding growth lumps or swarming Double Mouthers to tear them apart. This is the first step to intelligence.
>>5398112>Pack mentality
>>5398112get bigger.
Rolled 78 (1d100)>>5398115>>5398119>>5398121>>5398126You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder's group instinct, to grant them a pack mentality for increased security against their predators and greater hunting success. Will it be enough to secure their future against the aggression of the Double Mouthers and their own homeworld?>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 20 (1d100)>>5398161
Rolled 45 (1d100)>>5398161
Rolled 84 (1d100)>>5398161best roll
>>5398165>>5398164>>5398163Nice.
>>5398161so we have a moderately positive development, a new mutation, and the Double Mouthers population is in decline.
>>5397807Right now a Flounder Feeder is roughly the size of a squishy, wriggling tennis ball. You could hold one in your hand but would risk losing a finger to its pincers if you weren't careful and likely get cancer down to your elbow from touching it, due to radiation contamination. The radiation that's penetrating to the ocean is diluted after traveling through many light minutes of the void and being dispersed by many more kilometers of ice. In terms of lethality to human life, the surface makes chernobyl look like a playground. Time-displaced Terran xenobiologists would find it bizarre that material life exists here, though those that came later might not be surprised by the stubbornness of xeno evolution.
>>5398171Honestly we should try to figure out a way to use that radiation.
>>5398175There are radiosynthetic mosses in chernobyl, iirc
Massive potential to go wrong, but we could evolve the ability to concentrate radioactive material into 'pearls' that then degrade in the the stomach of our predators and give them a lethal dose of radiation.
>>5398175>Admech keeps using radiation weapons on us>We just get stronger
>>5398161>>5398163>>5398164>>5398165>The fresh bud thrashes wildly, churning the waters around it. Its side is torn, its fin is tattered, and one tongue is missing its tip. The pincers are closing in and there is no escape. It is doomed.The Flounder Feeders have developed a crude and simple pack mentality. Initially, the Double Mouthers had great success in their resurgence but over an incredible length of time, the constant consumption of lone Flounder Feeders caused the previously rare Flounder Feeders attracted to the smell of their species to become the majority. Now, the Flounder Feeders cluster together into small packs of two to four and solitary individuals are rare, overwhelmingly freshly-burst Flounder Feeders that haven’t grown enough to avoid being snatched and eaten by their larger relatives. In them, selfish gorging and opportunistic cannibalism when food is slim are the standard but grouping together has allowed them to consume Lump Grazers that might’ve escaped a lone predator and to defend themselves from the Double Mouthers. Conflict is still tilted in a grown Double Mouther’s favour due to its size and speed but they are far less one-sided, and the Double Mouther surge has slowed to a crawl.After strong natural selection to avoid spreading cancer to their offspring, the Double Mouthers have evolved to disconnect their buds almost as soon as they’re self-sufficient. This has caused a reduction in cancer in the Double Mouther’s population but their young are far more vulnerable than their adults and the Flounder Feeder packs have taken vicious advantage. Unluckily, these half-grown Double Mouthers mature even faster than the Flounder Feeders do so they’re only an uncommon but much metaphorically anticipated encounter.>1/2
>>5398223>Be me, Imperial Crusade Vanguard>Filthy Xeno from a titanic, irradiated, warp it hellhole stand in our way. Attempted diplomacy, shelled the diplomats. Purge!>Bring out the irradiators, scourge them from the void!>The beings that evolved on a planet constantly based with intense radiation are barely effected.>Surprsied Pkachu Face. Gets boarded and eaten inc lose combat, T3 S3 too weak.
>>5398227In an unrelated incident, a dominant mutation spurred on by the radioactive environment has caused a vestigial tail to spread through the Flounder Feeder population. It mildly reduces hydrodynamics in certain circumstances and costs slightly more calories to sustain for no great advantage but for now it’s largely harmless. A worthless, radiation shielded lump of sorts, albeit one they didn’t have before.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>2/2
>>5398230Straighten up and flatten the lump, use it as a rudimentary tail fin.
>>5398229Oh dear. My spelling is pathetic today. Spellcheck wry.>>5398230> Over time, the odd shape of the tail grows narrower and narrower, until the Flounder Feeders possess a dorsal fin to navigate the tides.
>>5398233Great minds think alike.
>>5398233>supportdo we get a bonus because we're working off a pervious mutation.
>>5398233SupportINCREASED MOBILITY we need to outspeed the double mouthers
Tell you what.One way to prevent cancer is to grow very large, and exploit the same mechanisms that prevent megafauna IRL from dying as a cancerous blob. Combined with the corresponding increase in thickness in our shell, and our living on a water world to support our weight, and we would have a good thing going…….except for the part where we then need to figure out how to feed ourselves. There are currently five species in existence- Lazy Flounders, Double Mouthers, Lump Growths, Shufflers and us, and none of those provide sufficient prey.When there’s an actual bloody ecosystem, maybe. Or maybe when we learn to eat warp energy.
>>5398230support >>5398233
Rolled 41 (1d100)>>5398233>>5398234>>5398238>>5398239>>5398245You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder's tail into a flatter, slimmer fin to aid mobility in the tides. If the Flounder Feeders can outmatch or surpass the speed of the Double Mouthers, their status as apex predator will be lost.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 89 (1d100)>>5398259
Rolled 61 (1d100)>>5398259
Rolled 49 (1d100)>>5398259
uhmmight need a fix that tail>>539824maybe i think with more evolution a stronger ecosystem should be able to born, especially if it has more types of resistance so life can grow in multiple places.
>>5398322possibly calcite shells and being able to equalize pressure so we have a bigger range of motion to where possibly some predators can not follow us.
>>5398259>>5398260>>5398261>>5398262>A Flounder Feeder swims toward the vibrations of a Lump Grazer but in its haste, fails to account for the swollen knot of tissue on its rear. It catches water, a misshapen stabilizer with none of the benefit, and in the process it loses all momentum. The Lump Grazer feels the stirring in the water and crawls away: a by now ancient evolutionary adaption. Though the rest of its pack succeeds, it goes hungry and soon, it will starve.The Flounder Feeder’s tail has grown… after a certain definition of the word. It was only a mild nuisance but your species’ radiation shielding, deadly if brittle pincers, and pack mentality have left it so well adapted that even adverse mutations aren’t expelled from the gene-pool. The problem has gotten to the point that the Flounder Feeder’s mobility is suffering, both in turn speed and direct movement, and with its loss goes its survivability. The population is still high but it is in a slow decline, as it’s become much more difficult to catch the swift Double Mouthers while they’re still young. The Double Mouther was poised to reclaim its status as apex predator, were it not for a worrying development...>1/3
>>5398325Rather than grow its tail, a segment of the Flounder Feeders population grew its internals: filling it with many redundant bundles of the same vibration sensing nerves as are on their front. This has given them a sensory precision that, when extreme tides and catastrophic radiation isn’t interfering, is unrivaled in the narrow band ecosystem. Combined with its preexisting pack mentality, it has become a lethal danger to every other species. They aren’t much more dangerous against adults than the mainline Flounder Feeders but their aggression has them targeting the freshly-burst and budded, and vulnerable, offspring of their competitors with ruthless precision. This makes them less likely to reach adulthood, which makes reproduction less reliable, which in turn reduces the overall Flounder Feeder, Double Mouther, and Lazy Feeder populations while its own is growing at a steady rate. If something isn’t done to improve the Flounder Feeder’s survivability or that of its offspring, it may be left in a dangerous position. Their sole consolation is that the Double Mouthers are exposed to the same degree of offspring consumption. Soon, these Ripple Trackers are likely to become apex predator.>2/3
>>5398326After an enormous length of time spent in extreme natural selection, the lowly Shufflers have broken their genetic stagnation to grow even thicker and larger in response to predators. For lone predators, such as the Lazy Feeder or Double Mouther, this added weight and muscle is a massive asset, but it is much less so toward the newer pack hunters. In terms of nutrition, their survival is due almost entirely to the abundance of Lump Grazers all across the stones. If this status quo were disrupted, it’s unlikely the Shufflers would be unscathed.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>3/3
>>5398327>develop longer gestation period so that the young will be more ready for the outside world>fix Tail into something usable.
>>5398327>Develop a stronger, agile and more armored tail>The females develop a sack inside them for grow the offsprings to a certain size, and then let them out from behind.
>>5398327>Fix the tail, make it more suitable for fast movement and manoeuvringOur greatest threat is ourselves now? I don't know if that is a good sign or not.We might want to rip off ripple tracking later. It's basically primitive hearing, isn't it?
>>5398338+1
I'm going to call it for tonight and get some shuteye. Glad you guys are enjoying the quest. The modern Flounder Feeders are already unrecognizable compared to their earliest ancestors. I can't even begin to guess what the final species is going to resemble.>>5398241There are a couple more species than mentioned so far, you just aren't in direct competition with them. The only ones of note are the Flesh Gnawers, tiny scavengers that live below the safe pressure region for species besides themselves and the Latchers, uncommon external parasites that subsist on slow moving hosts, mostly Lump Grazers, occasionally Shufflers, and rarely Lazy Feeders, as unlike the previous two, Lazy Feeders sometimes use the waves to move which is hazardous to them. The ecosystem is extremely primitive and underdeveloped. Every time the environment changes and while time keeps crawling on, it will diversify on its own, but when simple consciousness arrives it's a near-certainty that all hell will break loose in short order.
>>5398333>>5398338>This>Fix tail into breeding sack.
>>5398341np it was great, nice two other species. Probably a terrifying predator from a murder tennis-ball size fish
>>5398338+1.Ripple Trackers have a good thing going, maybe we can co-opt them like we did Neanderthals. They can’t be that far removed until maybe two more updates, one hopes.>>5398341IC. Thanks.
>>5398346Or they evolve in murder-pirhanas and turns the story more... Interesting.
>>5398346yeah that ability of theirs is definitely nice for hunting. We will need to grab eyes and ears for get more advantages over everyone else, also would allow to better avoid foes and other dangers.We will probably need to give armor to our nose, and any ears and eyes we make. Both for avoid too much radiation exposure for them and also for better protect delicate parts while hunting/fighting
The curved body keeps making me think of shrimps. Maybe we have more success if we segment our armor and copy their locomotion? Just something to keep in mind.The crude pack behavior can help us make the first step towards r-selection. I want offspring to stay within a pack, and the eldest to lag behind when escaping predators on purpose, so the youngest have a higher chance of survival. This gives us more potential for adaptation and less cancerous cells among the population.
My word, it occurs to me we might accidentally sexually dimorphism, depending on how the QM interprets this.Men get a snake-fin to move faster, women get an egg sac so our young don’t have a higher casualty rate than the battle of Somme.……That’s kind of cool, except for the fact where our Feeders are literally brainless and will likely screw up what you’d think would be the dynamic then (ie. males bring females food, especially when the latter is spawning).
>>5398338>support
>>5398356I want to go one step further, and get shifting plates of armor on an amorphous blob of flesh. Pure muscles, shapeable flesh
>>5398357i think a combination of new senses, plus differences between males and females should resolve the problem (say size difference, pheromones, colors differences and different parts)
>>5398357>>5398385once we rendered the tail not useless, let's evolve decentralized brain cells.I'd love it for our space-fairing species to be an absolute monster without special weak points.
>>5398388interesting, definitely another step in the path for make them great killers. Maybe we should place them in the very inside of our body and have them connect to each other in great lines. They could have a protective material around them, being brain cells and all they should be very protected.i am thinking black, grey and darker blue for males in stripes in terms of colors. For females white, grey and lighter blue and again in stripes. Maybe with some red dots on top of their heads, perhaps around their future eyes.
>>5398401I can get behind color-based sexual dismorphism.Can't way for gaypride-colored offshoot species
>>5398401We don't even have photosensitive cells, and deep see fish are colorless for a reason - sight and color would be wasted at this depth. Since we already can sense vibrations fairly well, maybe we could use those to differentiate between species - perhaps have the releasers and vomiters grow different shapes for tailfins. Releasers could even instinctually hold their sperm until they detect the vibrations of vomiters - that would increase the likelihood of successful fertilization and lower the necessary sperm count needed.
The easiest way would just to have different body shapes entirely.Slimmer males with full tails and fins, bulkier females with fins and an incubator. Substantially different silhouettes with an actual purpose sounds more feasible than small differences in the extremities.Different scents would help as well.
>>5398430I wonder if in time we can get enough control over the tumors to turn them into body parts we might lose instead of having them be harmful?
So yeah, I got some ideas of what we could evolve from our species later.-Use that mutation lump in our tail to make it like a "central" stabilizer. While we have the three stabilizer spikes, this one we could make it so it moves, maybe a secondary fin to go either faster or have better control over the tides.-"hibernation" like mechanic. Essentially we make an extra organ or something to use the fat and nutrients of our food, and make it so we can heal ourselves after a period. The problem is that we should try and make i onions the Flounders actually stay close to the ones hibernated until they heal. What could happen in this process is to regrow any missing or broken part of our shielding or pincers, or even from our body, and if later we develop it, we could try and assimilate the cancer tumors into either more biomass or even purge it, with of course, maybe a morality rate where they can't actually heal from the tumors. This could trigger once it's necessary so we don't have the Flounders to actually hibernate at the first cancer tumor.-Go with the pheromone idea, but also develop some kind of poison or chemical to cause more pain to those we attack with our pincers.-Try and make some system so we get more energy from our meals and we need longer time to feel hunger, so maybe we could explore into territory out of our hunting grounds (or maybe don't, actually)-Second set of smaller pincers, and latter evolve that into a primitive jaw.-Some protection from our nose, maybe change our form to develop a little more of our smell sense-If we go with develop fins, maybe even develop our anti-cancer carcass so the tip of our fins could also be used as weapons to better escape from the Double Mouthers if they use their tongue in us.
>>5398472>Second set of smaller pincers, and latter evolve that into a primitive jaw.I'd prefer to evolve pincers in a tentacle way for dexterity. Armored tentacle segment with blades.In term of innovation, we could also resist better the pression, to hunt the lower-band scavenger, and synthetize energy from radiation, to go higher and expand our territory
>>5398388Yeah but that means any internal damage is brain damage
Rolled 96 (1d100)>>5398338>>5398340>>5398342>>5398346>>5398359>>5398362You choose to evolve a broadly superior tail and improve the reproduction system simultaneously. This is a very complicated development. The harsh sun punishes innovation but sometimes, it pays off.>Roll 5 1d100s.
Rolled 95 (1d100)>>5398565Holy shit. The Sun is ANGRY!
Rolled 40 (1d100)>>5398565Whelp based on the enviorment and first rolls looks like we may be pushed to the brink of extinctionLets see if i can improve this situation somehow
>>5398565Oh also 5 rolls? Are we rolling for all the species now?
>>5398567Situation just turned FUBAR
It's always a fuckin' negative change
>>5398238I'm sorry I didn't notice this earlier. You don't get a direct bonus to the roll but it reduces the complexity of evolution and gives more starting mass, letting you fit more development into less time.>>5398570No. Once per evolution, twice for radiation, taking the highest, and once for your competitor.
Rolled 26 (1d100)>>5398565Well this sucks
>>5398579Wonderful, just wonderful
>>5398583Well its a radiation roll so actually thats a good thing i think if i read what qm. Said correctly.
These are some extreme rolls. The 40 on reproduction will see the Flounder Feeders merely scalded instead of burnt but these next few turns are going to be tense.>>5398587Yes. I'm going to need two more 1d100s.
Rolled 44 (1d100)>>5398591can I this be redeemed
Rolled 64 (1d100)>>5398565Well... shitHopefully we can un-fuck this eventually
>>5398594Much appreciated but no need.>>5398593At least the Ripple Trackers aren't doing too much better than the Flounder Feeders.
>>5398587>>5396430The second 1d100 is to determine your species’ genetic drift from radiation, again, lower is better, on a sliding scale: 1-20 is negligible, 21-40 is mild, 41-60 is an unplanned mutation, 61-80 is a new, offshoot competitor species, and 81-100 is an overall population decline. If your species grows more resilient toward radiation or finds a method of preserving its genome, this scale will change, and high results aren’t always negative in certain contexts. The third, final 1d100 is to determine the success of your deadliest competitors in their own evolution. Unlike your species, you want to roll high here, and the same scale is applied, though you won’t be aware of what their attempted evolution is until you see it in action.
>>5398599Im aware. Buy the qm this round was looking for 2 evolution rolls 2 radiation rolls and 1 competitor evolution roll it was said several times
man those rollswell i guess is fixing time, we can't move forward with that 94 for sure.
>>5398565>>5398567>>5398568>>5398579>>5398592>>5398593The whims of astronomy have caused the planet to roll like a gargantuan marble, just a tad farther from its sun. On one cracked pincer, this has slightly reduced the amount of radiation saturating the ocean. On the other, this has caused a major drop in the temperature, thickening the ice sheets and bringing their constant crashing closer to the narrow band. The chill in the water alone is a deadly killer for smaller species but the chunks of ice, breakaways from above or frozen from what was already below, have turned the wild tides into a far deadlier phenomenon. Now, creatures of all kind are regularly pummeled by ice flung by the water, as if the rockslides below weren’t enough on their own.This has posed two obvious new challenges to the ecosystem. The temperature itself and the blunt ice, but there is a third, enormous implication to this change. Now that the planet is farther from its sun, the foundational Growth Lumps are getting less nutrients, making them slower to spread, and the Lump Grazers, the mainstay of every predator, have increased difficulty finding food and in surviving the cold with their tiny bodies. This has caused their population to drop and with it, the competition has reached a crescendo. This would be a terrible situation in the best of times but these are not the best of times.>1/4
>>5398650The Flounder Feeder’s tail has grown, once more. It’s gone from a cumbersome lump of tissue to a swollen, tumorous mass burdening every Flounder Feeder. It has effectively cut their mobility in half, in a time where it is more essential than ever. For most species, this would take them to the brink of extinction but there are two saving graces. The Flounder Feeder’s radiation shielding, as thin as it is, has lessened the murderous impact of the ice in most non-pincer cases to merely injurious, and a new, vital improvement that’s seen the first major departure between the sexes…>2/4
>>5398654Rather than continue vomiting from a pouch in the mouth, natural selection by reflexive, sometimes unfortunate pincers has seen a significant change. The pouch in the mouth has grown tiny and vestigial, but deep within the Flounder Feeder, behind its core muscles and just above its burdensome tail, a large, internal sack organ has developed. Below, a simple tube connects it to a sealed hole similar to the nose flap, a primitive birthing canal. This allows the Flounder Feeder’s offspring to grow much larger than their ancestors’ before release, a critical edge that has seen their population only cut in half instead of reduced to a fraction of its former prominence. No longer vomitors, the species is now divided between releasers and birthers. Much less important is the emergence of a new minor organ near the stomach, present in both sexes. It’s largely useless and serves to store waste from the stomach before it’s expelled from the mouth, as is the norm for the narrow band ecosystem, but the benefit from this is questionable as they occasionally burst when the Flounder Feeder is damaged. Needless to say, this tends to cause a lethal infection. Most of the deaths from this are only edge-cases but it’s still a matter of some concern.>3/4
>>5398655Meanwhile, the Ripple Tracker has made a much less original advancement by growing a thin fin between its front two stabilizers. This noticeably improves its speed and maneuverability, which would be more useful if the exposed flesh weren’t also extremely prone to getting cancer. The Flounder Feeder population has been cut in half, the Double Mouthers are in continued decline from the Ripple Trackers, and the Ripple Trackers themselves are in a slower decline than their rivals. Your more relaxed relatives, the Lazy Feeders, are actually almost unscathed by the ice and cold, due to their low positions and slow metabolisms. The Shufflers are on the upswing and it appears their decision to grow in size has been somewhat prescient. They could be a major contender for apex predator if circumstances are unchanged.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>4/4
>>5398656>fix Tail into something usable. again.
>>5398656>Fix the fucking tailYou know the expression "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?Well this shit is broke, and needs some serious fixing.
>>5398656support >>5398665
>>5398656Fix the tail and make it stronger, add additional protecting from rads too
>>5398656Fix the stoopid tail
I also wanna fix the tail. Maybe with the more biomass we have with us this means we could make it a more powerful tail than before by correcting the shape and better develop the lump
Also we need an hole for making our poop. Best to not have it from the side were we eat . Maybe we can have the poop take some rads away from our body
>>5398671yeah the way the lump is right now I can easily see it becoming a fish/shark like tail. we should evolve some bones next.
>>5398665+1Also>Minor Radiation absorbingIf food becomes scarce, then the rads can sustain us for a little while.
>>5398656Fix the tail
>>5398673>>5398675Hey, maybe we could do something with these two.We could store radiation for some mean of energy, and when we reach some dangerous quantity we could be able to eject it with our poop. AND MAYBE, with that we could start making some more communication improvement with the rest of us, catching radiation-poop signals from other to know when there are other flounder like us near
Rolled 81 (1d100)>>5398660>>5398665>>5398667>>5398668>>5398670>>5398671>>5398675You choose to evolve the Flounder Feeder's tail into something useful. If all of that additional mass could be made functional, it would go from an evolutionary ball and chain to a major advantage.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 75 (1d100)>>5398730
Rolled 94 (1d100)>>5398731bruh>>5398730rollan
>>5398734DUUUUUDE
Rolled 16 (1d100)>>5398730RNGesus have mercy>>5398734BRUH
>>5398734
Evolution doesn't want us to have a functional tail
>>5398737Our fate has been sealed i guess considering that good roll from the competitionThat's one mutation has been a curse and trying to improve it only has ever made it worse
>>5398742Time to make some legs/arms with membranes for swiming, like frogs
>>5398745That is if we even survive this turn our pop has declined even more and there is probbably only a handfull of us left now
I guess the feeders die because of our repeated bad rolls. We better get to play as the trackers.
hell rads really fuck things up
If we somehow survive this. Lets just give up on trying to fix the tail. Maybe improve our armour further since its been negating some damage. Or do what the other anon suggested and goin for legs
>>5398730>>5398731>>5398734>>5398737>Unlike its recent ancestors, the modern Flounder Feeder can flop its distended tail and make a small contribution to its forward motion. This in turn has made movement less difficult, easing its existence in many ways.Over countless generations of struggle, the Flounder Feeders have finally begun to streamline their enormous tail. It has gotten skinnier, gained a weak, flexing muscle, and now boasts two small, frail ridges of cartilage to make movement less difficult. There is a massive amount of room for improvement but at least now it can charitably be called a limb and not a heritable tumor. This slows the decline of the Flounder Feeders to a more manageable level.>1/3
>>5398782For their part, the Ripple Trackers have finished attaching their new fin to the third stabilizer and have seen phenomenal results. Now, their speed matches the Double Mouther’s and they’re able to pursue all kinds of prey with impunity. Even the Shufflers aren’t safe, as packs of Ripple Trackers swarm them, tear away chunks, and flee before they can retaliate. In defiance of the cold and radiation, their population has started to grow at the same rate their rivals have declined. With their small bud size and lack of pack instinct, the Double Mouthers in particular are in extreme danger. The Flounder Feeders are suffering greatly, though they can fight their evolutionary cousins off as adults, their smaller, scattered offspring are being picked off one by one.>2/3
>>5398783This could be surmountable, were it not for one terrifying factor. The endless barrage of ice cracking the Flounder Feeder’s fragile, essential shells and exposing the tender flesh beneath to environmental radiation. This has caused a massive spike in cancer and in combination with their tail and the merciless Ripple Trackers, the Flounder Feeder’s numbers have dropped to only a quarter of what they were before the temperature cooled. What’s worse, the Ripple Tracker’s sophisticated sense of vibration and speed allows them to dodge ice, leaving them almost untouched. Now the ancient Flounder Feeders are at a fraction of their former numbers, in steep decline, and hovering at the brink of extinction. Only a masterstroke of evolution or blind, careless luck can save them now.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>3/3
>>5398785>GROW MUSCLES AND ARMOR
>>5398785>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?Into corpses. This quest was poorly thoughtout all around.
Between staying the course and trying to salvage the tail, or going all in on a hail mary, it might be smarter to stay the course, or failing that try to build up some more reproductive capability to push our numbers up before we try gambling on anything. I'm not voting for anything just yet, but maybe faster gestation/larger broods could be something that'll help us more than anything else? We've already made some investment into that.
>>5398785Improve armor
>>5398790with the current tail i can't see our guys hunt properly, especially since a lot of older preys are dying or adapting. Ice and rocks falling on us make hunting very difficult too More muscles are needed, same for armor otherwise we are either too slow or not tough enough,Beyond that we need ears so we can avoid ice and rocks, much like the ripple trackers
>>5398793We can only change so much so quickly though, and I'm concerned that without building up our numbers a bit, we're going to have a hard time dethroning the Ripple Trackers from their niche. I'm concerned that by trying to directly compete with them, we're just gonna get stuck behind. Maybe we could evolve some new hunting strategy that capitalises on the strengths we have? Some sort of neurotoxin might work, if we weren't so genetically close to our biggest competition.
Eh, try to develop our tail into something useful to let us move better. If we die, we can play as the Ripple Trackers, since they're our offshoots anyway.
>>5398785Voting improving armour so we stop getting picked off and the ice stops damaging us. We can worry more about hunting later
>>5398785>Improve armor>Develop Absorbing radiation in the armor as a secondary energy source
>>5398785support >>5398807
>>5398807Becoming radiotrophic could be huge, actually. I'll support this - having some sort of radiation absorbing cells in the outer layer of armour would be great.
>>5398797i can t see us hunting with the current situation.Beside we can fight our cousins, is just that they have gain more advantages than us and can kill our offsprings faster
>>5398811With pack hunting, I think greater numbers would give us more of an advantage than you might think. Then again, I suppose it relies on the rolls. Right now, I think radiosynthesis is actually a better bet, to allow our guys to go longer without food.
>>5398811My secret next plan is to create neural cell alongside with herding instinct to protect the small
>>5398785>fix the fucking tail.
Wanna just say we should choose one seeing what happend last time it didnt help too much. As much as it would be nice to have two evolutions theres just so mucv more opportunity to go wrong
>>5398785Supporting >>5398807Radiosynthesis is theorized to have actually come before photosynthesis. It is about getting energy from photons anyways, just these are very high energy.
>>5398785+1 >>5398818
>>5398807SupportingIf all else fails, maybe we should try doing SOMETHING with the Warp next evolution, given the system is pretty much soaking in it.
change from this>>5398786to support this one >>5398807>>5398815we will see though i would prefer to see our body fixed .
>>5398785>Abandon tail. Evolve internal rad Resistance and rudimentary legs.Three fails in a row means the tail is going to outright kill us. Abandon it for something more useful to the situation. Use legs to propel us away from ice chunks without them damaging us.
>>5398807+1After this I say trying to make more muscles/massIf we can have food and energy for it, surely we could sustain it.
>>5398845We have gotten to the point that we have to fix it. We just need one good roll...
>>5398848I'm with you, but now we need to find a way for the long run. At least this mutation helped us a little, but now it's not the time for fixing the tail
>>5398848>Literally sunk cost fallacy.It has brought us to the brink. We have failed thrice in a row. One more fail means we die.
>>5398857>>5398852I will admit it, you're right.>>5398785Change >>5398822 to instead have shell repair mechanism of some sort.
>>5398807+1Man, the rolls are not kind to us lately.
What if instead of armor we gave ourselves a layer of blubber under the armor. Softens impacts, more radiation shielding, and emergency calories.
>>5398807Support
Rolled 17 (1d100)>>5398807>>5398808>>5398809>>5398820>>5398826>>5398832>>5398846>>5398878You choose to evolve your armour to be more resilient and take on radiotrophic properties. This may be the Flounder Feeder's last chance. One final gambit before the abyss overtakes your species.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 74 (1d100)>>5398905Oh boy
Rolled 74 (1d100)>>5398905
>>5398909I just killed us.>>5398911With dubs as well. Why the hell am I always getting these high dubs?>>5398905Well, it’s been nice playing with you Xeno QM.
>>5398909>>5398911Ok it may be not over. The offshoot species might act as a detterent food source while >>5398905 environment favor us...Let's see the roll for the other species.
Rolled 60 (1d100)>>5398905
>>5398909>>5398911>>5398914Oh yeah, dubs. Maybe the QM will go "unplanned mutation" route as we are not many left to not cuck the quest?
>partial development for both species>another offshootCould be worse I guess.I suspect we are still in deep shit and just managed to hand on for anther roll longer.
>>5398918It’s over. Our species split, and our final gamble failed to pay off.
>>5398922Like, a symbiotic sister species? That would be interesting.
Uh...ya people realize that we can just keep playing as the trackers, roight? We're not even the same species as the one we began with, that'd be like comparing an tiktaalik and an alligato.
>>5398927This was never a good quest or evolution game though. It lacks what makes the two fun and makes it more unpleasant with the fact we're focused on a species and roll dice for mutation success and for environment conditions and for enemies adapting to our species and for if our species randomly self-destructs for reasons. Any agency and cool ideas we have is and will be undermined by the dice.I'd rather if xeno rethought his game and made more player friendly, instead going the Fortune Evolution/Primordal Evo route for the beginning part until we have sapients.
Personally i like this questIt seems to be based on another quest that was around awhile but stopped cause qm poofed (but it had the same exact set up and had a bit more intresting mechanic but can see why qm didnt wanna let write ins for base speciesBut honestly ive seen other versions of this kinda thing but multiplayer but still relying on dice( except it was a D6 ) and honestly i kinda like this method of choose a mutation and dont have to deal with editing images cause desu. Editing images not my thing so its nice seeing something familiar.Though i can see why its not everyones thing eitherBut maybe it will be like its predacessor and if we do go extinct we can choose an offshoot species to continue with.
>>5398905Punished Flounder Feeder
I enjoyed it.Time to see how we get along though; we’re not dead until the QM declares us fossil fuel.
>>5398924i don't mind, if rolls go bad or good is beyond our decision, so for me we have played quite well and made at least a cool murder fish. In a very unforgiving planet too, were complex evolution is difficult.
Rolled 22, 13, 54 = 89 (3d100)>>5398965it probably would have been better if we rolled best of 3d100 for mutation and the QM rolled for the environment, offshoots, and environment.
>>5398905>>5398909>>5398911>>5398920>Far above, a titanic sheet of ice ruptures, cracked for the millionth going on millions more time. Part of it is flung deeper in many shards, where the increased pressure shatters them into many more chunks. These pieces of ice are small and move at dangerous speeds in the tide, most into rocks, but some into the many small, chthonic creatures lurking below. One lump of ice is tiny, but dense and rapid. In its path, a hungry Flounder Feeder treads water in its hunt for food. Moments later, it slams into its body with furious speed and is harmlessly deflected, as the predator acknowledges that it is not food and continues the search. Several hundred generations ago, this would’ve been a fatal or crippling encounter.The Flounder Feeder has failed to develop radiotrophic shielding and its movement is no swifter but the gauntlet of natural selection has, by killing every individual with a softer exterior, forced them into a sturdier constitution. Their pincers and stabilizers are still prone to chipping and cracking on rocks but these wounds are rarely shattering and rarely more than shallow and superficial. This has rendered its shielding much less vulnerable to wear and tear and as a consequence, its cancer rate has dropped to previous levels.The only major threat is the predations of the Ripple Tracker, which have caused grievous damage to the Double Mouthers and make Flounder Feeder and Lazy Feeder young much less likely to reach adulthood. When they do, however, the durable Flounder Feeder packs tend to outmatch the nimble Ripple Trackers, who crack their pincers on their shielding. Even with this advantage, the Ripple Trackers are more numerous, better hunters, and in constant growth. In the end, the Flounder Feeder population has been left in a very small and precarious position but isn’t currently in decline.>1/3
>>5399034Instead of improving its shielding to better survive the ice, one segment of the Flounder Feeder population abandoned the waves altogether, flattening the tips of their tails and following the Lazy Feeder’s example. Now, the Flat-Tail Crawler is competing with the Lazy Feeders and Shufflers for their territory. It’s not doing a very good job but it’s better off down there than trying to survive the ice with a soft outside. Its population is small and stable, but that could easily change.>2/3
>>5399036In an unprecedented move, the Ripple Trackers have doubled-down on their mobility and started the slow, painful process of straightening the curve in their bodies. Already, the hump is less pronounced and they have an easier time navigating the waters. They are already dominant in the ecosystem but if they finish this, their status as apex predator will be indisputable. The Flounder Feeders are faced with several difficulties. Their lower mobility makes it challenging to hunt, many of their young are devoured by packs of Ripple Trackers, and their tail is arguably still more trouble than it’s worth.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>3/3
>>5399034>fix the tail again
>>5399038>Grow muscles, especially were we have less like the tailmore muscles, mean we are stronger and agile. If we can achieve that, we have a better possibility.///otherwise, i suggest spikes across our armor, make it a pain to attack us.
>>5399038Abandon the tail, evolve radio-trophy.
>>5399038>fix tail again>Develop a more efficient digestive system>Try Radioactive feeding again.
Not too bad, all things considered. Now we can survive the ice, I think doubling down on radiosynthesis is a good idea? It'll give us a bit more flexibility over being an obligate carnivore, kinda like humans. Not that we can absorb radiation, but if you've got more food sources, you tend to do better. With more energy available to us, fixing our mobility issues could be a good next move, then going for intelligence would be our best bet, I think. Plus, I figure we should focus on one thing at a time, trying to split our efforts tends to not go too well.My vote's gonna be purely on becoming radiotrophic for now.
>>5399047>support ignore >>5399043
> Learn to communicate with each other, to identify threats and protect their young.Lads, the Ripple Trackers are slaughtering us while in our youths; we need to stop the infant mortality rate.A layer of blubber under the armour wouldn’t be bad, though.
>>5399038Fuck Flounder Feeders, the dorsal fin was my idea. I'm team Ripple Trackers now.Since no species possesses the ability to digest them, maybe we can adapt to consume the remaining shells of dead Feeders and Trackers and use the calcium or chitin or whatever it is to grow our own shell more easily. Right now, efficiency is the key.
>>5399047SupportVictory or Extinction!
>>5399038+1 >>5399047
>>5399052Reinforce pack mentality, increase it into a proper tribe mentality, and use pheromones to communicate. Simple as.
>>5399051I'll add to my vote> Learn to communicate with each other, to identify threats and protect their young.
>>5399052Also, get some more goddamned sensory organs. We can’t communicate a threat if we can’t perceive the threat in the first place.
>>5399038…Fix that fucking tail. I don’t even know why we got a tail in the first place, we were going to be giants! But all I know is that we NEED IT.
>>5399052+1Guys we cant keep doing a ton of things at once so im going with this
>>5399052>>5399038Supporting herd mentality where we actively protect the younglings.Alternatively we could have our younglings be born with a strong poisonous payload.
>>5399038>RadiosynthesisHaving a passive way to sustain our metabolism frees energy for other pursuits. Radiation is going to be a constant in our evolution.For the mechanism:>A symbiosis of unicellular life developing on the outer thick layer. The unicellular life originally developed there for a stable anchoring for absorbing radiation from the environment, but more importantly for the constant radiation the highly radioactive thick layer gives out. >Eventually, through a quirk of evolution, the unicellular life integrated itself into the Flounder Feeder itself, similar to the Terran mitochondria. It became simpler, but was heritable and generated another pathway for energy to be produced, highly concentrated in the radioactive layer.
>>5399052Supporting this.We can’t out mobility the other species and they have a hard time killing our adults - we need to protect our young as the primary concern
>>5399122>I don’t even know why we got a tail in the first place, we were going to be giants!That's how primitive life was develop in our world anon, and as such we will crawl from the deep, frost and ill womb of this world and see the red son right with our eyes, ready to claim the montains and skies and strike with our might to anyone we find after the many struggles we faced in such an early stage.After all, we have a base or some proto-spine, from then we need either legs or hands and create another way for us to swim
>>5399122Those aren’t mutually exclusive at all. We could be house-sized psionic Kaiju.
>>5399321>We could be house-sized psionic Kaiju.I think picrel fit the description perfectly
>>5399052SupportI would like to say that the ripplebastards are onto something with uncurving their bodies. After the young protecting, we need to do that next, both for the sake of mobility and the sake of efficent growth later on.
>>5399369Oh, and I just remembered we have a digestive system that, iirc, really only needs an opening on the back end to function wholely
Rolled 77 (1d100)>>5399052>>5399088>>5399124>>5399163>>5399204>>5399369You choose to evolve rudimentary communication to increase cooperation within Flounder Feeder packs, particularly to drive away the Ripple Trackers and defend their young.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 79 (1d100)>>5399424
>>5399435Anddd the horrible rolls continue. Well atleast its some progress again but that was really close to negative
With our improved shell and the recently weakening radiation, may we know what the scale is now for rad damage?
>>5399437What rolls were good again? I know high and some low were good, but not which
>>5399443 Anything below 80 is good for our evolution roll (but preferably under 40 especially right now)Radiation rolls below 60 Competition rolls above 40 (preferably over 80)We still need 2 rolls though guys (besides my roll)
>>5399445This radiation roll prefrence is before radiation resistance i dont know present numbers
Rolled 67 (1d100)>>5399424Here
Rolled 50 (1d100)>>5399424Nat 100 here we go, time to die
>>5398789>>5398965I know the quest is difficult but that's the point, it's supposed to be a difficult effort to crawl from the primordial murk to the beginnings of civilization, and scrape and claw your species' way to unified survival or greater ideal before entering the void and being hammered by an absolute, genocidal threat that wants to destroy everything you've struggled to create. If it was easy and I started us off with a basic, simple choice of biology and culture, and then had everything go on, it wouldn't matter as much. It'd just be a lopsided or surprisingly balanced strategy depending on your initial luck, tactics, and personal abilities instead of what it's supposed to be, a desperate effort to stave off the annihilation of something much greater in the working than any one fleet or city-equivalent or any number of individual lives. It's all of the extreme zeal and seemingly unstoppable power, from the perspective of the aliens on the receiving end. I want to see what comes out of your speculative evolution, what comes out of your society derived from its form of sapience, and what comes out of your interstellar effort to take advantage of what you can and build up for the century or handful, depending on your biology, societal structure, and sheer, hideous luck, that you have to prepare. Then I want to take a hammer to it and see it survive or be reduced to a statistic on a forgotten parchment by your own merits. I want this quest to be more than mechanics, is all, and the difficulty is a massive part of that. If the Flounder Feeders go extinct, you'll get a chance to choose an evolutionary offshoot to evolve in its stead but I want you to do everything in your power to keep it alive. I understand if you don't like the quest or feel like I'm not doing the concept well and I respect that, but I've thought for a long time about the mechanics and how it'll all link together. I'm not going to change things to run on a Bo3 or default to immediate evolutionary success.>>5399438Of course. The current radiation scale is 1-25: Negligible, 26-50: Mild, 51-70: Unplanned Mutation, 71-90: Offshoot Species, 91-100: Overall Population Decline.>>5399443The evolution evolution scale is 1: Game-changing, 2-11: Overwhelmingly Positive, 12-40: Moderately Positive, 41-80: Partial Development, 81-90: Moderately Negative, 91-99: Overwhelming Negative, 100: Crippling. For Partial Development, the species comes closer to its goal or only has part of it implemented, but if the same species has multiple Partial Developments for the same evolution they'll stack into a complete evolution. The competitor for the evolution roll is determined by which species poses the biggest threat to your species, or if they're matched, I determine it randomly. The environmental scale which I've been rolling hasn't changed, and is 1: Extremely Beneficial Shift, 2-11: Positive Change, 12-89: No Change, 90-99: Negative Change, and 100: Mass Extinction Event.
>>5399469And seemingly unstoppable power of the Great Crusade, that is. I'm busy baking a cake right now so I'm half between my PC and the oven at the moment.
>>5399469Thanks.When we start moving in larger groups, maybe a primitive beak to pin and shred these Ripples might be in order.Many, many options.
On a related note to my earlier explanation, the overwhelming majority of you voted for the most hellish possible, Nightmare Mode, Dante Must Die tier homeworld. If you were on a small, reasonable temperature, balanced land planet orbiting a gentle star it would effectively be a completely different game.
>>5399478I cast the first vote, and still don’t regret it.
>>5399478Yeah but that was before we knew the rolling system we would be using.
>>5399480The end evolution is going to be fundamentally impacted by it, as well. It's impossible to predict what your species is going to look like down the line.>>5399481That's fair, I could've been more transparent about it but the mechanics are weighted in your favor, guided evolution and getting one evolution attempt when the other is spread between your various rival species is a massive edge. You'd still have abundant danger under a gentle sun, if anything, it might be deadlier than here just for the sheer complexity any one hostile species could evolve at once.
>>5399478Yeah but then we'd end up PUSSIES
>>5399486I do know we're either probably going to end up either stark black or stark white. White for ice camo/light deflection, black for rock camo and heat absorption
Good thing we have sturdier armor. We'll try again radiation absorption later.I'm also happy of the herd/Child protection mentality. We'll see if that bold move pays.Here's a few propositions to keep in mind.>Radiation absorption>Evolve pincers in tentacles for dexterity>Evolve decentralized brain>Evolve regeneration (shed pincers/tentacles? Fix shell? Mend internals?)>Fix our body shape and mobility
>>5399424>>5399435>>5399449>>5399451>Beneath the wrathful waves, a young Flounder Feeder treads water near its birther. It has no comprehension of the significance, but it smells the adult and instinctively recognizes it’s of its own species. Only the simplest of instincts are possible, written in genetic code by countless generations of trial and error. Not food. Stay close. These alone have saved many lives.The Flounder Feeders have developed a small gland near the base of their tail which occasionally releases a distinct scent in the waters nearby. The pheromone serves as a loose identifier, keeping packs together and causing the young to stay near their parent. Although no true dialogue is possible, emergent behavior spurred by natural selection manages the next best thing. Protection of the young by attacking nearby outsiders has reversed the population decline and the Flounder Feeder’s numbers have started to climb once again.These pheromones aren’t perfect, they’re constantly washed away by the tide and rarely cause confusion when they stain a rock or particularly large Lump Grazer, but they are a major adaptation. Among the narrow band ecosystem, the Flounder Feeders are the first species to actively protect their young, even if by coincidence. The long-term implications of this are nothing short of enormous.>1/3
>>5399537In a mild fluke of rad-addled genetics, the Flounder Feeder’s internal waste organ has nearly doubled in size. This does nothing to harm the Flounder Feeder but has more capacity than most Flounder Feeders are able to fill, considering the rate their inefficient digestive systems expel the sizable portion they can’t digest. Its necessity is questionable but it is a sizeable organ with a definite purpose and worth recognizing.>2/3
>>5399539The Ripple Trackers have continued to straighten their posture and their sheer maneuverability has grown with it. They are now faster than grown Double Mouthers and with their pack hunting, they are able to reliably kill and maim them without the risk of more than one or two losses of their own. Between this and their vulnerable buds, the Double Mouthers have no counter. At this rate, their extinction is only a matter of time. On the other cracked pincer, Flounder Feeders also hunt in packs and are more durable than the Ripple Trackers' weak pincers can consistently handle. With a fair amount of other, softer prey, as natural selection grinds through the generations the Ripple Trackers are increasingly less apt to attempt hostilities. It’s been a long time coming, but things are starting to look less dire for the Flounder Feeders. Of course, the whims of fate are cruel and that could change at any millennia.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>3/3
>>5399540>Evolve straighter posture for better Mobility and looking not quite as Derpy.No one will respect us if we are crooked sacks of armored skin.
>>5399540>fix the tail> start forming an ass to get rid of waste and maybe some radiation
>>5399540>Fix the tailI know we are tempting fate but it would turn our biggest disadvantage back into an asset. We can do other cool shit after.
>>5399540>Fix the tailTurns out, we don’t need those pincers to defeat the trackers anyhow.Although being a straight fish is nice, there’s nothing wrong with being a seahorse.
>>5399540Fix the tail, with more muscles And create a canal for take out our waste
>>5399513I am okay with tentacles having blades, but I would like to keep our pincers and grow them longer/larger. Essentially tentacles cut first and once we are close enough a big cut with the pincers (also pincers are cool).Combined with growing spikes across our armor we would become probably the apex predator. Having more senses/muscles and other weapons would likely help with that too (especially when will have more resitances since we will be able to go higher and deeper in the ocean. Meaning areas with more light and less light)
Or the tentacles could have hooks and spikes at the end instead of blades, making our preys/foes slower/unmoving and allowing us to tear them apart with our improved pincers
Or, or, hear me out.We don’t develop manipulators appendages at all, but instead, (after we gain short term memory and sociability), we develop warpsight, and then telekinesis.Mind over matter.
>>5399563So we become giant Squid then?>>5399565Yeah and one Blank makes our attacks somewhat useless once they are in close. Remember what happened to Magnus when he fought Russ and his Psychic powers failed him.
I understand that the tail is major thing we want to see fixed but I think focusing on other niches would be better. At this point we as a species are way to far behind to catch up to the Ripple Trackers. They are just too far ahead and catching up would take a miracle. That being a nat 1 which with the rolls so far I don't think will happen. Personally I think we should advance our digestion to be more efficient and improve our waste disposal. Having those will allow for any food gotten to give our species more nutrient absorption which means we need to eat less and thus have more food to go around, allowing for a higher population. We could also start storing fat in our tail and throughout our body to allow for better weight distribution which should make swimming easier. It will make our species tougher as you have to get through a thick layer of fat to do any real damage, might also give some minor radiation protection.
>>5399566Right….Yeah, that would be an issue.Alright, fine, jellyfish tentacles, and then telekinesis.As an aside, if I used Psionics to hurl a mundane projectile at a blank from a distance, would the blank still die?
>>5399567That does partially sound like a roundabout way to fix the tail, to be honest.
>>5399568yeah the Blank would still die since physics is stil a thing no matter how you accelerated the hunk of lead. But if you only have Warpsight there is a pretty big place where things are at best blurry and at worst just outside of your perception so good luck aiming. I dont mind using a lot of Psionics as our main weapon but we should have a powerful and strong body as a Base just in case we meet something that either suppresses or exceeds our mastery over the Warp so we can still rip and Tear regardless.
>>5399543We've been given a gift with the waste organ, we should capitalize on it.Either we develop to process discarded shells from dead Flounders to grow shells more easily, or we learn to forcibly eject the waste on a whim so we can use it as both a defense mechanism and evasive maneuver.
>>5399570Good idea, let’s not be Tau.
>weaponize waste poach to coat pincers in infectious shit
>>5399590Literally a shitty idea.I figured it out! A use for the waste bladder!We can also use it as a pressure bladder, to let water in or out, thus enabling us to better withstand different pressures!I… am not sure why we would because everything is alive in a very narrow band, but we could.
Have we ever explained how Flounders grow with a hardened shell surrounding them? Do they molt? That would make them extremely vulnerable, especially to radiation.
More or less a few tentacles can t hurt for hunting. I want legs and arms on land desu, hopefully we have more muscles before we arrive at that stage. Get stronk
Meant to reply with this >>5399605>>5399566For our size, i have others ideas in mind. Not sure how big but more than an ork would satisfy me, bigger than that might be problematic for certain type of construction and crafting. With the development of pyskerim, industry and technology, that would change but is my preference.
>>5399540>Fix tail, more efficient digestion system, radiation absorption>>5399592>I… am not sure why we would because everything is alive in a very narrow bandYes… all the predators are stuck on that narrow band, and better vertical mobility may just negate the Ripple Tackler’s main advantage, horizontal speed.
Fat if instead of fixing our posture we just our form for latter turn more easily into a bipedal?We might not need to straight it all the way to be fish like, at least try so it isn't a trouble. My idea is that we could grow like a cape of sorts from our back to work like a tentacle with a membrane we could use for propulsion like squids, and if we turn to be fast enough with that mutation we could grow arms and hands to grab and pin other fish. Hell, if things turn right we could even use the tentacles in our back for also grabbing fish and if we add the hook on the tips, we have an extra medium range weaponBut this is a theory/suggestion for latter, so you might think again about the idea of straighten our backs
>>5399540>Improve diggestive system>Fix tikIn that orden of importance
>>5399605Personally, I think arms and legs are for noobs.If we have tentacles, we can just use those, like a spider.A large armoured octopus/spider alien would be pretty cool.
Guys, this is an aquatic world.There is almost no land, and very little impetus to be a biped- or, at this rate, have an endoskeleton worth the name.
>>5399653could be an idea, i wonder how our equipment, clothing, tools etc... will look like.
>>5399657Most of it is ice with a whole lot of mountains, we can become the Frost Giants we were always meant to be.
>>5399540>fix the tail>inb4 nat 100
>>5399540>Abandon the tail, evolve legs.You people have tried this tail thing for 6 posts now and have failed everytime. Let it go already before it kills us.
I need to run some errands before I get to work so I won't be able to do a morning update like we have been. I'll be back in 8-10 hours to update then and that might be the only major update for today. Lots of interesting discussion going on.>>5399594Their shell is more a thick, rigid layer of skin fused on top of their tender skin than it is a true chitin or bone shell. Compared to a more advanced exoskeleton, it's very delicate: your average grip strength could shatter it whole or crack and peel it in one part, but if you tried to dig in with a fingernail, you'd likely chip it. It currently has no mechanism for repairing lost pieces in the brief lifespan of a Flounder Feeder and grows with them over time. Evolving molting or a means to repair it would improve their quality of life but radiation is a serious problem, as the shell is the only real protection they have. There are naturally many, many ways to resist the radiation or the cancer itself. On the subject of exoskeletons vs endoskeletons, if you can carry the weight and supply the nutrients, there's nothing preventing you from having both. Likewise you could forgo rigid structure altogether and rely on pure muscle or take on a more amorphous shape. This is a fundamentally alien ecology in a warp laced hellhole, the only hard limit you have is what your evolutionary pressures will let you get away with.
>>5399751Yeah I think having a dual endo/exo skeleton is the best. You get the sheer support of an endo skeleton and the protection of an exoskeleton.
>>5399540Evolve the ability to cultivate gas in our waste organ, then expel it for bursts of speed.Improve survival and invent fart jokes
I'll go for the radiation absorption.Regarding skeleton, I'd love us to be a slime-like ball of engulfing warp material
>>5399799Too late for that anon. We have a structural shell now. SOON, we'll have BONES and you can do NOTHING ABOUT IT! MUAHAHAHA!
TFW when we ascend into semi-daemons, with the oldest and most powerful becoming full on warp entities, before we become sapient.
>>5399815We turn into Enslavers 2.0 Electric Boogaloo.
What name will be given to our homeworld i wonder
>>5399803Not too late. We can mutate our external skin layer to become armor (like nails from hell) and rgenerate it from our inner blob any time.
>>5399861What would be the Flounder descendant's translation for "Shitty Ice Hell"?
I think people are getting way too ahead of themselves and choose traits that are either too big of a leap to succeed or set up success for waaaaay down the road.Yes, this is the 40k universe, but our current threat isn't Psionics or Bolters, it's a worm that swims fast. Just focus on things that either adress a weakness of ours, or exploit a niche that has been created by the environment. Our rolls are bad enough already, and success is a sliding scale based on how simple and effective the mutation is. Besides, I think short-term solutions leading to an emergent body plan and skillset is more fun than picking a creature you want to look like, and building towards that.
>>5399569A bit of the point was to try and give another solution then make a 'tail flap' or 'just fix the tail'. There's things we can do that can lead to fixing the tail's issue without having to do anything to the tail specifically. But again I think improving digestion and nutrient absorption would be better then better waste disposal. After that we can fix mobility.
>>5399540Water jets like squid
Been gone for the last three days, just now caught up. I only have one question: Why do you niggas keep fucking with the tail? Why? WHY?!?!? Seriously though, like one anon said we should shore up our other senses/abilities rather than constantly try and fail to fix one defective organ, wasting precious time on what is, at the moment, a lost cause.
>>5400054it won't be almost cause if it works. I know it's sunk cost but I'll be damned if we give up.
>>5400054I look at it this way. If we had failed all those rolls on different things we'd have a heap of defective organs instead of one. At least the tail is more helpful than hazard at the moment.
>>5400054In fairness, our abject failure to work our tail is due to the rolls, not because it’s a bad plan.At least it’s only the tail.
>>5399879Its a bunch of guys that want to play an epic badass, tough as nail race in 40K while playing Spore but wanting to skip all of the Spore part of an evo quest. This is still an evo quest, just one that has a definitive goal, fend of the Guard and the Imperial Navy. DESU i can easily see the appeal of such an item but at the same time i wonder if the QM focusing on the 40K as a selling point, instead of popping it up as a surprise at the end game, was a mistake. Its making people think of things that really do not matter yet since we are a wormthing and are instead trying to rush past the evo game into 40K as a whole.
>>5400054All of the sexiest cambrian chordate analogues had tails. Straight up 10/10s worth a fap each one yessir. We can "exchange" it later for a weapon/mobility aid or as part of gaining a longer body if we no longer want it but still want some benefit.>>5400206well they probably didn't want it to look like just another soon-to-die directionless evo as per standard evo protocol
We are also moving very fast for an evo quest. Some of it is definitely out there, but in a week or two some of those are actually feasible.Emergent evolution is cool, though.
I got home from home and was surprised with a pot roast, update's going to be in another hour longer than anticipated.
>>5400236Home from work, heheheh
>>5400236No complaint there, pot roast is pretty good.
Rolled 39 (1d100)>>5399544>>5399547>>5399548>>5399558>>5399625>>5399746You choose to evolve the tail in the hope of improving the Flounder Feeder's desperately needed strength and mobility. If successful, this could reverse their loss of agility and then some. If not... mother nature is a cruel mistress, and yours has been crueler than most.
Rolled 32 (1d100)>>5400312
>>5400313FINNALLY A SUCCESsnow to see how radiation and
Rolled 10 (1d100)>>5400312nat 1
Rolled 25 (1d100)>>5400312
>>5400317We succeeded only for our competitors to outdo us :(
>>5400318not really, they're both the same degree of success.
>>5400321True but they still got a lower roll overall which kinda sucks
>>5400313>>5400316>>5400317>An aging Flounder Feeder is flung by the tide, like so many of its ancestors, powerless to resist the immensity of its flow. In its path sits a rock, sharp and promising ruinous damage. Above, a cracked ice chunk thunders to the peak, yanked from the ocean’s ceiling by titanic force. There is no hope. Many of its ancestors have died similar deaths, and yet… The Flounder Feeder senses the nearing vibration, thrashes the powerful muscle in its tail, and escapes unscathed.After an incredible amount of natural selection trying to undo a genetic mistake, the Flounder Feeders have finally found true success. Their tail, previously a lump not worth its weight, has been packed with muscle, endowed with ridges, and widened at its departing point from the body. It is now a very strong limb that requires a high amount of nutrients to grow and sustain but earns its keep through sheer utility. Gone are the generations of wriggling and squirming in the waves. Now, when the Flounder Feeder’s instincts demand it move, it cracks its tail and its bulk is propelled in any of a dozen directions without delay. Its increased weight, curved shape, and lack of supporting fins mean it isn’t as fast as the Ripple Tracker and can’t escape rival predators or chase elusive prey as reliably, but when it comes to sudden turns and raw force of motion, there are none superior.>1/2
>>5400389The Ripple Trackers have finally done the unthinkable. Through sheer force of unconscious will over tens of thousands of generations, they have taken their ancient, curved muscle and bent it straight. This has made them the single fastest species in the narrow band ecosystem, par none, and with the combination of its fins, numerical headstart, and ruthless sensory apparatus, it has become the undisputed apex predator. Even lone, frail, and small Flounder Feeders are thrust into vicious danger by their freakish speed and instinctive ability to tack with the waves. In terms of efficiency and versatility as a predator, they simply can’t be matched.This has caused them to fall into a dangerous trap. By achieving such environmental supremacy, it has become so perfectly adapted to its niche that until the sea changes once more and it is threatened in its status, the rigours of natural selection will pass them over. For now, the Ripple Trackers have reached a stopping point. Their foremost rivals, the Flounder Feeders, Double Mouthers, and Shufflers, are too slow to be of any threat, on the brink of extinction, and contributing far more to their food intake than they cost, respectively. The Lazy Feeders have continued trudging by and the Flat-Tail Crawler has stubbornly clung to survival. Due to the fierce competition and interconsumption among its predators, the Lump Grazers’ population has remained roughly static. Luckily, as if their nutritional bedrock were to decline the narrow band ecosystem would be thrown into disarray. This is an evolutionary era of stability, one the Flounder Feeders would benefit greatly from shattering. In time. With the harsh sun bearing down on their hides, simple evolutions and incremental behavioral changes will suit it well. Complexity, however, offers a great advantage at an even greater risk.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>2/2
Space is extremely cold, and so is the deep sea. I think, if food is not a concern, a layer of expendable blubber under the armour to absorb shock, preserve heat and act as an emergency food supply would be pretty neat.Will wait for other ideas before voting, though.
>>5400392We are . Doing okay and are stable ish. So i wanna put in a vote for a more efficent digestive system (Perhaps move twoards making our waste organ usefull
Although… it occurs to me that as it is, the environment is stable. This is not conductive to evolution; if we want change, therefore, we’ll need to assault the Ripple Tracers directly.How to throw the ecosystem into chaos… develop the ability to vocalise or make vibrations in a way that enables communication and directly attacks the Tracker’s senses?
>>5400392>Increase Digestive Efficency so we can sustain a larger population with the same nutrients>Repurpose the Wastebladder to be able to shoot out the waste into an attacker as a defense.
>>5400392Am I the only one that wants to straighten out the body? Seems like the obvious choice.
>>5400392>Evolve Internal Rad Resistance. >>5400411Also this.
>>5400392>Increase Digestive Efficency so we can sustain a larger population with the same nutrients>Repurpose the Wastebladder to be a Pressurebladder, in order for us to go deeper to escape predators>Strengthen our shell to be able to withstand more pressure, and to absorb radiationMight as well go ham here.
>>5400411I want to do that after increased digestion efficiency. Mainly, I don’t want to ape the Ripple Tackers too much.
>>5400392>Increase Digestive Efficency so we can sustain a larger population with the same nutrients>grow an ass to remove waste
>>5400420>Mainly, I don’t want to ape the Ripple Tackers too much.Why not? It CLEARLY works. I mean, look at the bastards. They have literally killed one of our starting rivals (Double-Mouthers) BY THEMSELVES. Quite literally we are now the sole dominant genetic legacy in this ocean hellhole, and it wasnt the Flounder Feeder's doings.
>>5400427We would be putting ourselves at a disadvantage in trying to beat the ripples at their own game. If we can instead subvert their dominance instead of directly break it, they’re a lot less likely to be able to then promptly outcompete us.>>5400392>>Increase Digestive Efficency so we can sustain a larger population with the same nutrientsBeing more numerous so that more territory is controlled by us directly isn’t a terrible start to do so, however.
>>5400427It just seems bad form. We’re suppose to make our own path, not follow in the footsteps of our rival. If we’re a couple evolutions away from their evolutionary innovation I could dig the change, but not so close to the tree.
>>5400392Improved digestion system
>>5400392> Evolve a 'vibration mimic' trick in our pinsers that allows us to confuse and trick other creatures, or quickly communicate to our allies.I think a vibration tool would be super useful.
>>5400404>Repurpose the Wastebladder to be able to shoot out the waste either as an attack or defense>Create a radiation absorption organ
>>5400392Turn our waste sack into a spiteful organ of poison and death to those that would try to eat us
>>5400558>>Increase Digestive Efficency so we can sustain a larger population with the same nutrients>>grow an ass to remove wasteConsidering we are able to perform rapid twitch movements, shouldn't this mean that we can shatter the trackers pincers by using our armored body like a club thus cucking many of them them into starvation?
>>5400439 Support
Please, let's not make an ass. Pressure bladder or nasty shitspray or poisonous inside are much more interesting.
>>5400574Just saying.
>>5400574It can be both.
>>5400392Water jet propulsion like squid, maybe make use of the waste sack for waste jet propulsion
>>5400575Yes, I know your point. But this is 40k evo quest. please, let's try to be fun
Sticking with my plan:Eating discarded shell to grow our own more easily, and eventually regenerate it indefinitely.It's an untapped keratin source.
>>5400432Except we have a tail now. We could annihilate them if we straightened out, but because people "want to be unique" or some shit people don't even want to evolve an ass
>>5400647True.Having two ends in our digestion system, beyond helping our digestion, would probably make the intake and expelling of water we’d need for a waste gland to double as a pressure gland, since all the muscles would only have to push in one direction.Unlike whatever the hell a starfish does, we, not being almost 2-Dimensional, do have space to fit a tube inside us.
*make the water flow easier, sorry.
Rolled 90 (1d100)>>5400399>>5400404>>5400426>>5400432>>5400439>>5400558>>5400568>>5400569You choose to evolve a more efficient digestive system to stretch the nutrients Flounder Feeders are able to catch much farther and fuel further population growth.>Roll 3 1d100s.
Rolled 55 (1d100)>>5400698
Rolled 91 (1d100)>>5400698
Rolled 62 (1d100)>>5400698
Well.. i caused a population decline thats great. Oh and theres a negative enviorment eventThough we did make progress on digestive system so not everythings bad but not good either probbably overall decline again
>>5400707Our enemys will also be negatively affected by the Enviorment. With increased Efficency we might be able to outcompete them on the scarce ressources or they will be able to outcompete us by leveraging their speed to get to more food sooner.
>>5400698>>5400700>>5400701>>5400705>A Flounder Feeder floats in blind satiation. It hasn’t eaten a Lump Grazer in nearly half of a local day but it has a longer time still before it begins to starve. Between its newly enhanced digestive system and cooperative pack, it can, or could, if it had a consciousness, count on its future survival.The Flounder Feeders have developed a stronger digestive system. There are many pieces it isn’t capable of digesting and most of those it does hold nutrients that go to waste rather than being processed but this is an improvement to their individual odds of survival. The population was set to increase a fair amount but a sudden, violent burst of deep radiation caused a noticeable decline instead.>1/3
>>5400748What’s worse, the Latcher has made a powerful adaptation of its own. Previously a petty nuisance limited to the slowest Lump Grazers, natural selection has seen their eggs, too small to sense by vibration, achieve buoyancy and attach themselves to almost every creature in the narrow band ecosystem. Once these hatch, the Latchers penetrate the flesh beneath, digging themselves in, and leech nutrients from the early, heartless, open circulatory system beneath. Each Latcher has a very small impact, if any at all, but there are many eggs and each Latcher is prone to lay a dozen of its own eggs if it can survive.This has resulted in a parasite-filled ecosystem. One the Flounder Feeders, with the durability of their shells and relatively streamlined digestive systems, are suffering little from. Against what would’ve been a near-extinction event if they were less protected, in combination with earlier radiation, their population has only been reduced by half. They’re in a vulnerable state but far from extinction. Much more worrying is the Latcher’s effect on the Lump Grazer population. Now that they’re infested by nutrient-leeching parasites on top of their several predators, the Lump Grazers have declined and with them, every predator has felt hunger pangs. For countless generations, the Lump Grazers have gotten by on simply requiring very little and reproducing rapidly, but under such extreme selection pressures, an adaptation is inevitable. The Ripple Trackers are better off than unshelled organisms but their agility and senses mean nothing to the eggs, which readily, if slowly, crack their exteriors. Their already massive population and sheer efficiency ensures their continued survival but it is much less comfortable than before.>2/3
>>5400749Last, after untold millions of generations of hellish struggle, the final Double Mouther floats in the waves. It is riddled with Latchers, wracked with cancer, and hasn’t eaten in a full local day. Its bud, the closest thing it had to a companion, has atrophied for lack of nutrition and detached to decay long ago. Both tongues lap the moisture, searching for some means of preserving its wretched life one moment longer, but despite its gnawing instincts, despite the ancient imperatives of its biology, it comes to a stop. On some existential level, the Double Mouther understands that it has lost. For its kind, there is no hope and for it, there is no future. In the last motion ever made by its species, it chooses to roll over, stop swimming, and let the eternal, crushing pressure pull its body into the abyss. This is the end of its evolutionary strife, and it is content.For the first and last time, the Double Mouther has known peace.The Double Mouther has gone extinct and the environment has changed radically since the first Flounder Feeder emerged. If it doesn’t wish to follow its former rival’s example, it must stay strong and continue to adapt.>How should the Flounder Feeders evolve?>3/3
>>5400752>Learn to feed on Radiation. If the Population of Prey is gonna continue to decline then we need to find an alternative Food Source that can help us stretch our nutrients even further.Develop poisonous mucus that we can coat ourselves with to kill off parasites.Might be something for the future. Maybe we will have to find a way to devour those parasites as well.
>>5400752>Evolve a stronger, thicker shellFuck parasites. Doubles as radiation protection and wards off other predators too. >The Double Mouthers are no moreRest in peace. It may turn out that they were smart to die out now.
>>5400752>Have a canal for expel waste efficientlyour waste will likely effect the enviroment in some way or another
>>5400752Honestly. I wanna say take advantage of this niche opening up a bit and adapt to maybe feed off the parasites as cleaner speciesWe can always adapt away from it in the future or even later down the line Kinda like >>5400755Was suggesting
>>5400752>Develop a way to feed on any Latchers that get stuck on our shell
