The day is your turn. The water runs for half a minute, then stops dead at dusk and the Council opens - what happened, what it cost, who matters, and what you do next. There is no timer on it. Food is a real store: your kin carry back what they graze, the House eats every day, and the bar tells you how many days you have left. At the table you give the orders of the House - foragers, quarriers, guards, breeders - and raise six Works on your seat, from kelp beds to a coral weir that hunters die on and that wears down as they try. Danger is fair by design: nothing arrives unannounced, packs scale with your own standing and are capped, and no event in this game can end a House outright. Leave it undirected and it dies anyway, slowly, after a dozen warnings you chose to ignore. Swear the Breakaway at the height and two of your best carry the blood into the next House when this one finally falls.
The agency layer this build grew from, at its original pace. Anoint a champion, choose consorts, draft patron boons, commit to a hunt through a pre-battle lightbox, and send envoys to rival Houses for a pact or an uneasy peace.
The information layer this build grew from. Live trait histograms, a genome-and-ancestry dossier for every kin, and scouting reports on rival Houses - without the champion, boons or diplomacy of the Reins.
The original pool. Evolving grazers and hunters, day and night, generative sound. Feed it, stir it, watch what evolves. No goal but wonder.
Adopt a creature. Found a House. Protect the bloodline as it passes from ward to heir, and see how many generations your line survives.
A persistent world with seasons, red tides, comets and scavengers. Keeper powers, essence, tasks, a written chronicle — and it remembers you between visits.
Now you are the creature. Eat, dash, evolve mutation by mutation, bond for heirs — and when you die, your heir carries everything you became. The game.
Now be the world. Deep time: species split and die out on a living Tree of Life, cataclysms fall, the Chronicle writes the mythology — and if life goes far enough, something down there awakens and watches you back.