The world is still computed every 2 minutes of the way. Nothing is skipped, only not shown.
ProtoPrairie
A strip of Texas prairie that evolves its own animals
You're standing in the grass on the Blackland Prairie near Dallas, with the soil cut open at your feet. The sun rises and sets on Dallas's real clock; temperature and rain follow Dallas's monthly averages.
Every animal is a Protobyte built from 18 genes. They eat, mate and die on their own, and their young inherit a mix of their parents' genes with small mutations.
Nobody designs them. A broad mouth pays off on grass, a fine beak on seed heads, spade claws on roots and grubs underground, wings and a wide gape on insects. Each organ costs energy, so lineages split into grazers, seed-eaters, diggers and flyers.
Visitors belong to the place: a hawk by day, an owl and now and then a coyote at night. They take the animals that stand out: no cover, a coat that doesn't match the ground, a lantern lit in the dark. The ground turns green, gold and black after a burn, and coats follow.
In dry cured grass a burn can start, run downwind and leave the ground black; the grass comes back greener. A new lineage is named after two days apart.
The night sky is the real one over Dallas at that hour: the stars, the Milky Way, the moon in its true phase and place, the bright planets, and meteor showers on their real dates (shown as on a dark night, without the city's glow). Moonlight lights the land. Fireflies rise at dusk from late April to early July.
Animals live about a day, so a season is around a hundred generations. That's why Next season lands on a changed roster; the trip is summed up in the events feed.
Try: tap an animal · 2 min/day to watch a day pass · Light a burn · press H for a clean wall, F for full screen