Video Game / Evolve Idle

Evolve is a browser based Idle Game created by Demagorddon. Begin as primordial ooze and evolve into a sapient species, advancing in technology, spreading across your planet, the stars, and eventually the universe itself.

Not to be confused with Evolve, the hero shooter.

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This game provides examples of:

• All There in the Manual: The site has a built in wiki that explains races, plasmids, achievements, and everything else you need.
• All Trolls Are Different: Trolls are a possible species in the game, described as large, humanoid species with regenerative powers. True to form, they have a species trait that helps 4 wounded units recover at a time instead of one. Funnily enough, they also have an Achievement that references the other type of Troll.
• Alternate Techline: The game's Technology Tree mostly mirrors the development of human tech, but there are exceptions: for instance, the Internet usually becomes available before television and interstellar travel is a prerequisite for inventing the chainsaw (which is Lampshaded in the Flavor Text).
• Alternate Universe: After destabilizing a black hole, causing the universe to blow up the player can select a different universe to play in, each with its own effects on gameplay. There are standard universes, universes where everyone is evil, universes where magic is real and can be harnessed and exploited, a universe made of antimatter, and more.
• Apocalypse How: MAD is a Class 6, Black Hole Resets are a class X-4.
• Artistic License - Astronomy: To land and work on Sirius B you need to build several special structures that defend you against the immense gravity. However, by that point in the game you have already been working on a neutron star and a black hole — which have even higher surface gravity — without the need for such structures.^note Possibly justified for the black hole if you have been working in orbit around it, rather than flying straight to it. In the case of the neutron star, which you mine for neutronium, no such justification is possible.
• Artistic License – Biology: Plasmids and phage provide a collection bonus to resources just being there and can be used to purchase permanent CRISPR upgrades that carry over to all subsequent races, even if the universe itself is blown up.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The fourth main prestige mechanic is ascension, and it involves, well, ascending beyond your physical bodies and becoming beings of pure energy. Doing so allows you to create your own custom race.
• Asteroid Miners: A natural part of progression involves sending mining ships to the asteroid belt to mine iron, iridium, and Elerium.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Yeti are an option on tundra planets. Amusingly, one of their positive traits is blurry, which provides a bonus to spy operations because it's harder to capture one on any sort of film.
• Bigger Is Better: Inverted. The Large trait is considered negative, and the race requires more materials to build things. In-game, this translates to having higher cost creep leading to faster Diminishing Returns for Balance. Small races on the other hand have a lowered cost creep.
• Bigger on the Inside: A Warehouse upgrade that you can discover after you build a Supercollider and provides extra storage space.
• Blessed with Suck: Balorgs are covered in hellfire, making them terrifying opponents in battle. Unfortunately nobody will trade with them as a result of this.
• Cap: Can be increased with warehouses or special buildings like fuel depots, crates, containers, and plasmids/phage from previous runs.
• Cat Folk: The Cath are a race of humanoid cats. They're carnivorous, which means that they do not use agriculture, and their unemployed are instead replaced with Hunters that gather food. Like many cats they like to laze in the heat, which gives them a 10% production penalty when it's hot.
• Challenge Run: After the first prestige reset the player has the option to select "challenge genes" that provide debuffs that disable things like manual trade or manual crafting. Completing achievements with these challenge genes active nets the player mastery, which provides a resource income bonus for all subsequent runs. The more challenge genes that are selected (up to four), the higher reward.
• Christmas Elves: During Christmas season, newly created elven civilizations start at the North Pole, and are treated as slavers.
• Cold Iron: Fey races like the Dryad and Satyr get a 25% penalty to iron mining thanks to raw iron being toxic to them.
• Colonized Solar System: The various planets can (and indeed must eventually be) colonized and mined for rare resources.
• Commonplace Rare: Water is unlocked much, much later in the game than one would expect. It only appears at all as a resource in the True Path, and even then it can only be obtained from Enceladus rather than on Earth.
• Crack Defeat: Even if your army has a massive advantage over the enemy forces in an operation, the advantage and chance of victory is never 100%. As such, there's still the small but possible chance that your far stronger army can get defeated.
• Creating Life: The purpose of the game. Numerous races and biomes are available.
• Demon of Human Origin: One of the last resets available is Demonic Infusion, in which you sacrifice your civilization to infuse yourself with demonic power and become a Lord of Hell.
• Devil, but No God: Most universes have a dimension outright called the Hell Dimension, as well as Hell planets (with an orbital period of 666 days) where the player can evolve demons. Inverted in the evil universe, where Hell worlds are replaced with Eden worlds and the demons are replaced with angelic beings like cherubs. The Hell dimension is unchanged though.
• Double Unlock: Starting with when you leave the Solar System, most major steps forward in the game requires one of these.
  • The Bioseeding prestige method is the first example you are going to meet. You first need to research a good few technologies in the tech tree, some of which require at least 1 level of Supercollider in your ARPA projects, until you can build the Genesis Ship. Then, you need to construct the dock for the ship, which will take a lot of resources. Then, you can finally start building the probes for the Bioseeder Ship and the ship itself — which consists of 100 segments that need to be crafted individually. Only then can you do a Bioseed reset.
  • A Black Hole reset requires you to research a Stellar Engine, build all 100 segments of it, then research a Mass Ejector to improve the Engine's power and use it for a long time (possibly a few Real Life days on your first try) until you the conditions for the reset are met.
  • To unlock the Andromeda galaxy, you need to build a Jump Ship requiring a massive amounts of resources to explore a wormhole. Only then can you build a Gate — made of a whopping 200 segments — that allows regular travel to Andromeda.
  • Ascension is even worse, requiring a rather expensive research, then an expensive survey for a site, a space elevator that must be built in segments, then a gravity dome that must also be built in segments, followed by an ascension machine that must also be built in segments.
  • Deep Hell is similarly locked behind a vault that requires 100 soul gems to unlock, then jams and needs to be repaired with a vast amount of orichalcum. Further access to the Spire is locked behind a pair of massive towers constructed out of soul gems and scarletite.
• Draconic Humanoid: The Dracnid race is an avian race descended from large scaly flying creatures and tend to be anti-social and greedy. This allows them to have a larger maximum money storage and lowered small housing cost creep, but their medium housing cost creep is increased.
• Dragon Hoard: The Dracnid race's major positive trait is being hoarders, which allows them to have an extra 20% on bank storage.
• Dumb Muscle: The Ogre race is dumb but tough. Their lack of intelligence makes all knowledge costs 5% higher but their strength and stamina increases all their mining production by 25%.
• Dyson Sphere: Zigzagged. Researching the Dyson Sphere will unlock the Dyson Swarm research, allowing you to create a Dyson Swarm to harvest the Sun's energy (which was closer to Dyson's original idea anyway), mentioning that "a Dyson Sphere turns out to be completely impractical, if not impossible". Later in the interstellar phase you can build a Dyson Net around a star, which can be fully upgraded into a Dyson Sphere in the late game for an achievement.
• Early Game Hell:
  • Your first run will always be longer and much more tedious than subsequent runs, as you will not have any production-boosting Plasmids, nor will you be able to unlock Theology and its associated upgrades to boost the effects of said plasmids as well as other resource gains.
  • Some races have a much tougher early game than others thanks to their negative racial traits. Examples are Humans^note increased soldier training time and increased crafting cost and Wolven^note increased basic housing cost creep but decreased medium/larger housing cost creep — and the early-game is almost always basic housing until Cottage is unlocked
• End of the World as We Know It: The first reset option is Mutually Assured Destruction, which wipes the planet clear of life, allowing you to evolve into another species. The Black Hole Reset option involves dumping exotic matter into a black hole to destabilize it, blowing up the universe.
• Enemy Mine: It's highly inadvisable to have two foreign powers with less than 20% relations with you, as they will team up to attack you with far stronger forces.
• Evil Counterpart Race: Black hole resetting into an Evil Universe grants you mostly the same races as a normal universe, but everyone is evil. Gathering wood is replaced with Slaughter the weak for their bones and structures like houses, cottages, and wardenclyffes are replaced with lairs, dens of evil, and Towers of Babel respectively. The warmonger penalty is now a buff and going too long without attacking an enemy will result in your underlings plotting to overthrow you for your perceived weakness. Interestingly, hell worlds are now Eden Worlds and the races that evolve on them are Angelic genus races like Seraph and Unicorns.
• Export Save: You can copy the 8KB+ save file from a window or download it and paste it to restore it. The game will even periodically asked if you've exported your save data recently in case something happens and you lose your progress or want to roll back to an earlier point in your races development.
• The Fair Folk: The two Fey races, Dryads and Satyrs can be evolved on Forest Planets. Their Elusive trait prevents their spies from being caught altogether, but their Iron Allergy trait decreases their iron mining output by 25%.
• Fantasy Metals: Many different types are available to be mined or crafted:
  • Mithril unlocks after reaching space and requires alloy and iridium to craft.
  • Adamantite is unlocked after reaching Alpha Centauri and must be mined by droids.
  • Infernite can only be found in the Hell dimension and surveyors must be protected by troop patrols to survive the demons that live there.
  • Bolognium and Vitelroy unlock after reaching Andromeda and trading with the non-hostile aliens there.
  • Orichalcum is unlocked later in Andromeda and has to be mined from a dangerous system with high pirate activity.
  • Scarletite is found in the deep hell region after studying the Codex Infernium. A special forge has to be constructed in hell to craft it from iron and orichalcum and it can't be freely crafted like other materials (so you can't dump resources into it to get some when you need it, you have to wait for it to build up naturally).
• Fear of Thunder: The Cacti race are easily startled as their racial weakness, which causes their morale to drop by a huge 12% during thunderstorms.
• Fiery Salamander: One of the races you can evolve into on a hot planet.
• First Contact Faux Pas: Your first contact with aliens in the Andromeda galaxy will result in your scout ship being destroyed after a failed attempt to communicate. The Xenolinguistics tech will alleviate future problems with the non-hostile race.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Begin as primordial ooze, evolve into basic cavemen, and before long you may end up conquering entire galaxies.
• Glass Cannon: The Sharkin species has a trait called Apex Predator, which gives them +25% Combat Rating and +50% Hunting production. The tradeoff is that they cannot wear any armor at all, meaning that they'll be taking heavy losses in combat even on a victory.
• Godwin's Law: Invoked by name via an achievement made by unlocking the internet with toxic trolls.
• Gray Rain of Depression: Several races get a weather penalty to morale whenever it's raining.
• Hard Mode Perks: Challenge genes allow the player to play races that have nerfs like not being able to smelt steel or are joyless (resulting in a heavy penalty to production) but completing a run with one will give you a bonus on subsequent playthroughs, such as increased steel production
• Healing Factor: The Troll race has the Regenerative ability, which allows them to heal much quicker. This allows four wounded soldiers to recover at one go instead of one, cutting down soldier recovery times to a quarter.
• Hell Has New Management: It's possible to have your troops find and defeat the Demon Lord in the Hell Dimension, then infuse yourself with demonic energy and become the new Lord of Hell in a new form of prestige reset.
• Human Resources: On Hell worlds some resources like wood are replaced with bones and flesh, which are obtained by "slaughtering the weak".
• Human Sacrifice: Well, Mantis Sacrifice in this case. The Mantids have the racial ability to sacrifice their own citizens as an altar offering, which kills a citizen (leaving empty slot until a new citizen arrives) but gives a production or combat boon that lasts for a period of time.
• Humans Are Average: Actually averted. Humans have their own positive and negative traits just like the other races. If anything, they're one of the worse races to use for the very first run because their advantages only come into play during the Globalized stage^note faster gene sequencing, smaller ARPA costs which will not be important thanks to being near prestiging via MAD, while their disadvantages^note increased crafting cost and soldier training time both affect the game speed far earlier.
• Humans Are Divided: Humans are among the few species with the "diverse" trait, which provides a malus to soldier training since it makes harder to work together as a cohesive unit.
• Humans Are White: During the evolution phase humans are described as having pink skin specifically.
• Indian Burial Ground: Defied in one random flavor text event, which says your workers found an ancient burial ground, prompting you to relocate construction to another location.
  An ancient burial ground was found while digging a foundation. You wisely order the ground filled to avoid disturbing your ancestors' rest.
• Industrialized Mercury: The innermost planet in your system (revealed to be Mercury if you play as humans) cannot host a permanent population, but it can be used for power generation and to facilitate the construction of the Dyson Swarm — and, oddly enough, for space casinos which are unlocked later in the game.
• Interface Spoiler: If you go through with the Valdi challenge gene and decode your genus, you'll get to see most race's unique weaknesses. This includes "Pathetic," which mentions other demons, spoiling that there are demonic races, like the Imps.
• Joke Character:
  • The Valdi race, which you get in the "Genetic Dead End" challenge. They're even considered "a genetic disaster" and have a multitude of other races' negative traits that severely impact gameplay.
  • The Sludge, who star in the "Failed Experiment" challenge have it even worse than the Valdi. In addition to having every single negative trait in the game, they have a unique Major Trait named Ooze, which weakens the effect of Mastery and Theology bonuses alongside inflicting a penalty to workers. They are also incapable of using the MAD reset, and can only remove only one of their many negative traits via Genetics (said removal costs 10x as many Genes as normal, and cannot remove Ooze)
• LEGO Genetics: Progressing far enough lets you add or subtract traits from your race with plasmids. Eventually you can even create your own custom race.
  • A CRISPR upgrade allows you to remove racial traits, allowing you to shed your racial nerf mid to late game, if you so choose. Another one allows you to gain traits from other animals in the same genus, allowing for example a human race to spend some plasmids for Elven studiousness and Orc toughness.
• Luck-Based Mission:
  • Whether or not your army wins or loses in combat, the amount of troops injured/killed, and the amount and type of resources gained are randomized. The first two can be tweaked in your favour with stronger forces and better armor upgrades respectively, but you can never have a 100% advantage and there is still a small chance for a Crack Defeat even with stronger advantage.
  • Spy Espionage missions always have a risk chance to fail, which is never 0%. Even a low-risk influence operation carries around a 25% chance to fail.
• Mad Scientist: Mad Science can be unlocked after unlocking steel and aluminum. The flavor text comments that "the greatest leaps in science are often made by "misunderstood" individuals." Completing the research unlocks Wardenclyffes.
• Man-Eating Plant: The Achievement "Madagascar Tree" requires you to play as nightmarish, flesh-eating Ents, which can be done be using Ents and getting Fanaticism for the previous run's Cath. Later on, Carnivorous was moved to a shared species trait, which also changed the achievement's requirement to obtaining Blood Thirst from a previous run's Sharkin.
• Magical Land: There's a Magic Universe type where Magic is a 5th fundamental force of reality. Most jobs have lower production, but output can be boosted by bolstering it with Mana. Special mana-based technologies replace or augment the standard tech tree.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Certain races have traits that drastically change gameplay.
  • The Cath's Major Trait is Carnivorous, and lack Farmers or agriculture upgrades and buildings entirely. Instead, their unemployed are replaced with Hunters that gather food. Their food also decays past a certain point. This was later moved to an entire shared carnivore species category.
  • Ents like other plant races produce Amber naturally and use it instead of Stone, removing the need for Quarries and workers. Their "Kindling Kindred" Major Trait also removes Wood and Plywood as resources altogether, instead slightly increasing the resource/money cost for buildings that would normally use them. As such, they do not have any Lumber- or Stone- related facilities, occupations, or upgrades at all.
  • The Sporgar are a parasitic fungus that, like other fungi, compost wood instead of farming for food, and have zero population growth if it's raining. However, they also have no population growth if it's not windy. Instead, their primary way of growing population involves infecting and controlling enemies and thus have a chance to increase their population whenever they attack an enemy state.
  • The Fanaticism upgrade allows your race to obtain the Major Trait of your previous run's race. Prior to Carnivorous being made into a shared species category, this made Carnivorous Ents possible, who do not need the usual Farming, Lumberjacking, or Quarrying professions, buildings, or upgrades entirely.
  • Seraphs are Always Lawful Good angelic beings that cannot go to war^note Not with each other, that is — demons are fair game and they start the game with Unification, a game-changing tech usually unlocked in the midgame.
• Mushroom Man: The Shroomi race is a species of sentient toxic mushrooms that prefer dark places. They compost instead of grow agriculture, cannot reproduce when it's raining, and get a morale penalty when it's sunny but a bonus when it's cloudy. As a result of their toxic physiology and resistance they gain a production bonus to cement plants and factories.
• New Game Plus: Several prestige systems are present in the game, starting from Mutually Assured Destruction, then Bioseeding a planet, then overloading a Black Hole to reset the universe, and finally Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Our Elves Are Different: They are one of the humanoid evolutionary branches. They have a bonus to knowledge production, but gets less effective trade deals due to their haughty attitude. There's also a Christmas version as well.
• Our Demons Are Different: Imps and Balorgs are options on hellscape worlds. Lumber, furs, and plywood are replaced with bones, flesh, and boneweave, respectively. Rather than harvesting these from the land you slaughter the weak for their flesh and bones. Food is replaced with souls and the warmonger penalty that comes from attacking enemies too often instead gives a small morale boost.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are one of the races that you can evolve. They're small red humanoid creatures with a fascination for candles, and are great at packing stuff (which gives them extra container space) but don't trust banks (which reduces their bank space). As they're based on the traditional goblin-like variant and not the D&D variant, they're classified as mammals, not reptiles.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Orcs are available from the start of the game, branching off humanoids.
• The Phoenix: Phoenixes are a race that can evolve on Volcanic planets. True to form, they have an ability which gives a chance for soldiers to Auto-Revive when killed, this increases if it's hot and decreases if it's cold.
• Planet Heck: Hellscape Planets. They are never cold, and have a debilitating -75% penalty to all agriculture. The special races that can be evolved on such planets are the Balorgs and the Imps, both of which are evil demonic races that eat souls for sustenance.
• Playing with Fire: The Salamander race can breathe fire. Beneficial because it allows them to operate smelters with a constant bonus and no fuel.
• Poisonous Person: The Shroomi are a race of toxic mushroom people. Their toxicity and toxic resistance allows them to be more productive in polluted workplaces, increasing production from Factories by 20% and Cement Plants by 30%.
• Power of the Void: In the Magic universe the Mana Syphon superprojects replace the black hole reset, as all matter is exotic in this universe. Syphons breach the veil between universes and pull magic directly out of the void. Each one will destabilize the universe a bit, which can eventually lead to a vacuum collapse.
• Precursors: After the first reset point you can build temples devoted to the race that came before you, choosing to study them or revere them as gods and attempt to mimic them. On third run onwards you can find evidence of a race that predates them on the moon even if you never made it into space as that species.
• Reset Button Ending: There are a few different versions of these. You're going to be having a lot of these, as it's the only way to get meaningful amounts of plasmids and phage.
• Ret-Gone: The conclusion to the black hole reset, by proxy of you effectively resetting the entire universe. Your next species will (somehow) remember what you were, though!
• Riddling Sphinx: Guarding the bridge in deep hell is a Sphinx. Your two options are bribing it with soul gems and a large amount of supplies or solving complex mathematical riddles.
• Shout-Out: So many that it Its own page.
• Shown Their Work: In evil universes the hell races are replaced with celestial races and hell planets are replaced with Eden worlds. The Seraph call their home world Araboth. Araboth is the 7th heaven of Judaism, which is home to the Seraphim.
  • The in-game solar system is our own with different names. References range from the obvious (a red planet that's the best candidate for colonization — can you say Mars?) to the obscure (a dwarf planet inside the asteroid belt, with an equator 1800+ miles long — a dead ringer for Ceres).
• Soul Eating: Wendigos, as well as Imps and Balorgs have souls replacing the standard food resource.
• Space Pirates: Travelling to Andromeda unlocks a few different solar systems, all of which are threatened by alien pirates. There's even an achievement for containing the threat by eliminating pirate activity entirely.
• Spiritual Successor: To Kittens Game. The game shares several elements with Kittens Game especially once the player evolves their race, with a need to balance food and workers to prevent your citizens from dying. There's also a a similar morale, housing, assignment, and research mechanic. Later on, space travel is unlocked just like in Kittens Game.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Unlocking Andromeda means having to contend with alien pirates. The player can roll out scout craft, corvettes, cruisers, and dreadnoughts to combat them.
• Stealth Expert: Some of the races have abilities that decrease the chances for their spies to get caught and executed:
  • Yetis have the "Blurry" major trait, which decreases the chance for Espionage Missions to fail. Their surveyors are also 25% less likely to get killed.
  • The Fey races in the Dryad and Satyr have the "Elusive" genus trait, which prevents their spies from being caught at all, be it Espionage Missions or random events.
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: The Tortoisian race has both Scales (decreases number of soldier deaths in combat) and Armored (-25% soldier deaths), making them durable in war. They however have the Slow trait, which makes the game run 10% slower.
• Take That!: The name of the achievement for building 99 Supercolliders ("Black hole? No Hole") and the associated flavor text ("Scence 1, Fearmongers 0") refer to disproven claims that new particle accelerators (especially the LHC) would produce dangerous micro black holes.
• Tesla Tech Timeline: Relatively early on the player can construct Wardenclyffes, a reference to the real world Wardenclyffe Tower, designed and built by Nikola Tesla. Shortly after they're built they can be powered by electricity, increasing the amount of knowledge the player can have. A later upgrade, the Tesla Coil, makes them even more effective. The flavor text even quotes Tesla: "I don't care that they stole my idea . . I care that they don't have any of their own"
• Troll: Invoked with the "Godwin's Law" achievement where you need to "Unlock the Internet with Toxic Trolls". This is done by "creating the Internet while using the Troll race with the Toxic trait gained from fanaticism towards your previous run's Shroomi".
• Tower of Babel: Referenced by demonic races (or anyone in the evil universe) where the wardenclyffes are replaced with Towers of Babel, complete with flavor text that reads "A vantage point to challenge the heavens." Since there appears to be Devil, but No God, your race isn't then stricken with different languages and forced to disperse since nobody can understand each other anymore, as in the original story.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The Hell Dimension turns the game from an idle/resource game into a Real-Time Strategy game, where you need to manage the demonic threat level with frequent troop patrols and bolster your fortress so it doesn't get overrun.
• Villain World: A black hole reset allows you to create different kinds of universes, one of which is evil. In this case every world is inhabited by evil warmongers who use demon mechanics except hell worlds, which are now Eden worlds inhabited by angelic beings.
• Violence is the Only Option: Combat is by far one of the best ways to obtain resources especially on your first run, as obtaining resources without combat is usually excruciatingly slow. This is pretty much encouraged with some races, such as the Sporgar who primarily reproduce from combat, or the Balorgs who get a bonus from Warmonger, have a much higher combat rating, capture slaves from combat, but have a huge disadvantage of being unable to trade at all.
• Void Between the Worlds: The magic universe lacks the standard black hole reset mechanic since all matter is exotic in that universe. Instead a new ARPA project called Mana Syphons are available, which will breach the veil between universes to siphon magic directly from the void. Constructing syphons will destabilize the universe and eventually lead to a vacuum collapse.
• You Nuke 'Em: The first prestige option is Mutually Assured Destruction, which gives you the command (and even comes with a failsafe on/off button) to press a nuke button to destroy the world and reset it. Using it actually causes an explosion to engulf the entire screen.