Descent is an adaptation of Conway’s Game of Life, the cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Horton Conway. It explores how simple local rules can produce complex, unpredictable behaviour.
Life
A living cell survives with two or three living neighbours. A dead cell becomes living with exactly three. All other living cells die.
Design
The Design module is where new colonies are made. Draw a starting colony on the grid and submit it to add it to the colony library. Submitted colonies can then be added to Co-culture and allowed to interact with other colonies.
Memory. Palimpsest shows the most recent lineage to occupy each place. Collected memory accumulates repeated occupation through the run. Log and Rescale change only its display, not the stored counts.
Culture
In Co-culture, colonies can be placed beside or on top of one another before the run begins. Living cells retain lineage; newborn cells inherit lineage from their living neighbours.
Memory. Palimpsest shows the most recent lineage to occupy each place. Collected memory accumulates repeated occupation through the run. Log and Rescale change only its display, not the stored counts.
Descent With
Z toggles 1×/4× zoom.
Run culture starts the culture or resumes it after Stop; it does not restart the level.
Rerun culture restores the level to Generation 0, returns With to his original starting position, resets Beacon Time, and immediately starts the culture again.
R is the keyboard shortcut for Rerun culture, so after With dies you can press R to immediately try again.
R and Z are ignored while typing in name or comment fields.
Recipes
Stop defines the endpoint of a culture. A recorded culture can enter Recipes of the Ancestors and be run again.