Everybody poops
The entire PolyFish food web runs on one humble mechanic. The first thing that happens in the whole simulation, before a single fish, is a piece of poop falling out of the sky.
The very first thing that happens in PolyFish, before you see a single fish, is a piece of poop falling out of the sky.
The logo fades, and down it comes from just above the top of the screen. It lands on the seafloor, a stalk of kelp sprouts where it hit, and a fish comes swimming over to investigate, toward the food, and toward you. That is the opening shot. I am aware of how that sounds. But it is not a gag. That falling poop is the single most important object in the entire ecosystem, and I mean that completely seriously.
Here is how the whole simulation actually works, and it all traces back to that. The critters do three things: eat, poop, reproduce. When one of them poops, the poop drops, and when it lands it gets a roll of the dice. It might sprout into a strand of kelp. The kelp is the food. It feeds the manatees directly, and it gives off the little bits the fish swim around eating. So plants come from poop, and plants are what everything else is living on. The fish even get pulled toward poop, because that is where the food is about to be, which means the dolphins, who eat the fish, are really just feeding downstream of the poop too. Pull the thread on any creature in there and it leads back to something pooping.
Now the part that taught me the most. At first, every poop that landed turned into a plant. Seemed reasonable. It was a disaster. Kelp forests exploded across the whole floor, which meant unlimited food, which meant the fish bred without end, which meant a screen so packed with fish the whole thing choked. One innocent little rule, “poop becomes a plant,” quietly tried to end the world.
So the fix is that dice roll. When a poop lands, it might become a plant, it might bounce and try again, or it might just vanish. That one bit of randomness is the whole reason the ocean doesn’t bury itself in kelp. It is the tiny knob that keeps the entire system breathing.
That is the thing I love about building little worlds like this. The most undignified mechanic you can imagine turns out to be the one holding everything else up, and a single dice roll on a piece of poop is the difference between a living ocean and a dead, overgrown mess. Everybody poops. In here, it is the only reason anybody gets to live.
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