OH GOD IT GROWS

How to play

Four verbs: feed it, grow organs, mutate, go extinct. Everything else is detail.

Play now →

The loop

01

Feed it

Tap the specimen in the jar. Every tap is biomass, which is the only currency in the game.

02

Grow organs

Organs make biomass on their own, forever, including while the game is closed. They will do most of the work.

03

Mutate

Hit a biomass milestone and the organism changes. You get two or three cards and pick one. It sticks for the rest of that life, and they stack. Fourteen of them, and the later ones sit further out than any early life can reach.

04

Go extinct

Kill the whole thing for genome, spend that on permanent traits, start again under a new epoch. Your first extinction always funds a trait and begins in the forgiving Kind Epoch.

Organs are not reflexes

People mix these up, so:

The three columns under your biomass count keep them separate: organs per second, per tap, reflex per second.

Mutations and hybrids

Every card rewrites the creature's body, its Latin name and its maths at the same time. Pure instinct and metastasize both make creatures that feed themselves well. Sentience does the opposite, because something that thinks about eating is slower at it.

Hybrids are secret combinations. Take the right cards inside a single life and you permanently unlock a gold card for every future life, plus bonus genome. Twelve exist, and the game does not tell you what they are. The later ones need cards from the far end of the tree, so they stay out of reach for a long time.

What it does tell you is how many pieces each one needs, and it names any piece you happen to be holding. So the creature you are already growing will let you know when you are close. If hunting is not your thing, genome buys a decoded recipe outright.

Nobody has published a complete list yet.

Extinction and genome

Extinction is the point. You are meant to do it over and over. Genome is permanent: every point you have ever earned adds 2.5% to production, and spending it buys traits like earlier mutations, free starting organs, or Second Opinion, which lets you take two cards at one fork instead of one. The first viable extinction pays at least 3 genome, enough to make a permanent choice immediately.

Each new life also rolls an epoch that bends the rules. One hands you enormous offline gains and useless tapping. Another gives you four times everything and then cuts your mutations off at five.

Colour morphs

Every card shifts the creature's pigment, so its colour ends up encoding the path you took. On top of that, each mutation carries a small chance of rolling something rarer: albino, melanistic, translucent, bioluminescent, iridescent, or gilded. They do nothing at all to your numbers. They are catalogued forever and gilded is a 4% roll of a 4% chance, so good luck.

The garden

When something dies you may keep it. Preserved specimens stand in the garden with their file attached: what they were, how much they weighed at the end, how far down the tree they got. Drag them around. Fit them with any regalia you have earned, including hats they never wore in life. Twenty four is the limit, so at some point keeping one means releasing another.

The end of the tree

The mutation tree runs to fourteen forks, ending somewhere past Terminal Classification. You will not reach the end on your first life, or your fourth. Each extinction buys enough power to push one or two forks deeper than last time, which is the actual shape of the game.

After the last fork, growth events keep arriving at ever larger thresholds. The creature does not stop. It was never going to stop.

Common questions

Is it free?

Yes. No ads, no account, nothing to download.

How long does it take?

A first life runs three to four hours of mostly idle play and will not finish the tree. Later lives settle into roughly one to two hours each as you reach deeper forks. Seeing everything takes well over twenty hours.

Does it run while closed?

Yes. Offline progress accrues at half rate for up to eight hours.

Where is my save?

In your browser, on your device. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. Browsers do clear local storage eventually, so use Export save code in Records if you care about keeping it.

Start feeding →