Thanks! I get that and short version: it’s not a realistic genetic model, it’s a trait-inheritance system with evolutionary flavor.

Each organism just has a set of numeric traits (size, armor, spikes, tentacles, aggression, reproduction rate, etc). There are no genes, codons, chromosomes, or genetic sequences. When organisms reproduce, offspring traits are basically noisy, heritable copies of the parents, with per-trait heritability and mutation.

Structural traits (like size) are strongly inherited, behavioral traits are more plastic. Big size, armor, high reproduction, etc all come with metabolic and mobility tradeoffs and mutation rates can go up under stress.

So it’s a phenotype-level evolutionary model, not a molecular genetics simulator. The goal is to get interesting evolutionary dynamics and tradeoffs, not to simulate real DNA or genetic architectures.

You can zoom into (and capture a snapshot of) each organism by clicking it and see a lot of details on traits.