Spore in Space

283 Days

You are moss on the hull of a spacecraft. Endure the open void, then germinate.

How to play

ProtonemaGrowing filaments. Regrows biomass and heals, but only while nothing is actively striking you. No defense. Your calm-weather form.

Brood cellA tough pod that halves all damage. Cheap shelter for a single mild hazard. It only endures; it can't heal.

SporeSealed in its sporangium. Blocks nearly all damage, even stacked storms. But it's dormant: no growth, and viability slowly ebbs.

Shelter from the incoming hazard: brood for one mild threat, spore when storms stack or bite hard.

Snap back to protonema the instant it is calm, to heal and grow.

Or parry: tap Space (or the moss) right as a hazard strikes to deflect it for free and build your streak.

Every shelter spends biomass, and your final biomass is your germination score, so do not hide longer than you must.

Keys: 1 / 2 / 3 forms · Space parry · P pause · M mute

Storm front

The UV Season

Days 57 – 85

Checkpoint: adapt

Natural selection favors you. Choose one adaptation (click or press 1 / 2 / 3).

Press P to resume.

Every form and hazard you have met on the voyage. Sealed entries reveal themselves the first time you encounter them.

In a laboratory drawer, a colony of moss, older than roots, older than seeds. They wanted to know what it could survive.

They dried it, froze it to −196°, burned it with ultraviolet. Every stress that kills a plant. It folded inward, and held.

So they sent it higher than any green thing had ever gone.

Bolted to the outside of the hull, facing the open void. Two hundred and eighty-three days. Then, if anything was left, germinate.

click / Enter to continue

Two hundred and eighty-three days, and the moss came home alive. The lab cheered. Somebody brought cake.

Then someone re-checked the survival curve. It did not politely stop at 283 days. It kept climbing, right off the top of the page.

Extrapolated: five thousand six hundred days. Roughly fifteen years. "Oh," said the scientist, very quietly. "We may have stopped a little early."

So. Back outside you go, little moss. Mind the vacuum. See you in fifteen years or so.

click / Enter to continue

Vital signs across the voyage

Run stats

Leaderboard

#	Voyage	Days	Germ.	Score