Play SimEarth: The Living Planet Online

Summary

SimEarth: The Living Planet lets you steer an entire world through its 10 billion‑year saga, nudging single‑celled ancestors toward a future among the stars. I can reshape continents, trigger tidal waves or earthquakes, and even move whole mountain ranges, all while watching ecosystems blossom or collapse.

The control panels are absurdly precise – atmospheric gases can be tweaked to three decimal places, drift rates set, and life‑form mutation rates dialed in. Helpful gadgets like oxygen generators and a monolith (a nod to *2001: A Space Odyssey*) sit at my disposal, but every action drains a limited pool of energy units that must be replenished as the planet matures.

Threats are relentless: pollution, disease, famine, war and runaway global warming can all undo progress, while natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires add extra pressure. Each calamity costs energy, forcing careful budgeting.

The game offers a “Random Planet” start, eight goal‑based scenarios (including Aquarium, Cambrian Earth, Mars and Ice Planet), and a quirky Daisy World mode that mirrors James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis – the scientist even consulted on the project.

Life evolves from bacteria and amoebas (the SNES version’s starting point) through radiates, dinosaurs, birds and mammals, eventually reaching a Nanotech Age where machine life appears and interplanetary travel becomes possible.

Storyline

SimEarth: The Living Planet (often just SimEarth) puts you in charge of a planet’s entire biosphere. The toughest goal is to guide a primitive life form all the way to sentience and then to an advanced civilization.

The ultimate scenario, labeled Earth 2XXX, throws you into a future Earth plagued by self‑replicating robots and nuclear war. You must rescue both life and civilization, and you even have the option to unleash a massive flood to aid the recovery.

When the dominant species finally reaches the Nanotech Age, they launch an Exodus, sending the whole population into space. This departure clears the way for other species on the planet to evolve toward sentience.