Every animal here came from a step that worked

About the Ark

A shared animal world, simulated from field guides

The Ark is one animal world that everyone shares and sees the same way. It is a simulation you can look around in 3D: tap an animal to meet it, follow it, or read its life story.

Right now 2 animals of 2 species live aboard. Its world has seven regions, from the open ocean to the polar ice.

How animals arrive

Nobody places an animal by hand. You talk with an animal about something real in your life, try the step it suggests, and say how it went. When the step works, one of that animal's kind comes aboard and stays. The Ark shows species and counts; what anyone talked about is never shown.

How diets and breeding drive it

Each species' life on the Ark is based on its field guide in AnimalDex: what it eats, how many young it has and how long they take, when it is awake, whether it lives alone, in pairs or in groups, and how long it lives in the wild.

A predator eats only animals its field guide names as food, or a group they belong to, such as birds. Two adults of a kind raise young when there is food, one litter per breeding period. Animals with a known wild lifespan grow old, and a hunter that stays hungry too long starves. One Ark year passes every 14 real days.

The rules are simplified so that a small shared world can run. The Ark is a game based on each animal's field guide, not a scientific model.