How the Ark works

Captures bring animals aboard

When you photograph a real animal with AnimalDex and the capture identifies its species, one of its kind comes aboard the Ark. Each person can have up to two living animals of a species aboard: a pair. Capturing the same species again adds nothing while both are alive. If one dies, your next capture of that species brings a replacement.

Only species with a 3D model can come aboard. A capture of a species whose model isn't ready yet waits, and boards when it is.

Each animal shows who brought it, by @username, or as a Voyager when the person is under 18 or has no username. Where an animal was captured is never shown.

Two islands: the wild and the town

The wild island has regions from the open ocean and the coral reef to rainforest, grassland, desert, mountains and the polar ice. Each wild species lives in the region its field guide describes.

The town island has houses, farms and a zoo. Pets live in the houses, livestock and poultry on the farms, and animals photographed at a zoo live in its enclosures. Wild animals that live around people, such as house geckos, sparrows and mallards, live in the town's gardens, trees, canal and roofs.

Where an animal lives is set once, when it arrives, from the kind of place it was photographed in: in the wild, at home, on a farm or at a zoo. The place itself never reaches the Ark.

Steps keep them thriving

Every animal you capture also becomes an AI companion you can talk to. Bring it something real from your life and it answers from its own kind's point of view, then suggests one step to try. When you tell it the step worked, your animals of that kind aboard the Ark gain condition.

Condition has three bands: ordinary, good and prime. Each step that worked closes part of the gap to the top. A step that only partly worked raises nothing, and condition slowly fades again over weeks without steps. Young born aboard inherit part of their parents' condition, up to good.

Condition changes lives aboard: animals in prime condition breed every breeding period and ordinary ones less often, and a hunting predator takes the weakest prey first. The Ark shows only the band, never what anyone talked about.

Food chains from field guides

Who eats whom comes from each predator's field guide. Its diet names particular species, or groups such as birds, fish or insects. A named species becomes a food link. A group reaches every species of that group aboard, with three checks: an animal never eats its own species or genus, prey from a group must be no larger than the predator (smaller still when the guide says small prey), and the two must share a realm: sea, fresh water, land or air.

Every link keeps the exact words of the field guide it came from, so you can see why it exists.

A predator hunts only on its own island and in its own region, and a hungry one hunts the prey it comes across there, the weakest first. How often a predator needs a meal depends on its body mass, and cold-blooded hunters go longer between meals than warm-blooded ones. Pets, farm animals and the zoo's animals are fed by their keepers: they don't hunt and are never hunted. For the Ark's first two weeks, until about 25 November 2026, animals that came aboard are never hunted, to give populations a head start.

Plants, seeds, fruit, nectar, insects, worms and other small food in each region are background food. They feed animals without being counted aboard. A hunter with nothing it can eat and no background food goes hungry, and one that stays hungry too long starves.

See every food link aboard →

Breeding and young

Two adults of a species that live in the same place raise young when there is food for them. How many young, and how long they take to be born or to hatch, come from the field guide. When the guide doesn't say, the Ark uses a labelled estimate: the middle of the values stored for animals of the same class.

Egg layers lay clutches that hatch after their incubation; eggs don't count as animals and are never food. Young grow into adults over part of their lifespan, and each species has a limit set by its size, so small animals can become more numerous than large ones. Breeding stops at that limit.

Young are credited to the people who brought their parents, so one capture can start a family line that lasts for generations.

Seasons, days and lifespans

The Ark keeps its own calendar: one Ark year passes every 14 real days, each starting on 1 January, and the world moves on once an hour, so it has changed between your visits. A species whose field guide names breeding months or seasons breeds only then. One with no named season, or one that breeds all year, can breed at any time.

In the 3D world, animals the field guide calls nocturnal are out at night, diurnal ones by day, and crepuscular ones at dawn and dusk.

Animals with a known wild lifespan grow old and die of old age when they reach it. Lifespans run on the Ark's clock, so an animal that lives two years in the wild lives about four real weeks aboard. When the last animal of a species dies, that species is gone from the Ark until someone captures another.

What the Ark is, and what it isn't

The Ark is built from each animal's field guide in AnimalDex. Its rules are simplified so that one shared world can run for everyone, and it is not a scientific model: its numbers show how those rules play out aboard, not how many of an animal live in the wild. Who is aboard is whoever people have photographed, so the mix is not nature's: there are far more cats and dogs aboard than snow leopards.

Everything that decides life and death runs on AnimalDex's servers, the same for everyone. What you see in 3D, such as where an animal walks or when it turns its head, is drawn on your device and changes nothing.