The very first thing you do after creating your creature is to name it, the planet you are on, and more importantly, choose what kind of food it eats. The reason that choosing diet is so important is because in the realm of Spore, diet determines your behavior for a good chunk of the game. Herbivore could be considered good, omnivore could be considered neutral, and carnivore could be considered evil. For purposes of gameplay, carnivore is the easiest path to follow, as you can attack and eat other creatures along with eating random bits of meat. Herbivore, while still letting you attack creatures, won't let you devour the chunks they leave behind, making it a much slower prospect for leveling up.

Upon entering the dish, you will notice a few things. First off, there aren't really a lot of creatures as you start out. Creatures don't start appearing frequently until the later levels of the cell stage, so just eat random meat chunks or plant bits. They will give you one DNA apiece, and once you reach a certain amount, you will grow bigger and advance to the next level (quite literally, as you swim up one level in the oceans upon growing). Upon getting bigger, you'll find that there are now creatures inhabiting the same level as you.

Killing (and possibly devouring) other creatures does a few things for you. Most immediately, it removes a potential threat to your survival, since a lot of them are carnivores. The other obvious benefit is that the creature will either be devoured in one go (small creatures) or explode into chunks when dead (all other sizes) if you are a carnivore. This gives you DNA, furthering your advancement to the path of sentience. This is obviously only for carnivore creatures. For herbivore creatures, it's purely a defense mechanism.

Defeated cells also drop new parts, which is the key to evolving to the top of your form in the oceans. There's only 6 extra parts, but they range from spikes to faster ways to swim, and each is an important way to make your cell more powerful. Perhaps the most important part is the proboscis, which allows herbivores and carnivores to be omnivores in the other stages, even if they don't have the capacity to be omnivores due to behavior.

That's the final aspect that one must keep in mind when playing through the cell stage. Depending on how aggressive you were, how much meat or plant material you ate, and how many creatures you killed, your behavioral pattern for the next stage will start in a different area. If you leaned towards carnivore, which is really easy to do, you will start in the carnivore area for Creature stage. Naturally, if you ate plants and avoided conflict, you will be an herbivore in the next stage, and if you were a balance of both, you'll be an omnivore.

Completing this stage your first time should get you three achievements if you followed this guide.

Creature stage unlocked

Play enough of the Cell stage to unlock the Creature stage




Completist

Gather all 6 cell parts in the cell stage




Landfall

Complete cell stage and take your first steps on land




You can also check out the Cell Stage trailer right here on Big Download. Now that you are done with roaming around in the murky waters of the ocean, it's time to walk on land! So prepare yourself to make friend and enemies and work your way towards civilization!