As soon as you elevate yourself from cell to creature status, you should notice a few things. First of all, you'll be immediately taken to the creature creator where you can add legs and manipulate the spine of your creature. However, you are heavily limited in what you can do with this, as you only have three legs choices and whatever was used in the cell stage. Keep in mind that if you want certain things from the cell stage (such as electricity) you can't sell the cell parts. You'll never be able to get them back.

Upon finishing your design, you are sent out into the world. Your most immediate concerns should be finding food and interacting with creatures. Finding food is a fairly simple affair. If you are an herbivore, you can only eat fruit (unless you happened to keep a proboscis from the cell stage), and as a carnivore, you can only eat meat or eggs (once again, unless you have the proboscis). If you are an omnivore, you can eat anything you please! Your hunger is represented by the yellow bar on your portrait. If it gets low, you will need to eat. No worries, though, because food is always readily available and is also a great way to regain health after a fight.

Naturally, as you move throughout the wilderness, you will want to find better and more effective parts to aid in your quest to become more civilized. There are several ways to go about this. The easiest way is to just look for the bones of creatures less fortunate than yourself. They often sparkle, making them easy to spot. If you forage at one of these bones, you'll find a new part. The other method involves socializing or killing alpha members of a species. This alpha method only lasts so long, though, and eventually you will be reduced to trying to find the last few parts by scavenging.

The main avenue of progression is to socialize with or attack other creatures. Making a friend will net you a certain amount of DNA, and befriending a whole tribe will net you a fairly large amount (depending on how advanced they are compared to you). Likewise, attacking an enemy tribe will get you DNA per killed creature, and a large bonus for causing them to go extinct. Keep in mind that as a carnivore, you will be forced to either attack and kill other species or poach from them, making it harder to find food. You don't have to do this with every species, only enough to sustain yourself. However, you gain DNA much, much faster, thanks to your policy of aggression. You must also kill more creatures to force a species to go extinct than the amount you have to impress to ally with, meaning you will get more DNA from a full interaction with a species going carnivore than herbivore. Naturally, an omnivore can do anything they want.

There are four social options, and to socialize with a creature, you must choose the option they have and have at or above their skill level. In cases of groups, your group must be at or above the combined skill level of the group. For example, if you have four party members, each with level 1 in dancing, you could hold your own against a creature with level 4 in dancing. If he gets a buddy, though, you are screwed. Naturally, if you are going the social route, you will want to invest in as much social options as possible, especially since a socializing creature can have multiple skills themselves. And singing to a posing creature doesn't impress them all that much.

Much like socializing, there are four options to attack other creatures. Unlike socializing, each one has a very specific purpose. Bite is your base attack and recharges the fastest. It's also the only attack that automatically triggers. Charge rushes you in and stuns the enemy creature, leaving them open for more attacks. Strike deals a lot of damage, but is slow. Spit is a ranged attack that poisons the creature as well as keeping it at a range. Each of these attacks has their own specific place in combat, and you will need to learn how to use them.

Along with social and attack abilities, there's a set of neutral abilities along the bottom in blue that pertain to neither side. They are purely for movement and, in the case of call, for mating and changing your creature. Jump makes you hop, flight makes you fly, sneak makes you invisible, and so on. It's fairly straightforward and nearly impossible to misunderstand.

On top of regular creatures, you have Rogues and Epics. A Rogue creature is one without a nest. They usually have extremely powerful combat abilities and a ton of health, making them great for attacking other nests. A social creature, though, will probably want to max out their stats and get a party of their own race to impress other species. Befriending a Rogue is always preferable to killing one. Epics, on the other hand are something from the mind of a mad scientist. An extremely large creature with about a thousand hit points on average, it can kill creatures in huge swathes (and often does). It's the epitome of challenge in creature mode, and if you kill it, you are treated to a nice achievement.

After you have mastered the creature stage, it's time to move into the tribal stage! You've finally developed the ability to use tools, and it is now your goal to dominate the other tribes in the area to prove your dominance of the planet! If you followed the guide, you should get the following achievements:

Creature stage unlocked

Play enough of the Cell stage to unlock the Creature stage




Evolver

Finish Creature stage.




For an overview of the creature stage, check out the creature trailer here on Big Download. And prepare yourself for the next stage, because it's time to begin conquering the world!