Cell Lab: Evolution Sandbox
Cell Lab simulates few-celled organisms. It contains 45 challenges where the player is presented with an environment and has to design an organism that will survive in it. Solving challenges unlocks additional genes that can give cells new properties.
The encoding of the cells behaviour has been made as intuitive as possible without losing generality but it nevertheless takes a bit of effort to understand. Going through the provided tutorials carefully is recommended.
Cell Lab also contains an experimental mode where the user can set the parameters of the environment and put designed organisms in it to see how they multiply (or die). It is also possible to seed this environment with random genomes and once a viable genome has been seeded one can see how it slowly evolves through tiny mutations to an organism well adapted to the environment it is in.
It is then possible to change the environment to see how they re-adapt, fast forward the simulation, and finally to save and share it.
This simulation is not biologically realistic, all cells in Cell Lab only has one function, to swim, to eat, to collect sunlight, to float, etc . This is not how cells work in nature where one cell can do many things at once. This accuracy has been traded off to be able to make an interesting game. The cells have also been made to multiply very fast, this also for the enjoyment of the user.
What is realistic is the evolution taking place in this game. How species adapt to their environment and compete with each other to sometimes attain an equilibrium and sometimes extinction.
Features:
• 4 tutorials
• 45 challenges
• 16 types of cells with different functions
• 20 cell-modes per genome to program
• 22+ parameters in each cell mode
• Environment editor with 27 parameters
• Simulates and renders up to 1000 cells at decent frame rates
• Arbitrary number of cells and petri dish size in advanced mode
• Beautifully animated vector graphics that lets you zoom to atomic scales
• Save, load and share both environments and genomes
• Simulation fast-forward and slow-motion
• No advertisements or in-game payments
An online forum where Cell Lab can be discussed is available at:http://cell-lab.forumatic.com
This app needs three permissions:
• Internet access. This is required to send bug reports and other anonymous usage data.
• Network state. This is required to make sure bug reports and usage data are only sent over wifi to avoid using mobile data.
• External Storage. This app needs to be able to read and write external storage so that the user can send and receive samples as email attachments.
Category : Simulation
Reviews (26)
Best Mobile game ever! Seriously, I've never kept a game this long. The challanges are super engaging, some taking me months to finish. My favorite part, being the minimal hand holding from the game, is a bit of a double edged sword though. New aspect have a steep learning curve. But the endless possibilities and total freedom keep bringing me back. No adds, no pay to play, and hands down the best intellectual/engaging chalanges I've ever had. I'd recommend this game to anyone! It's that good!
A very interesting game that I would recommend to anyone, I love the concept that you unlock levels in chunks rather than 1 by 1. It allows you to backtrack when stuck on hard levels to satisfy yourself. On some levels I had to open a text editor to take notes about a level, as well as process data to get a solution.
A truly free to play game, no ads, no in app purchases but you can donate to the developer if you wish which I have! Absolutely fantastic game and so clever! The cell design in level Infestation literally blew my mind. It's also very difficult or I'm not that smart but there are hints and forums you can go to for information. There is also a sandbox environment and it's so easy to get lost in creating something weird and interesting or just seeing where evolution can go! A definite must play
To a med student who's always had an extended interest in microbiology, this is just perfect. Really fills a gap nothing else can do well on the Play Store. And hell, it's completely free with no ads or inapp purchases beside the donations. The editor could be a bit complicated, but honestly experimenting with it is a large part of the fun in my oppinion. Music is also chill and relaxing and graphics are descriptive enough to let you know whats happening on the screen.
This game is great and i play it all the time but I have sime suggestions. 1. I think the ability to draw walls/barriers would be nice. Seeing how species differentiate is interesting and it would be faster with barriers between species. 2. Locking the light angle at a certain place without it moving. Just a feature i wished was present a few times while playing. 3. Perhaps customizable petri dish shapes? Squares/rectangles, etc. I think two circles connected by a tube would be interesting.
One of the coolest sims I have ever used. Just keep adding new parameters and cell types. One suggestion: The substrates in the Experiments section should have programmable parameters. For instance, you should be able to make the substrate viscosity decrease/increase every 200 in game hrs. Would be nice to see and very useful when trying to use natural selection to solve a challenge.
I love it But I hate having to do all these confusing missions to do things. It's not like you're ever gonna change that, so many others have complained about it yet nothing has been done. Just give us all the things at the very beginning and let us figure it out if we don't want to do missions. I have fun just meassing with things and the missions give TERRIBLE hints and spoilers. It would be awesome, but the missions flat out ruin the game experience. (New CB so gotta do them all over again)
Thank you for this amazing app! Also i would love to see more additions to the game, for example, could you add a property to add a flagellum to any cell? I would love having unicellular swimmers just like real life, it would add more realism to the game and make for more impressive creations. Another suggestion i have is a property for how many times the cell should split before not being able to any more.
To the people who gave low stars, all I can say is: it's alright if you find cellular biology boring. But to the developer: this game is one of the best and intuituive simulators I ever played. At first I was rather below mediocre. I only made rather simple organisms with few modes. But now that I understand the basics of cellular behaviour programming, I was almost able to be like the top players(maybe around half their coolness). I still need improvement though. Stemocytes are a really complex
Best game in existence. So when I play this game I learn new things each time. It has a nice fresh UI for even people that have a hard time understanding the difference between a title and a button. It's not for the people with little patience and packs an amazing amount of content for being a mobile game that has zero ads. The about section contains a donate button. Best part is you can access the forms at the cell lab website for inspiration and help from the amazing community.
Suprised that I never left a review! Other than the learning curve, (Which is to be expected as it's a simulation) it's actually pretty fun. Not to mention, this thing ended up helping me grasp certain concepts of cellular biology. Overall good, and very few bugs.
A truly unique and engaging game. The endless list of 5 star reviews here is not surprising. I have been playing this game for 10-15 hours, and I am still definitely a beginner with potentially hundreds of hours of experimentation and learning left to enjoy. Just like in nature, it's amazing how just a handful of different cell types can be put together to create an infinite variety of creatures, and so the creators of this game really have pulled off an amazing thing.
Great game, it is very hard to learn. *if you are learning biology this app isn't too good, not very educational* The game is well optimized, there is a lot of replayability and it is nice to spend 30+ minutes building a multicellular organism which can hunt and eat other organisms. No blood or profanity, perfectly appropriate for children. I wish there were more cell types.
This is an awesome game, you can simulate life and evolution at your fingertips! The challenges do get pretty hard but even when you can't complete all of them, the game is still fun. Good job on this game! Also, I ran an evolution simulation starting from a photocyte and it evolved into 2-celled swimmers by itself!
Cell Lab: Evolution Sandbox is by far an extremely complex and challenging game. The complexity makes brain teaser apps look like childs play and the challenge makes Cell Lab the power house of the cell. I've never enjoyed the frustration of a challenge before. 10/10 download this right now. I wish it was also available on my PC so I could play it on a more powerful computer.
Very cool how you can kind of create an enviroment and design genomes to survive in it! It's nice to have control of how much food, salinity, and radiation there is and see your cells mutate and adapt to them! It's just a little hard to evolve certain things.
Very impressive app. It is a super fun, but hard challenge for your brain. It takes a lot of thought and ingenuity to get past some of the challenges but it feels so good when you finally design the simple life that passes them. I would love to play this on PC!!!
Best game I ever played! It's a little hard though but I think it simulates cells perfectly. It only starts to lag at more than 3000 cells on the petry dish at once. I love that you can use slight radiation to simulate evoloution. This game is perfect in every way and I would love to see an update with more challenges and cells. Thank you!
It's a very good and fun game but because there is no cloud saving feature if you get a new phone or you reset your current one you will lose all your progress and have to start over. I have had this happen about 3 or 4 times now since I've been playing this game on and off for a few years now. Please add cloud saving, it would be a great feature for the game.
Challenging and fun game. Challenges are difficult but its rewarding when you are able to complete them. All the bad reviews are just people who dont understand how the game works and are too dumb to play it, no offense. This game isn't for children and actually requires thinking. Great puzzle game!
Personally, I think that the game is wonderful! It is little bit too difficult in the later levels, but I'm sure I will get better. It would be nice if in the later levels, or in the sandbox mode, you had all of the cells unlocked so you could mess with them. Otherwise great game!
I will keep my rating as 5 stars, because I enjoy the game, but I'm not sure if it's my phone type, or what, I cant use the M1 cells. I'm gonna try to keep this understandable, so when I go to the 'modes' tab and scroll up to M1 it is slightly offscreen, so I can't click it, which, by default, makes it impossible to beat some levels.
My man, Peter, you have created something unbelievably difficult to grasp on to. But once you do, a million doors open up. People that say that its "just cells" clearly did not play the tutorial (or enough of it). If I absolutely HAD to add something, it would be something along the lines of a plague.inc/bio.inc style mode/spin off game. In my personal vision, it would be a game where you would have a sing organism, and depending on its imune system/speices, you would choose different cells. 5/5
I love this app, it's so fascinating and science is over all. Now it's not 100% perfectly accurate in all aspects but it hits most points quite well and makes cells easier to understand. I'd suggest giving the app a chance even if you're not completely into this sort of stuff because it could change your mind. So many people are rating it one star because it's "difficult" for them or "boring", come on now, don't be ignorant. It's not the games fault and definitely doesn't mean it's bad.
Great game but i have a glitch where a cell wont keep the adhesion even if i set it to, in the infestation i wanted to try and recreate the cell and makes some modifications to create something infestive and deadly but when trying to make the photosynthesis cell create the center it would keep the adhesion and put a hole in the membrane so it just falls apart everything i did was exactly the same as the infestive cell, and i think i had this same glitch on one that wasnt copied
It will be nice if I can log in and save my progress to Google Play in case I need to delete stuff (storage issues). It's not fun trying to remember/recreate what I did just to get back where I last left off. Overall, this game is excellent at what it is advertised to do; with a bonus of no in-app payment and, most importantly, no ads! A great and amazing educational game; and it's free!