How a creature evolves: branches, conditions and fallbacks

The tree: stages, forks and leaves

• The egg is the root of the tree.
• A stage has its look, its animations, sometimes its powers, and its own needs.
• A fork is a stage that splits into several branches.
• A leaf is a stage with nothing after it: the end of a branch.

The tree of Aubroc, for example, rises on a trunk of five stages, then splits into a day path and a night path, and the night path splits again. Two communities raising the same egg therefore do not necessarily reach the same leaf: what happens during their streams decides.

What a branch can ask for

The creator sets conditions in the Creation workshop, in three families: airtime, care, live. None is required.

• Hours on air to spend in the previous stage.
• An average of the gauges, kept up over the whole stage. It is a true average, accumulated minute after minute: neglecting the creature during the stage and catching up just before the evolution is not enough.
• One gauge in particular, at a minimum level at the moment the evolution happens.
• A maximum number of care mistakes during the stage.
• Stream counters during the stage: messages, distinct chatters, follows, subscriptions, gifted subscriptions, bits, donations, raids, peak viewers, hype train levels, channel point rewards, clips, timeouts and bans.
• The same counters since the creature's birth.

Along its tree, Aubroc asks for example for 700 messages during a stage, strength at 55 or more, 40 follows, at most one care mistake, a gauge average of 65, or 14 raids and 60 subscriptions since birth. A creator picks what fits their audience: not everyone has follows or subscribers.

Branch order, and the fallback

Every minute on air, the creature looks at the branches of its stage in the order chosen by the creator, and takes the first one whose conditions are all met. In the workshop, each branch carries its rank, and creators usually put the most demanding ones first.

The fallback is the branch with no condition, placed last. It lets a less well-kept creature evolve anyway. It only opens once the stage's fallback time has passed, a time that grows from stage to stage, from 3 hours for the first to 28 for the most advanced. And it never opens before the hour of its latest sibling: a demanding branch therefore stays reachable until its hour.

A stage that carries a condition always requires it, even when it is alone or placed last. If there is no fallback and no condition is met, the creature stays at its stage.

That is what makes Aubroc's fork. The day path asks, on top of its hours, for at most one care mistake during the stage. The night path has no condition: it is the fallback, which opens at the earliest at the day path's hour. An attentive community heads for the day; a community that let two care mistakes slip heads for the night.

When it evolves

• Only during a stream. Off stream, the creature sleeps, and time off stream does not count toward its evolutions.
• A new stage resets the stage counters: hours in the stage, care mistakes, stream counters and the gauge average start again from there. Counters since birth keep going.
• Each evolution makes the gauges harder to fill, and the new stage can wear the stats down faster or slower. The details are in Health, strength, precision, mana: what changes at each level.
• Life has a length: 120 hours on air, minus 40 minutes per care mistake, never below 20 hours. A very long tree can therefore see its creature fade of old age before its last leaf.

In the launch collection, each creator's first creature has two stages, and the second asks for ten hours on air: a first milestone within reach of a community that is just starting.

What the streamer and the buyer see

The “what it is waiting for” widget shows, on the overlay, the objectives of the most demanding branch still within reach: time, an average to keep up, subscriptions. Never the name or the look of what awaits: the creature it becomes stays a surprise.

The estimated stream time, on a creation's page, adds up the hours along each path, from the first stage to the last, counting each fallback at the hour it opens. It gives the shortest and the longest path, in whole hours, as a range “depending on the path”, or a single duration when the tree does not split.

It refuses to turn messages, follows or a gauge kept up into hours. That would mean inventing a chat rhythm, and the figure would look true while being false. When a path asks for more than time, the page says so: some stages also ask for chat activity, and that time is a minimum.

Creators will find the full method, conditions included, in the Creation method.

Frequently asked questions