Have you ever fancied becoming a god? Do you perhaps hide a burning desire to oversee the creation of humankind using a card-based system of epiphanies and natural disasters? Few would admit to possessing such lofty ambitions, much less admit to actually seeking them out - but I have walked the path, and am here to tell you that it’s pretty amusing.

Of course, raising an entire species from sticks and stones to cars and guns is no walk in the park. This difficulty is by no means a result of any of my faults however; after all, as a god I am by definition a perfect being and therefore insulated from blame. The plain truth is that the humans of Simmiland are utter buffoons, which makes it challenging to teach them how to be a proper sentient species.

But! No challenge is actually challenging for a god - and to prove it, I decided to not only make humanity a grand species, but to have them defeat me.

As I mentioned before however, raising humanity is a tedious process. You must create the right environmental conditions and provide the right resources in order to enlighten the humans. This is all carried out through a series of randomly-shuffled cards.

“Why cards?” you ask? Well, I just think it’s funny to have the fate of the world decided by a deck of playing cards.

I start off with a limited number of cards, just to ease myself into it, and buy more as I go through various iterations of humanity. Despite the increased size of my deck though, I still run into road bumps. The sheer variety of ways humanity can doom itself is truly baffling.

For instance, I once created a snowy region to add some variety to the land. There aren’t any resources to speak of there - it’s merely a smidgen of chilly continent I made because one human prayed to me, saying that she wished for a pine tree to exist in the world.

Little did I know that the humans had some insatiable desire to cut down that tree, establishing a village and subsequent farmland in the snow.

They never even managed to cut the tree down. All the adult humans left the main village, hell-bent on felling this single tree, and they all froze to death in the wheatfields, leaving the last and only human (a child, mind you) to live out its remaining days among the farmland creatures. It was appalling to behold.

However, this event (and many others like it) was a learning experience. As I watched humanity bring itself to ruin again and again, I began to understand just how they work, and how to make them prosper. Soon, It was a simple task to create a thriving (albeit car-less) modern civilization.

Yet every time I reached that point, there was a wall. There was one last push needed for them to reach me, and I just could not fathom how to break past it.

Then I realized. Out of the many possible discoveries that could be made, the one the humans consistently failed to reach was the gun; it lay just between the technology of the future and the technology of the past. This was clearly the missing link.

Alas, making humanity discover firearms is no simple quest. Two conditions must be met: humankind must be smart, and violent on the morality scale.

I attempted numerous different approaches to make this happen - occasionally smiting a human with lightning or death, destroying some houses with meteors, making them have to fight to survive on a continent full of bloodthirsty bears. All to no avail. They would just rebuild, or spawn more children to outweigh their losses; how could I possibly make humanity wallow in hate and despair while still securing their survival?

I had almost lost hope, when I had an sudden idea. Rather than make humanity rely on plants and fruit trees for sustenance, I would force them to persist on meat. Certainly, having to slaughter their food would feed into humankind’s violent tendencies.

So I set forth on another venture. This new settlement knew nothing of the axe needed to harvest fruit trees (though I’m sure they could’ve just used their hands, honestly) and were taught nothing of farming. All I allowed them to learn was the knife, and animal domestication.

My plan seemed to be progressing smoothly. They had established fences for their chickens, and I was confident that, as soon as they had a surplus of fowl, the slaughter would begin.

But it didn’t.

The humans began praying to me, complaining that they had run out of food despite the fact that their fences were overflowing with flocks of fattened, wing-flapping foodstuffs!

I was beside myself. After all my efforts, the humans refused to grow some sense. In my frustration, I launched a meteor straight into the main village and chicken encampment. Following the eruption of feathers and rubble, I was surprised to find that the remaining population had gone from kind all the way to evil!

At last! We were finally on the right path; I just had to leave the humans alone for a while to clean up the mess.

When I came back, the smoke had settled, and humanity was on its feet again; the land was filled with wheat crops, and the humans even rebuilt the destroyed church in my honor! I was now the proud leader of an entire species of evil farmers.

Progress continued steadily, and I grew more and more eager as the goal drew close, but I began to notice something strange; though I provided the humans with more discoveries, their intelligence was stagnant. Seeming to sense my turmoil, a fellow god came to me and told me that the church was limiting the humans’ growth.

The church, of all things! Their faith is the one thing that keeps me from destroying them all, but it’s also keeping them from developing proper brains.

As it turns out, the church was my obstacle all along; every time I rebooted humanity, they made a church and kept their faith, along with their stupidity. So it turned out that my gun venture was meaningless (worst of all, I never even got to see a gun!).

I didn’t even bother ending this run of humanity, I just left it. They’re likely still out there - a numbskulled bunch of wicked wheat-farming fiends doomed to never discover the tool perfectly suited to harness their hate.

And so, it was time for one last dive into the fray of creation. This time… This time, for sure!

I give up.

Simmiland rating: 7/10, would watch an entire species freeze to death again.
If you’d like to see if you can get humanity to the top (or to just make a gun), go check out Simmiland on Steam!