Five diets
The creature card shows one of five diets. Herbivores eat vegetation. Carnivores need meat chunks or carcasses. Omnivores take whichever is closer. Photovores are used for long survival because many of them only need water. Photocarnivores mix a photo need with meat. When a photovore or photocarnivore dies, it drops a plant carcass that herbivores can eat as well as carnivores and omnivores.
Hunger and thirst are separate bars. Whichever is lower limits the route. At zero hunger the creature is starving: health drops and growth stops. At zero thirst it is dehydrated, with the same result. A warning appears before the bar empties, and hunger under 10 percent can play a stomach rumble.
Water quality
Drinkable water gets worse as creatures drink it. It stays blue until quality is very low, then turns brown, so color is a late warning. Quality recovers slowly. Rain raises all drinkable sources by 50 percent. Floods refill them to 100 percent. Larger sources take longer to spoil.
Very dirty water applies Sickly and refills thirst slowly. Water above 90 percent quality applies Clean Water for 60 stacks: thirst and hunger drain 20 percent slower, and stamina and health regeneration rise 20 percent. Water between those ranges only refills thirst.
Weather and shelter
The radar at the top right shows time, tide, season, weather, biome, players who share location, NPCs, and migration markers. During some disasters a shelter icon appears. Red means exposed. Green means the game currently counts you as sheltered. A volcanic eruption treats a cave as shelter and open ground as exposed. What counts changes with the disaster, so read the icon instead of reusing one hiding spot for every storm.
Lava is non-solid terrain. Most lava deals damage and applies burn and ashy lungs. Shallow lava is not always lethal for a large creature. Only the Volcanic ability ignores lava damage.
Moisture is a separate bar for creatures that dry out on land. When it empties they take damage down to about half health, not to zero. Entering water restores it, and rain pauses the drain. Oxygen is the opposite problem: air-breathing creatures suffocate if they stay under too long. A blank oxygen value defaults to 25. N/A means that creature does not use oxygen.
A turnaround rule
If either need bar is under half, finish the current bite or drink and go to the nearer source. Do not start a chase. If the shelter icon is red, the food route waits. A satiated, sheltered creature grows. A creature that sprints into a volcano because the carcass was there does not.