Hi all!

I just started playing Waking Mars last night and I was well hooked. I reached a point where I seem to be stuck, however, and I was hoping some of you might have some insights.

I'm about midway through the game (by its own estimation), I've patched up the hole in the "broken reservoir" and I'm trying to help the roots of the water transporting zoa grow down to reach the cave floor. One of the two seems to have made it without my help, actually. The second, however, keeps growing and shrinking, over and over. I just can't seem to figure out what combination of acid spores and alkali spores will make it keep growing.

I just don't get the dynamics of the root and the spores at all.

Any advice?

Really? And I was so sure the answer lay in figuring out the right pH balance or something... For a while I was jumping around the cavern, using spores to change acid cephads into alkali so I'd have an equal number of both. Total waste of time, I guess... Number 1 is not an option for me at this point in my current game, as I'm out of Feran Zoa seeds and am having trouble getting more. I actually appear to be one seed away from blasting my way out of the bottom of the cavern. I can see many seeds waiting for me in the chamber called "Feranmax" but I'm stuck there too, and I just can't figure out how to raise enough biomass for the cerebranes to let me through. I'm thinking of starting a new game anyway, but otherwise I guess #3 is my way forwards, as I won't be much good at playing Pong with spores.

Thank you, RWarehall!

Thanks.

I too had to struggle to raise enough biomass in the 'Feranmax' cavern as well. But then again I remembered one strategy that helped me in other places: Depending on the order in which you've done the caverns, you should by now have a few of them where there's an abundance of protocaps. 'Enrichment' is a good candidate, or 'The Meadow'. Grab as many of the Halid and Prax protocaps as you can, head back to wherever you want biomass to be raised, and start feeding the fauna. There are Cycots in the 'Feranmax' cavern, and with those this strategy works particularily well since they're worth forty biomass each. Toss protocaps at them so they start to reproduce, go back to the farm and grab some more, rinse & repeat. Just keep those suicidal ghosts from throwing themselves into the magma.

In a way, this feels almost like cheating. But then again, that's probably what the 'farming' caverns are there for, so you're still going with the flow of the game. :o)