That was quite a sprint at the end. But I did more or less finish The Crawling Eater. I hope to polish the documentation later on, and set up an informative page at the RogueBasin wiki. For now just some notes on further changes / additions since day 6:

• Creatures may suck fluid or food from other creatures, flee, and hunt.
• Creature movement triggers sounds heard all over the map, that may allow any creature to locate others. Sounds are displayed as "?" symbols next to known or unknown tiles on the map (see screenshot). One such sound symbol lasts but a few turns.
• Added a very basic help / in-game documentation system.
• A cursor can be scrolled over the map that indicates the focused tile's wetness and terrain elevation.
• Holes don't appear directly in the ground, but as the end result of a transformation that starts with a small crack ("-"), and grows to a bigger one ("+"). One may close such a crack by defecating into it.
• A hole surrounded by six other holes becomes a special kind of hole (part of the winning condition).
• Some special tiles are distributed over the map that may grant the player special abilities (no spoilering here), and the discovery of which may be needed to finish the game.

The end result can be downloaded here: https://github.com/plomlompom/plomrogue/releases/tag/TCE_proper_minor_fixes

Today's screenshot:

Only one day left … Not sure I will finish the basics of the game. Nevertheless, I made quite some progress today:

• Built a more differentiated food / fluid cycle. Eating and drinking will fill the "stomach" and "kidney" bars. Every x turns, those decrement by one each, while the waste product bars "bowel" and "bladder" grow to the same amount. Need to pee and defecate depends on the latter two bars, while emptiness of either the "stomach" or the "kidney" bar means death by hunger or dehydration.
• A part of the cave's humidity growth (i.e. the amount of water that trickles down into the ground) is invested not into the creation of new pools of water on the ground, but into the growth of new creatures. Once this separate investment pool grows to half a kidney's fluid absorption potential, a new creature with half its stomach and kidney filled spawns somewhere on the map. (The player avatar also spawns with half its stomach and kidney filled. Player and non-player creatures all belong to the same species.)
• Set up an AI optimized towards survival to control non-player characters, and an optional player autopilot command.
• Once a non-player creature dies, its fluid amount (kidney, bladder; plus, the amount of water on the tile it's standing on) is drawn into the cave's general humidity pool, while the creature and the tile it stands on are turned into a stone wall.

Today's screenshot (notice the two differently colored "@" symbols – one is the player avatar, one a NPC):

Found a little bit more time today (still far from finishing the game, though), mostly improved geology:

• On non-ground terrain tiles (i.e. walls, or any former ground-terrain onto which feces were dumped), fluid will trickle down. The earth will soak up the fluid, and emit it as wetness on ground terrain tiles
• Wetness on a tile may stack up temporarily, but any such stack may collapse quickly, excessive wetness being distributed to less wet ground terrain tiles.
• But the fewer ground terrain tiles are available, the greater the tendency to stack up wetness, i.e. towards higher fluid concentrations on individual ground terrain tiles.
• The more fluid concentrates on a ground terrain tile, the greater the chance that this tile will erode into a hole, to fall into which will be deadly.
• Re-wrote large parts of the internal representation of terrain height and wetness, made the mechanics based on these more consistent.
• As always, still playing around wildly with how to color or symbolize different things on the game map.

Today's screenshot:

Again, did not have much time. (From tomorrow on, I will have three days free time, so I will probably make much faster progress then.) Only extended the urination mechanic a bit:

• Urination will now actually wet the ground, i.e. manipulate the terrain / the game map.
• All kinds of terrain can become wet. But on all but the lowest terrain levels (i.e. on all levels were waste, earth, feces cover the ground) will the water trickle down into the terrain, and therefore become unavailable for drinking.
• Different amounts of wetness of a terrain are visible as different background colors.
• Wetting on a terrain that is already extremely wet will drown the player.

Today's screenshot ("@" is now finally the player avatar again):

Progress is slow. Found even less time today than yesterday for my 7DRL. The changes:

• Some water reservoirs ("~") will be generated with the map.
• The player may drink from these. This will fill their bladder.
• The bladder content can be peed out voluntarily, or will be peed out involuntarily once the bladder is too full (similar to defecation).
• Changed some language.

Today's screenshot ("@@" is the player avatar; still experimenting with the symbol, will probably end up with the classical "@"):