The game Sapiens is a persistent universe, meaning that time never stops, even when you’re not playing your character. In Sapiens, time passes much faster that real life, therefore your characters shall age rather quickly.

The life of your character if divided into 3 ages: adolescent, adult, and elder. After about 1 week (7 days) real time, your character shall progress from adolescent to adult. Another 2 weeks shall be needed to pass from adult to elder. Once an elder, you run the risk of dying of old age. From here, your life is in the hands of the spirits. At the end of each day, the character will need an ever increasing number of spiritual points(table 2.2) to survive.

Your character’s age also determines the number of maximum energy points that they can have. Adolescents can accumulate a maximum of 60 energy points, adults 100, and elders 80.


The characters that you create in Sapiens need your help to survive and prosper in their dangerous world. To maintain your character in optimal health, we ask that you visit the Sapiens world at least once a day, at least for just a few minutes in order to avoid any penalties suffered from starvation. If you do not play your character, their daily ration of cooked meat will be diminished, thus giving your character less energy points at the start of the day.

But don’t panic if you can’t play for several days, the penalties for starvation start off relatively small and only require you to perform a little better than normal in your different activities. Your character doesn’t risk death at first, however after 4 days, this loss of energy becomes more and more significant and can kill your character if the starvation penalty is greater than the current amount of energy points you earn each day from your meat ration.

Table 2.3: Penalties due to starvation

# of days absent	Penalty on meat ration (in energy points)
1	2
2	8
3	18
4	36
5	50
6	72
7	84
More than 7 days…	Death

During the course of your adventures you will have the possibility to collect objects that will all be kept in your inventory: offerings, small flints, and large flints. These objects are necessary to succeed at certain activities, making it in your best interest to collect them.

You can find offerings while hunting or gathering. They are represented by a 4 leaf clover and are used to initiate musical duels and the shaman’s quiz.

You have to create yourself small and large flints by cutting them in the quarry. Spears with flints are more effective than simple wooden spears and will inflict more damage on the animals that you hunt. This gives you more chance to bag yourself a hunting trophy (section 3.7). However you cannot possess more than 10 of each type. Small flints are represented by a small double sided yellowish flint, while the large flint has the form of a greyish flint.