Lineage - The Evolution Atlas for RPG Maker MZ

Your game already knows which creature becomes which. Your player does not — and no amount of text explains a branching family the way a picture of it does.

Lineage draws that picture, from your database, with no art to supply. Every species is rendered as a generated specimen mark: 65 hand-authored body plans × 8 element palettes × 6 growth stages = 3,120 distinct marks, and not one image file.

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Compatibility — the question you actually have

Tested against RPG Maker MZ with the stock scripts unmodified, verified by running the plugin in the real engine rather than only in tests.

Plugin Manager order:

1. LineageMorphology.js — the corpus. Data only: registers nothing, patches nothing.
2. Lineage.js — the graph, the notetags, the save record, the plugin commands.
3. LineageAtlas.js — the atlas scene.

Load order is a tidiness request, not a requirement — every read of the corpus is deferred to Scene_Boot.prototype.start, so it still works if your manager reorders them.

Core methods extended — all three by saved-original prototype extension, none replaced: Scene_Boot.prototype.start, Game_System.prototype.initialize, and Game_Troop.prototype.setup (only when "Discover On Encounter" is on). Because nothing is clobbered, Lineage co-exists with other plugins that patch the same seams, including large suites.

It adds no battle logic, no menu replacement and no map behaviour, so there is very little of anyone else's surface for it to collide with.

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It is a display layer, on purpose

Lineage is not an evolution mechanic. It does not decide when a creature evolves, change its stats, or touch your battle system. If you already have evolution logic — your own, or another plugin's — Lineage is the layer that shows it, and you tell it what happened with one plugin command.

That is deliberate. It means Lineage sits happily beside a monster-catching suite, a breeding plugin, or nothing at all.

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What the player sees

• Generations, ruled and numbered, so descent is legible at a glance.
• Branches that curve between them — solid gold where this playthrough actually went, dashed where it did not — with your own condition text shown on the branches under the cursor.
• Undiscovered species as hollow silhouettes of their real shape. The player can see what they are hunting without being told what it is. This is the collection hook, and it is why an atlas beats a list.
• A clade rail across the foot, computed from your data: every clade in your project, a real mark from it, and how many of it they have found.
• A specimen plate with the species' body plan, element, stage and what it can become.

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Two notetags and you are done

<lineage plan:wolf palette:ember stage:juvenile>
<lineage evolves:2,3 when:"level 16">

Everything is optional. Omit plan: and one is chosen deterministically from the enemy's name — the same name always yields the same mark, on every machine, in every playthrough. An untagged database still produces a full, stable atlas, and nothing is random.

when: is a label, not a condition. Lineage never evaluates it — your game decides when a creature evolves; this is how the player is told what to try.

Only tagged enemies, and enemies named by an evolves:, enter the atlas. Your slimes and bats stay out of it. An atlas that listed every enemy in the database would be a bestiary, and that is a different thing.

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Built the way you would want to inherit it

• Raw, readable, uncompressed JavaScript. No minification, no obfuscation. Adding your own body plans is expressly permitted by the licence.
• Zero Math.random() in game logic — a seeded, channel-separated hash instead.
• Zero allocation in the per-frame path. The scene redraws only when something changes.
• Off-screen species are culled before any geometry is replayed, so a 240-species atlas costs the same per frame as a 12-species one.
• Versioned, lossless save round-trip through MZ's own JsonEx — verified in the real engine, not just in a test.
• No windowskin, no engine font, no stock chrome anywhere in the scene — verified in-engine by a detector proven to fire on a stock scene first.
• 96 headless tests and 30 in-engine checks, all green, zero console errors.

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Building a collection game?

Lineage is the display layer above one. These are its siblings:

• Chimera Core — creature breeding and inheritance
• Chimera Field — field encounters and capture
• Chimera Battle — creature-led battles
• Sigil Core — every spell generates its own animated seal
• The full catalogue

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Licence: unlimited games, commercial or free, no royalties, no revenue share. Modify it freely for your own projects. Just don't resell the plugin itself. Full terms in LICENSE.txt.

Core Systems Asset Factory