This is so up my alley! Had so much fun, did all the levels, messed around on free play, love the art and sound. As other commenters have said some other layouts (I enjoyed restricting the board size with rocks in free play to figure out some basic behaviours) might help make the puzzles less of a gambling/pattern matching game but goodness it’s fun to watch and impressive that it works at all. And the idea of the goal being periodic patterns! Excellent interpretation of the theme, has such pleasing mathematical symmetry while also kind of thematically working to represent a sustainable ecosystem?
My advice, were I musing on ways to heighten the experience further, would be to provide a ‘step’ mode that lets you see the effect of advancing one iteration at a time… I think that would help a lot to teach/internalize the basic rules.
Fantastic job! Genuinely my favorite game this jam so far :)