Avida is arguably the most advanced software platform to study digital organisms to date, and is certainly the one that has had the biggest impact in the biological literature so far. Having reached version 2.12, it now supports detailed control over experimental settings, a sophisticated system to design and execute experimental protocols, a multitude of possibilities for organisms to interact with their environment (including depletable resources and conversion from one resource into another) and a module to post-process data from evolution experiments (including tools to find the line of descent from the original ancestor to any final organism, to carry out knock-out studies with organisms, to calculate the fitness landscape around a genotype, and to align and compare organisms’ genomes).