South town MVP: world sim, seasons, granary, contrast test + findings

Godot 4.7 C# world simulation per SPEC.md (with 2026-07-21 amendments).
15 NPCs, 5-state machine, demand-driven work, soul-imprint triad data
model, seasons with winter frost, granary, need-based gift economy,
selfish-soul contrast wiring, daily/per-villager/gift CSV logging.

FINDINGS.md documents the four soak experiments: the dead paradise,
the buffers winning, the emergent hungry gap, and the contrast test
proving the four-town thesis (and that selfishness wins until the
soul-consequence layer exists).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

FINDINGS.md

@@ -0,0 +1,107 @@
+# WorldSim — Soak Experiment Findings (July 2026)
+
+Four long-run experiments against the South (Nature) town MVP. Each run:
+15 NPCs, 256×256 world, seed 12345, ~240 simulated days (2 years) at
+accelerated speed. Data: `soak_stats.csv` (daily), `soak_npc_days.csv`
+(per-villager dominant states), `soak_gifts.csv` (every gift, with names).
+
+---
+
+## Run 1 — Baseline (no seasons): the dead paradise
+
+**Setup:** constant regeneration, upkeep + food demand only.
+
+**Result:** perfectly stable, perfectly inert. 200 days: wood held a ±1%
+band, shelter condition pinned at 100%, **zero trades**, no roles — every
+villager Socializing-dominant ~114 of 119 days, 78% of waking life idle.
+The village completed all construction and expansion by day 3–4 and then
+had nothing left to want.
+
+**Lesson:** a village is a metabolism, not a project. Equilibrium without
+pressure produces no society: no differentiation, no exchange, no
+structure. Abundance makes generosity unobservable.
+
+---
+
+## Run 2 — Seasons (regen throttle only): the buffers win
+
+**Setup:** 30-day seasons; winter cuts food regen to 5%, wood to 40%.
+Granary added (clay walls — first clay use), need-based gift trigger.
+
+**Result:** winter became a *worked* season — gathering 4,889 ticks/day vs
+1,857 in summer, wild stocks visibly drained and refilled. But nourishment
+ran the identical sawtooth year-round, the granary sat untouched at
+150/150 through two winters, and trades stayed at **zero** across 240 days.
+
+**Lesson:** three compounding buffers (the sustainability floor acting as a
+~360-unit hidden savings account, personal pack reserves, wild food budget
+exceeding winter need) meant scarcity never reached an individual. Pressure
+that only raises labor doesn't create interdependence.
+
+---
+
+## Run 3 — Frost: the hungry gap
+
+**Setup:** winter now *decays* standing food ~7%/day toward 15% (frost
+kills the larder); granary draws deepened; anti-redeposit rule.
+
+**Result:** the simulation came alive.
+- **First trades in sim history: 21** (17 deep winter, 4 early spring) —
+  exactly when granary-empty met neighbor-with-food.
+- **Granary sawtooth textbook**: full through autumn, empty by winter day
+  ~25, refilled within 4 days of spring. Both years.
+- **The sim reproduced the "hungry gap"** — a real agricultural phenomenon
+  neither designed nor named in the code: worst hunger (village nourishment
+  0.21) fell in *early spring*, after stores ran out but before the land
+  regrew past harvestable thresholds.
+- Crisis cascaded: the food emergency pulled labor from heating (firewood
+  reserves dipped to 10, condition below 100% for the first time).
+- Balanced: severe hunger, zero lasting health damage, both years.
+
+**Lesson:** storage limits + decay + regrowth lag ⇒ emergent seasonality of
+need. Sharing is a *response*, not a behavior: 480 days of abundance
+produced zero exchanges; ten days of genuine need produced twenty-one.
+Still missing: individual roles — identical souls in a global work queue
+respond identically (winter gather ticks all within 490–553).
+
+---
+
+## Run 4 — The contrast test: 3 selfish souls among 12
+
+**Setup:** villagers M/N/O run the East (Selfish) soul profile. Same
+engine, same possibility space; only behavior weights differ: low
+sustainability (strip nodes to ~15% vs the 50% commons floor), low
+generosity (refuse gifts; excluded from asking), low community bias (no
+communal work at all), high accumulation (double carry, standing hoard).
+
+**Result — the four-town thesis validated:**
+- Selfish villager-days: **0 build ticks** (vs 104/day for nature souls),
+  gather 69 vs 269, **rest 0** (never tired), socializing 1,369 vs 921.
+  A visible leisure class living off a working village.
+- Gift network: 11 gifts, all nature→nature. The selfish never gave and
+  never needed to receive. First individual differentiation appeared:
+  **Villager_A gave 4 of 11 gifts** — the village's generous one.
+- The 12 communal souls absorbed 15 souls' worth of burden without a
+  single ruin.
+
+**The central finding: selfishness strictly won.** Most leisure, least
+fatigue, fullest bellies, zero costs, no pushback. This is not a balance
+bug — it is the empirical case for the game's soul layer. Economics alone
+cannot make selfishness cost anything; that is the job of imprints,
+debris, echoes, and social memory (the Unity POC's warmth-echo system).
+The soul-consequence layer is not flavor on top of the economy — it is
+the only thing standing between the South town and being farmed by the
+East.
+
+---
+
+## Next
+
+1. **Port the soul layer into the sim**: imprint triad accumulation,
+   social memory of gifts/refusals, consequences routed through behavior
+   (the generous get helped first; the ungenerous get asked last, served
+   last, remembered coldly). Rerun the contrast test; see if the village
+   organically stops carrying its parasites.
+2. Instrumentation gap: per-villager nourishment/health in
+   `soak_npc_days.csv` (currently the village average hides who starves).
+3. Save/load round-trip (SPEC §9 amendment) — still outstanding.