# 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.