Soul_Game/FINDINGS.md

# 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.

---

## Run 5 — The soul layer, uncalibrated: everyone a sinner

**Setup:** warmth echoes (memory replaces omniscience), refusal debris,
commons-line harvest debris, soul-to-soul atmospheric pressure, debris
metabolic tax (faster drain, weaker meals).

**Result:** justice arrived — all 108 refusals belonged to the selfish
three, whose health collapsed to 31–64 while nature souls held 100 (the
selfish never rest, so they have no healing loop — laziness blocking
recovery is fully emergent). But two pathologies: (1) the whole village
ratcheted to maxed others-regard debris, because the 50% commons penalty
line sat above the nature souls' own 45% harvest floor and debris had no
clearing path — harm without healing; (2) warmth-weighted asking plus
near-total gift transfers produced a 2,501-gift winter food-swapping
loop, and the universal debris tax turned the hungry gap into famine
(village nourishment 0.00).

**Lesson:** a moral system needs calibrated innocence and a redemption
path, or it converges to universal guilt and reads as noise.

## Run 6 — The soul layer, calibrated: the ledger works

**Setup:** commons line lowered to 40% (below any respectful floor);
gifts capped (keep 5, give ≤3, ask only when genuinely hungry); giving
heals the giver (−0.003 others-regard vs +0.02 per refusal — harm ~7×
easier than healing).

**Result — the design document, in numbers:**
- **Nature souls: debris 0.000 after two years.** The innocent are
  innocent.
- **Selfish souls: 0.225 and climbing.** The debris gap is total and
  driven entirely by how each soul lives.
- Gift ping-pong dead (2 gifts); the contact log is 18 refusals — in the
  hungry gap the only villagers with surplus are the hoarders, so the
  starving ask them, are refused, and learn. The village's warmth map is
  a map of learned coldness pointing at three names.
- Material consequences within one lifetime are mild — the selfish stay
  comfortable. **The sim's justice is written in the souls, not the
  outcomes.** That is correct: in the full game, the ledger cashes out
  at death (heavy debris carries forward; the rebirth verdict; the grave
  nobody tends). The sim now produces exactly the input reincarnation
  consumes.

---

## Next

## Run 7 — Organic construction v1: the stone-lock collapse

**Setup:** two towns (South nature+selfish, North generational); all
construction quotas removed. Shelters founded after three unsheltered
nights (beds are real: 3 + modules); granaries founded from surplus.

**Result:** a construction boom (8 shelters, multiple granaries by day
10), then **total civilizational collapse by day 40** — every building
ruined, and both towns spent the remaining 200 days homeless among the
monuments. Cause: a priority inversion. The homeless-gather-stone rule
preempted every other communal priority, so once ruins made everyone
homeless, all communal souls locked onto stone forever — foundations got
laid, walls (wood) never did, firewood hauling and granary stocking
ceased entirely, and the emergency rule prevented the emergency from
ever ending.

**Lesson:** in a needs-driven economy, priority ordering *is* the
constitution. An urgent rule that outranks the work needed to resolve it
deadlocks the society. (Also: surplus-founding without scarcity memory
produced granary sprawl by day 5 — buildings must be founded by lived
need, not by momentary abundance.)

**Fixes → run 8:** construction sites outrank homeless stone-gathering
(finish the walls before founding another foundation); homeless founding
defers while any shelter is under construction; granary founding
requires hunger memory + surplus, not surplus alone.

## Runs 8–9 — Organic construction v2: fixed forward, broken backward

Headless debugging (runs driven from the CLI) found and fixed three real
bugs: **wilderness homes** (founders built wherever their pack filled —
usually at a stone mine 100+ cells out; homes now rise at the founder's
habitual sleeping spot, within reach of the community), **sleepless
nights** (low-fatigue villagers socialized all night, so beds went unused
and rough nights — the founding trigger — never occurred; night now sends
everyone to bed), and **floor-sleeping** (arrivals at a full shelter
counted as sheltered; a bed must exist when you lie down in it).

**Verified working:** bootstrap founding near town, ~2,200 construction
deliveries, first roofs by day 3, three seasons of stability.

**Open problem (later resolved in run 10):** the loop cannot recover from
loss. The winter crisis ruins shelters and rebuilding stalls.

## Run 10 — The mineral question: recovery achieved

Demand diagnostics found the recovery blocker was *material*, not
motivational: homeless villagers correctly demanded stone (462/525
villager-days) but could not get it, twice over:

1. **The commons ethic stranded the stone.** Respectful souls won't take
   the last half of any deposit — but stone doesn't regrow, so once all
   deposits sat at the floor, the world's remaining stone was morally
   untouchable and the homeless stayed homeless forever. *Fix: the
   harvest floor is an ethic of regrowth — floors and commons debris now
   apply only to living, regenerating resources. Minerals quarry to
   depletion, for every soul equally.*
2. **Lossy packs milled the mountains to dust.** Idle variety-gathering
   mined stone as busywork, and the make-room rule vaporized cargo on
   every demand flap — 900+ stone destroyed in packs. *Fix: idle
   gathering touches only what regrows, and packs may only shed what the
   land replaces. Minerals are mined on purpose and conserved.*

**Correction:** run 10's original "zero year-2 ruins" claim was
contaminated — the headless console wrapper orphaned child sim processes
that kept writing to later runs' CSVs. (Instrumentation lesson: kill
process trees; distrust out-of-order data.) Clean reruns showed the
recovery loop worked but the town *cycled* — collapse each winter,
rebuild each spring — with chronic post-famine hunger.

## Run 11 — Enough, and the stone-mules: clean stability

Two fixes closed it: **granary satiation** (hunger scars motivate
storage only until the town's capacity could carry a winter — enough is
a real quantity; sprawl of ~10 granaries fell to the sated level), and
**quarry return** (villagers whose packs filled with undroppable stone
after rebuilds became starving porters, unable to gather food while
carrying a house on their backs; unneeded stone now goes back to the
quarry).

**Clean verified result:** year-1 catastrophe and rebuild as before;
then year-2 nourishment steady at 0.77, **year-2 winter with zero new
ruins and 100% condition**, textbook granary sawtooth (1,200 → 0 →
refilled). Organic civilization: naive youth, catastrophe, learning,
stable maturity — now on trustworthy data.

Open (Phase 3 economy, not a bug): accessible stone ran dry during the
rebuild (construction + quarry-return overflow at full nodes + selfish
hoards), so housing plateaus below population — a stable, fed town with
a permanently under-roofed minority. Wants deeper quarrying/metal and
real stockpiles.

---

## Run 12 — Knowledge, mortality, and the North's soul (SPEC §5)

**Built:** three skill domains (forage/woodcraft/masonry) that pay off
(skilled hands harvest more, masons waste less) and grow by practice;
proximity diffusion soul-calibrated by absorption × teaching-drive;
**mortality** — the piece that makes knowledge *generational*: elders die
at ~150–230 days, everything unshared dies with them, and a youth comes
of age knowing almost nothing. The North's whole identity is two numbers
(absorption 1.6, teaching 0.9) vs the South's (1.0, 0.3); the East
teaches no one, ever.

**First finding (instrumentation):** headless soaks were being
contaminated by orphaned Godot child processes writing to later runs'
CSVs — two files disagreeing on the final day was the tell. Fixed with a
`StopAfterDays` clean self-terminate (no external kill, no race).

**Second finding (design):** passive-only diffusion barely helped the
North — youths spawned at the empty town centroid and worked solo, so a
death reset a villager to roughly what they'd have self-taught anyway.
The missing mechanic was the North's actual culture: **the young must
seek out elders on purpose.** Added deliberate teacher-seeking for
high-absorption souls, and youths now cradle beside the town's wisest
elder instead of in a void.

**Result:** the North leads at every checkpoint (day 150: 0.586 vs 0.477;
final 0.972 vs 0.951) and both towns reach far higher knowledge than
before. But the gap is modest **because a stable town approaches the
knowledge ceiling regardless of teaching speed** — everyone eventually
maxes out; the North just arrives sooner. Teaching culture is a
*recovery* advantage, not an equilibrium one.

**Next experiment (the real test):** a shock that kills the experts, then
measure which town rebuilds its knowledge — the North's thesis stated as
a falsifiable claim.

---

## Run 13 — The full world: four towns, one engine

**Built:** world scaled 3× (768×768), all four towns at compass points
each running its own soul culture (North generational, South nature,
West materialist — new profile — East selfish); two new resources (Ore,
Herb — herbs are medicine, mended health; a reason to forage and a trade
good); a **spatial hash grid** so proximity queries stop being O(n²)
(3.6× headless speedup at ~80 NPCs, live view viable); and the first
social verb beyond work: **pair-bonds** (settled adults who keep warm
company pair up; warmth now accrues from proximity, not only gifts;
bonds break at death). Reproduction deferred (bonds-first, per plan).

**Result — the four-town thesis, fully realized on one engine:**

| Town  | Nourish | Knowledge | Debris | Character |
|-------|---------|-----------|--------|-----------|
| North | 0.84 | **1.27** | 0.000 | wise, whole — teaching wins |
| South | **0.85** | 1.18 | 0.000 | content, clean, lives with the land |
| West  | 0.80 | 1.24 | **0.227** | prosperous but soul-marked |
| East  | 0.60 | 1.08 | 0.223 | scheming and hungriest — selfishness starves itself |

The two positive cultures stay soul-clean; the two negative carry real
debris. The North leads knowledge (its purpose); the East trails it and
is hungriest (teaches no one, shares nothing). 99 bonds, 80 deaths — a
living, pairing, generational population in four distinct societies, all
from behavior weights. Nothing is scripted; the cultures are emergent.

## Run 14 — Reproduction, and towns anchored to the compass

**Built:** children from bonds (Phase B). Death no longer auto-spawns a
replacement — people die and are gone; bonded, fed, adult pairs conceive
(logistic-damped toward a per-town carrying capacity, so population is a
band, not an explosion or a collapse). Population is now genuinely
dynamic: births vs deaths. Also anchored towns to their cardinal seeds —
the build-centroid is now 70% weighted to the fixed compass point, so
settlements stay planted (North founds at ~(388,139) by its (384,130)
seed) instead of drifting to map-center where foraging paths overlap
(West had wandered 100+ cells before).

**Tuning story (three failed calibrations, logged as the lesson):**
first pass exploded (80→211 by day 80 — young founders, nobody dying,
every couple breeding); over-damped to fix it and the world died out
(80→6, East extinct); the real bug was a *generational gap* — founders
aged out of fertility before their children matured and bonded, so
births stopped even as room opened. Fix: wide fertility window (to 85%
of life) + generous rate (0.12/couple/day × room). Population dynamics
are a control loop; the birth rate must track the death rate or the
system runs away in whichever direction it's biased.

**Result — reproduction sharpens the four-town thesis:** births (108) ≈
deaths (104), population settled in a healthy band (~68–109). And the
cultures now diverge in *demographics*, not just soul-state: North (26)
and South (22) thrive and stay soul-clean; West shrinks (16) with debris
creeping in; **East collapses to 4, starving (nourishment 0.00), highest
debris — selfishness now literally fails to sustain a population.** A
town that won't share or cooperate can't feed its people or raise a next
generation. The most damning verdict the sim has produced.

## Run 15 — Known-nodes exploration (addendum §4) + the O(n²) hunt

**Built (stage 1 of the exploration addendum):** per-NPC known-nodes — an
NPC gathers only from resource nodes it has personally sensed (radius 22)
or been told about. Founders seed with their home ground; children
inherit their parents' map; node knowledge diffuses between neighbors by
the same proximity rule as skills. When nothing known qualifies, a
starving NPC ventures outward (biased away from town anchor) and senses
as it goes — the non-random, needs-driven venture-out the addendum wants,
and the seed of first contact. Repopulation explicitly preserved: seeding
+ a survival food fallback keep towns fed (verified: all four 0.56–0.78
fed, population stable 86–109 over 240 days).

**Debug screen rebuilt:** the per-villager roster (one line per soul,
~68 rows overflowing the panel at four-town scale) replaced with a
per-town summary — population, fed%, knowledge, debris, state breakdown,
buildings, colored by culture, plus world births/deaths. Scales to any
population.

**The performance lesson, earned properly this time:** the sim slowed to
a crawl and I burned four rounds guessing (node index — no; periodic
sensing — barely; node cell-index — barely; gated diffusion — barely).
Then I added phase timers and *measured*: `npc.Tick` was 94% of cost and
grew O(n²) with population. The culprit was `TickResting` calling
`RestingOccupancy` (a full-population scan) once per building per resting
NPC — O(buildings × NPCs²) per tick. Fixed with a once-per-tick occupancy
cache on Building. Result: npc phase ~4× faster and now linear; full
240-day four-town run in **180s, faster than the pre-exploration
baseline** despite all the new systems. Lesson restated: profile first;
the bottleneck is never where you guess.

**Next:** stage 2 (soul-weighted venture-out + first contact); crisis-
recovery experiment; save/load; then the player pivot.

---

Soul layer: done and validated (runs 5–6). The expansion phase begins:

1. **Towns as spatial structure**: multiple settlements with their own
   centroids, buildings, and granaries; NPCs affiliated with a home town
   but free to roam — the blend space between towns becomes real.
2. **The North (Generational) town**: second settlement; its signature
   knowledge/teaching system (SPEC §5) is the largest unbuilt spec piece.
3. Inter-town contact and trade routes (Phase 3); object-level soul
   residue traveling with traded goods.
4. Save/load round-trip (SPEC §9 amendment) — still outstanding.