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

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.