Children from bonds (Phase B): death no longer auto-spawns a replacement;
bonded, fed, adult pairs conceive, logistic-damped toward a per-town
carrying capacity. Population is now dynamic - births vs deaths, a band
not a fixed count. Towns anchored to their cardinal seeds (build-centroid
70% weighted to the fixed compass point) so settlements stay planted
instead of drifting to map-center - North now founds at ~(388,139) by its
(384,130) seed vs West's prior 100+ cell drift.
Tuning took three passes (logged in FINDINGS): explosion, then die-out,
then a generational-gap bug where founders aged out of fertility before
their children matured. Fix: wide fertility window + generous rate.
Result: births 108 ~= deaths 104, healthy population band, and the
four-town thesis sharpened into demographics - North/South thrive
soul-clean, West shrinks with debris, East collapses to a starving
remnant. Selfishness now literally fails to sustain a population.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
mmcghen
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