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