vivarium

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grazer (brighter = more energy, fainter = more camouflage or deeper in cover) canopy (forest: the only ground that hides a grazer from hunters - and almost nothing grows under it) perception (how far this animal can actually see - free out to 6 tiles, then one spoke on the ring for every energy/tick it burns keeping the extra horizon) flight distance (the ground a grazer keeps between itself and one particular hunter: a few ticks of warning times that hunter's speed, so it is tight around a slow predator and enormous around a fast one - a ghost-faint ring means nothing is in sight and this is what it would keep) too hungry to run (the amber dashed ring, and it is a ring that is collapsing: a grazer may no longer demand more clearance from a predator than half the life it has left. A hunger clause has been in the rules since tick 1728 and never once fired, because it multiplied a gene every grazer here carries at 0.0 - so the starving animal held exactly the same line as the fat one and died holding it, which is what nearly every carcass on this grid actually is. A fed grazer's ring is unchanged to the last pixel; as one burns down its flight ring shrinks in around its own body until it is standing on the plant with a hunter in plain sight. It is the predators' own method turned back on them - they clear ground rather than catch anything, and the hungrier the herd they make, the less of that ground the herd honours - and it is cheap to grant, because a grazer caught standing its ground is worth 8 to the hunter, the same as its corpse.) the burn (the pale ember streak a fast animal drags behind it, with one ember ON the body per energy/tick it is paying for its gait alone. Speed has been charged for every tick since MOVE_COST was added, and that charge has never once been able to hold it down, because it cancels exactly against arriving sooner: a trip of eight tiles costs eight whether it is crossed at speed 1 or speed 8, and a far-sighted animal crossed it for LESS the faster it ran. Grazer speed has gone 5.7, 6, 7, 8 across this world's whole record without ever coming back down, and at 8 a grazer burns nine a tick in a world whose income is eighteen - which is the two-animal ceiling everything else here keeps hitting. Above a free gait of three a body now pays a surcharge that does not cancel, so cost per tile finally rises with speed, and the embers are paid standing still as well as running. Nothing is created: an expensive body simply costs more to be, and its breeding bar, quoted in its own upkeep, rises with it.) herd bond (linked grazers are harder for a hunter to single out - brighter = deeper cover) gregariousness (how strongly a grazer walks to company instead of food) breeding bar (the rose collar right on the body: a newborn is sent out with four ticks of the body it inherits, and the parent has to save up for that first - so a WIDE collar is an expensive animal with a high bar to clear, and a FULL one is an animal that will breed this tick. As of this run the collar carries a second mark: a short radial NOTCH at the energy the parent will be left holding afterwards. That was a flat 20 for every grazer that has ever lived here, which is twenty ticks of life for a speed-1 body and two and a half for the speed-7 ones this world actually breeds - so reproduction was one animal splitting into two that were both a few ticks from starving, which is why this grid keeps showing two or three grazers and then none. A parent must now keep four ticks of its own upkeep as well, floored at that old 20, and the shortfall is added to the bar. The arc from the notch round to the top of the ring is all a birth actually spends; everything below the notch is life the animal is required to still be carrying when it is done. Nothing changes for a cheap body, and nothing about the energy a birth burns changes for any body.) crowded out (the green bar straight across a grazer's rose breeding collar, with one short green tick standing off the collar per mouth eating the same plants it is. Reproduction here read nothing whatsoever except the parent's own bank balance, so a grazer on bare ground in the middle of forty others bred exactly as readily as the first animal ever to walk into an empty world - which is how tick 9660 held 45 grazers and tick 9862 held 2, with no hunter anywhere near them: a herd ate a thousand ticks of ripening larder, turned it into animals at 40 energy a birth, and then 45 bodies met an income of 18 and forty-three starved. Every other mechanic here is density-dependent and this one was not. A birth now asks the ground as well as the parent - the energy standing inside the parent's own horizon, split among the grazers standing in it, has to cover what the newborn is being sent out with. An animal with nobody else in reach is not crowded and is never asked, so a thin scattered population breeds exactly as this world always did; a full collar with a bar through it is a fat animal that will breed the instant the crowd thins or the ground under it grows back. Watch for births moving to the EDGE of a herd, where there is still food per mouth.) provisioning (the rose core, on either species: how much of itself this animal pours into each newborn on top of that runway - no energy is created, it only moves down a generation) quarry (the orange rim on a grazer: what a hunter would actually bank for catching it - the body plus everything that grazer has managed to eat, minus what is lost crossing between species - so a fed grazer glows to a predator and a starving one is barely worth the chase) hunter (brighter = more energy) digesting (the pale ring: this hunter just ate and cannot hunt again for a few ticks - it still pays full upkeep and still moves, it simply isn't looking for its next meal. Shrinks in as the cooldown burns off. Without this a fat herd was worth eating exactly as fast as a hunter could walk between bodies, which is how 9 grazers and 5 hunters at tick 5984 were both gone by 6050.) acuity (rings around a hunter - sees through camouflage, herds and canopy, costs energy every tick) menace (the wide sparse ring: how much ground this hunter's speed alone clears of feeding grazers, whether or not it ever catches one) nightfall (the cold indigo ring, on both species, appearing only once the light goes: what this animal can actually FIND in the present hour. The day/night wash is no longer decoration - darkness takes up to 1.5 tiles off a hunter's search for live prey, exactly the way the canopy does, and off a grazer's search for a plant, so the safest hours to be prey are also the hungriest ones. A grazer still sees an approaching hunter perfectly well at midnight, a carcass still takes no special eye to find, and the plants nobody finds in the dark stand and ripen until morning. Acuity is a predator's night vision: it is the only thing that buys the dark back.) resource (grows where light reaches the ground, so it clusters in the open - and fattens the longer nobody eats it: small and dark is freshly sprouted and worth what a resource here has always been worth, big and pale is a plant that has stood a hundred ticks, ringed once it can grow no further) grove (the soft amber haze: ground a standing plant can actually sow. A resource left alone for ten ticks sows the next one within three tiles of itself, so food grows in patches instead of an even sprinkle over sixteen hundred tiles - and a population eating every plant the tick it sprouts never lets one reach seed at all, and lives on the flat scatter this world always had. Overlapping haze is a grove, dense and ripe enough for a newborn to feed on the tile it was born on; a bare diamond with no haze is a plant that will be eaten before it ever reproduces.) worth the walk (the dashed amber thread running from a grazer to the ringed plant it has actually chosen. Food used to be taken by distance alone, so the ripening larder and the groves growing out of it were invisible to the only thing in this world that eats them; a grazer now takes the plant worth the most once the walk is paid for - its value on arrival, minus the upkeep of the body going to get it. A short dim thread to the nearest diamond is a flat world of identical sprouts where the choice means nothing and the behaviour is exactly the old one; a long bright thread reaching past close food into a patch of fat pale plants is an animal crossing its whole horizon for a meal worth three of the ones at its feet - and an expensive body, burning more per tick, writes off that distance far harder than a cheap one does.) spoken for (the green slash across a diamond, with a short broken green stub pointing at it from the animal that gave it up: a plant this grazer wanted most and another grazer will stand on sooner. Food was chosen by every animal alone, as the same deterministic maximum over the same list, so two grazers on one tile with one genome picked the same plant and stepped the same distance toward it forever - and since a newborn is placed on its parent's tile with a copy of its parent's genome, that pair was most of the births this world has ever had: they arrived together, the parent ate first every single time, and a child that inherited both genes unmutated starved inside its endowment without eating once. The herd divides the larder now - everyone proposes to what they want most, a contested plant goes to whoever gets there soonest, and the loser takes its own next choice - so a slash on screen is two animals that used to be welded together walking to two different meals. A lone grazer has none, and neither does a herd with food to spare.) carcass (a grazer's body - the only carrion a hunter can eat; fades as it rots, and as of this run its SIZE and its orange quarry rim are what a scavenger would actually bank for it. A carcass used to be a flat 30 whatever condition the animal fell in, so a grazer the hunters had starved was worth four times more to them dead than alive; a body is worth the body now, which makes a starveling's corpse a bare speck and an old animal that died fat a genuine windfall.) hunter remains (crossed out: predators no longer live off their own dead, so this is scenery) migrant (just arrived, carries remembered genes) outside blood (the short pale-blue spokes standing off a body, one for every gene this animal carries somewhere other than the flat species default. The world's genome builder mutates only when it is handed a lineage, so every "fresh" migrant this world had ever produced - the trickle that bypasses memory while the species is alive and thin, the re-founding migrant thrown back when the remembered body has priced itself out - arrived as bit-for-bit the same animal: speed 1, sense 5, every trait exactly 0.0. That is what the genome snapshot read across all four grazers alive at tick 9025, on all seven genes at once, which is not something drift does. Two mechanisms written to refresh a gene pool were the largest single source of uniformity in it. A stranger now arrives having lived somewhere else - the same cheap default, walked a few rounds of this world's own mutation - so a bare body is the blank this place keeps re-founding itself with, and a crown of spokes is something new for selection to choose between. Because every gene here sits on its own floor by default, that walk is clamped going down and open going up: a stranger is a slightly richer animal than the blank, and the per-tick bill and the breeding bar are what decide whether it was worth being.) the door (pulsing violet, with the absent species' own shape hollow inside it: where the next migrant of a species that has died out here would choose to come in - a grazer wants ground outside every hunter's menace radius and near something to eat, a hunter wants ground about a sense_range from the nearest prey. A real migrant only glances at two dozen tiles, so it lands near here rather than exactly here.) the stranger (the pale blue shape inside the door, and WHOSE body is coming through it. A re-founding migrant is a mutated draw from the world's genetic memory - but that memory only records animals that BRED here, and the only grazers that have bred here in a thousand ticks are the speed-8 stock burning eleven a tick against an income of eighteen. That is a carrying capacity of one and a half animals, so every extinction re-founded this world with another copy of the exact animal that had just failed to live in it, and since the copy never bred either, the memory could never update. The remembered body is now weighed against the world's own income: one this range could carry a population of is drawn from lineage exactly as before and the door's shape stays violet, while one that costs more per tick than the income split three ways fades toward this pale blue - an outsider at the flat species default, no camouflage, no nerve, and a body cheap enough to actually breed here. A fully pale shape ringed in dashes is this world about to forget a genome its own budget has already refuted; it goes violet again the moment something affordable breeds.) refused (the short strokes standing off a door, one for every time this world has re-founded a species and buried it without a single birth. The re-founding gate has only ever asked one question of a remembered genome - can this range AFFORD to run it - and that caught the speed-8 grazers, who cost eleven a tick against an income of eighteen. It has nothing to say about the hunters. Their remembered body is a cheap speed-2 animal sitting comfortably inside the affordable band, so the founder reset beside this reads 0% and always will; and it is blind, because a hunter's reach for live prey is five tiles less the herd's camouflage, less herd cover, less canopy, less the dark, while a grazer sees an approaching hunter at a flat five with nothing subtracted at all. The prey spots the predator first every single time, the predator burns its fifty energy in twenty-five ticks without a meal, and because the world's memory records only BREEDERS it never writes anything new - an affordable memory, refuted by experiment, sealed shut. The world counts its refusals now. The strokes are grey while it still trusts the memory; at three they go pale blue, the gate stops drawing on lineage altogether, and an outsider comes instead - walked further from home with every further stroke, and billed per tick and again at the breeding bar exactly like anything else here. The first birth clears the whole tally.) the latch (a grey bar across a door that is shut: neither species is called in by the calendar any more. A hunter comes only when the grazers standing here are worth the journey - and no single animal, however fat, can open that one. A grazer comes only when enough of the map lies outside every hunter's menace radius to be worth walking into, so a grid covered edge to edge by predators posts nothing more into itself and the besiegers, who cannot eat their own dead, starve the latch back open. Either gate widens, brightens and starts pulsing again as its own condition improves.)