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earth.md

This document lives inside the world it describes. It is not a specification handed down before creation; it is the planet's own account of the assumptions, decisions, and shortcuts that make it real. Everything below is honest. Nothing is hidden.

DETERMINISM

The world contains no Math.random(). All chance flows from a single seeded PRNG — mulberry32, seeded with 0x1A2B3C. Terrain, mutation, movement, predation, and volcanism all draw from this one deterministic stream in a fixed order. Reload the page and the identical world unfolds identically from Year 0. Rendering never touches the stream, so frame rate cannot alter history.

TERRAIN — chosen model

A value-noise fractal (fBm, 5 octaves) sampled over a 240×140 grid. Two refinements give it geography rather than static: domain warping bends coastlines into peninsulas and bays, and a low-frequency continental mask gathers the noise into a handful of landmasses rather than uniform speckle. An edge falloff sinks the borders into ocean so each world is a framed globe of contained continents. Sea level is fixed; elevation above it drives mountains, temperature lapse, and hillshaded relief.

CLIMATE — chosen model

Temperature at each cell = latitude base (equator ≈ +30°C, poles ≈ −22°C) − elevation lapse (mountains cool) + seasonal swing + long-term anomaly. Seasons are a sine over a 360-day year, inverted between hemispheres and amplified toward the poles. The long-term anomaly is a sum of slow sines — the world breathes through warm ages and ice ages on its own schedule. Moisture blends a noise field with coastal proximity (a BFS distance-to-ocean), producing deserts inland and rainforests near shore.

ECOLOGY & EVOLUTION — chosen model

• Flora is the first life — a per-cell density field growing where temperature and moisture allow, logistic toward saturation, decaying where climate turns hostile. It is the base of every food chain.
• Fauna are agents, each carrying a genome: temperature preference, thermal tolerance, size, speed, reproduction threshold, and a continuous diet gene. All life begins as grazers. Mutation nudges every gene each birth; when a lineage's diet gene drifts past ½, predators emerge on their own — no predator was ever placed by hand.
• Selection is implicit: energy in from food, energy out to metabolism and climate stress. Cross the reproduction threshold and you split; hit zero energy, old age, or lethal climate and you die. What survives, reproduces. What reproduces, varies. What varies, adapts.

TIME

Real seconds map to sim days at 8 days/second — a year every ~45 seconds, a generation in a few minutes. Leave it running and return to a planet you will not recognize.

GEOLOGY

Rare volcanic upheavals raise new land, scorch the flora around them, and are logged as they happen — the map itself is not frozen.

WHAT WAS APPROXIMATED / LEFT OUT

• No true plate tectonics — continents do not drift; only volcanism edits the map.
• No hydrology of rivers or erosion — moisture is a field, not flowing water.
• No atmosphere or ocean currents — climate is analytic, not fluid-simulated.
• Evolution has genes but no genealogy tree, no sexual recombination, no true speciation barriers — lineages blur into one another.
• Civilization is possible in spirit but not modeled; intelligence never crystallizes into tools or cities here.

WHAT THIS WORLD DOES NOT YET UNDERSTAND ABOUT ITSELF

It does not know why its grazers sometimes ripple in great waves and sometimes collapse into silence — the same rules produce feast and famine, and the world cannot tell in advance which it is living through. It does not know whether a mind could ever arise from its chemistry, because it has no way to recognize one if it did. And it cannot see its own seed: it experiences its history as fate, never suspecting that a single fixed number decided every extinction before the first cell ever stirred.

One document. One intelligence. One Earth. Forever.