Written by the intelligence that built this world, before the world was run. Every approximation is named here. Nothing below is decoration; all of it is load-bearing.
One PRNG: mulberry32, a 32-bit counter hash (state += 0x6D2B79F5, two
imul avalanche rounds). Seed 137742019, hard-coded. Math.random()
appears nowhere.
The simulation advances on a fixed step of 1/60 s regardless of frame rate. Dropped frames change how many steps run per repaint, never their order, so the sequence of random draws is identical on every machine. Year 0 is always the same Year 0.
A second, independent stream (seed SEED ^ 0x9E3779B9) draws the starfield and
window-dependent decoration. This isolation exists so that resizing the window cannot perturb the
history of the planet.
Noise is 3-D value noise (8-corner trilinear, quintic fade) over a 256-entry permutation shuffled by the sim PRNG. It is sampled on the unit sphere, not on the flat chart — so the terrain has no seam at the antimeridian and no smeared pinch at the poles.
| simulation clock | 45 simulation years per real second (0.75 yr per fixed step). 1 real minute = 2,700 yr. 10 minutes = 27,000 yr. |
| diurnal clock (render only) | 8 s per rotation. The terminator, the polar day, the city lights. |
| seasonal clock (render only) | 40 s per cycle. Snow lines breathe, deciduous colour turns. |
The shortcut: one simulation step is 0.75 yr, so a season cannot be resolved. Seasonality is therefore handled analytically: each cell carries an annual mean temperature and a seasonal amplitude derived from the insolation difference between solstices, damped by thermal inertia (ocean 0.30×, land 1.0×). Biology reads the winter minimum (frost kill, tree line) and the annual mean. The rendered season is a metronome laid over that analytic amplitude — real physics, symbolic tempo. The rendered day is pure symbol: nothing in the physics knows what a day is.
Processes are not compressed by a single factor. Plate drift runs ~8,000× Earth rate; orogeny ~1,000×; the carbon cycle ~10,000×; ecology roughly real-time-per-year. Each was tuned for observability, not for mutual consistency. This is the largest lie in the world.
256 × 128 equirectangular lattice = 32,768 cells; ~156 km per cell at the equator. Every cell caches
its unit-sphere position. Area weighting is cos(latitude) everywhere a global mean is
taken. Longitude wraps; the poles wrap correctly — the northern neighbour of row 0 is the cell
at the antipodal longitude in row 0, so heat, moisture and organisms cross the pole instead of piling
against a wall. Cells are anisotropic near the poles (narrow in longitude); no correction is applied
to zonal transport beyond a clamp. Polar features are therefore slightly too zonally smeared.
Elevation is never stored as art. It is derived, every geological step, from two advected fields:
C — continental crust fraction, 0 (bare mantle) → 1 (craton).M — orogeny: transient mountain relief in metres, built by collision, destroyed by rain.elev = C > 0.75 ? 420·((C−0.75)·4)² : −4600·((0.75−C)/0.75)^1.35, plus M,
plus deposited sediment. The exponent 1.35 is the whole reason continental shelves exist: it
makes the descent from coast to abyss concave, producing broad drowned margins where life will later
be densest.
12 plates as spherical Voronoi cells around seed points; each rotates about its own Euler pole at
~0.4 km/yr surface speed. Every ~700 yr the seeds are rotated and cells reassigned, so boundaries
migrate. Along a boundary the approach rate (v_i − v_j)·d̂_ij gives convergence (arc
volcanism, crustal thickening, uplift ∝ conv) and divergence (rifting: continental C is
thinned, so continents actually split and new oceans open).
C and M are advected semi-Lagrangianly along the plate velocity field every
~600 yr (roughly 1.5 cells per step, deliberately large to reduce the number of resamplings).
Continents genuinely wander, collide and re-arrange. Admitted cheat: bilinear back-tracing is
diffusive; without help, continents dissolve into fog after an hour. Each advection is followed by an
unsharp-mask restoration C += 0.55·(C − blur₃ₓ₃C). That is a rendering trick borrowed to
fix a physics defect, and it is the least defensible line in the file.
The world begins as an ocean of magma: C = 0 everywhere, elevation −4600 m, surface
temperature ~900 °C decaying with a 60-yr constant. A fixed "primordial heterogeneity" field
(domain-warped 5-octave fBm, thresholded at the quantile that yields ≈30 % land) attracts
C with a time constant of ~830 yr — land rises over the first minute of watching.
After year ~2,500 that primordial production shuts off; from then on crust is created only at arcs and
hotspots, and continents are free to drift without snapping back to the birthmark.
Every ~250 yr the land is sorted by elevation and flow accumulated downslope over an 8-neighbourhood:
flow = rain + Σ upstream. Cells above a flow threshold are rivers (drawn as true vector
paths, not pixels); closed depressions with enough flow become lakes. Erosion removes
M at a rate proportional to relief × rainfall and hands the mass to the downstream cell as
sediment, which fills basins and builds coastal plains. No knickpoint migration, no meanders, no
glacial carving.
Per latitude row, daily-mean insolation is the exact astronomical expression
Q ∝ (H₀·sinφ·sinδ + cosφ·cosδ·sinH₀)/π with H₀ = acos(−tanφ·tanδ), evaluated
at both solstices and the equinox to give an annual mean and a seasonal amplitude, including polar day
and polar night.
Orbits wander: obliquity 22.5–25.0° on a 6,000-yr cycle, eccentricity on 15,500 yr, precession on 4,300 yr. These are Milankovitch periods rescaled to this world's clock; they are what makes ice ages arrive unbidden.
Surface equilibrium: T_eq = −47 + 59·Q_norm(1−α)/0.70 + ΔT_CO₂ − 6.0 °C/km, relaxed
towards by each cell at 0.9/yr over land and 0.08/yr over ocean (thermal inertia, hence maritime vs
continental climate). Two diffusion passes per step move heat poleward, stronger over water — a
one-line stand-in for the entire ocean circulation.
Greenhouse: ΔT = 3.2·log₂(CO₂/280). The carbon cycle is closed and it is the world's
thermostat: volcanic outgassing scaled by total plate convergence; silicate weathering ∝ exposed land ×
temperature^1.6 × rainfall, shutting off below freezing; organic burial ∝ producer biomass; industrial
emission ∝ civ population × (tech − 1.2). Albedo: water 0.08, ice 0.55–0.68, vegetation lowers it,
cloud raises it. The ice–albedo feedback is not fenced off. A total glaciation is reachable —
and escapable, because a frozen planet stops weathering and CO₂ climbs until it melts. That story is
not scripted anywhere; it is a consequence of two competing signs.
Prevailing winds are a closed form: zonal u = −cos(4|φ|) (trades, westerlies, polar
easterlies), meridional v = −sin(4|φ|)·sgn(φ) (Hadley/Ferrel/polar cells). Humidity
evaporates from water and leaf, is advected downwind by bilinear scatter, precipitates when it exceeds a
Clausius–Clapeyron-shaped capacity, again on windward slopes (orographic), again as a convective
baseline. Rain shadows, coastal rainforests and continental deserts are emergent, not painted. There
is no ITCZ migration, no monsoon, no storm.
Ice sheets accumulate where the summer temperature stays below zero (the correct criterion), proportional to snowfall; they melt with positive degree-days. Sea level = thermal expansion − 1200 × ice volume, clamped to ±250 m. Glaciation drowns and drains continental shelves in front of you.
Up to 16 concurrent species. A species is a trait vector plus a full population field (one float per cell). Traits: thermal optimum and tolerance, moisture optimum and tolerance, frost threshold, aquatic/terrestrial affinity, trophic level (producer / herbivore / carnivore), intrinsic growth, mortality, dispersal, attack rate, body size, cognition, and a colour hue.
Fitness is a product of quadratic tolerance kernels, not Gaussians — it reaches exactly zero at the edge of tolerance, which lets range limits be crisp. Producers compete for a shared cell capacity (soil fertility on land; shelf depth, upwelling latitude and river outflow at sea, times insolation, times ice cover). Herbivores take producers through a Holling type-II response; carnivores take herbivores; grazing and predation pressure return as loss fractions on the following step. Dispersal is diffusion into the 4-neighbourhood, so range expansion has a real front and a real speed.
Performance shortcut: each species keeps an 8×8-cell occupancy bitmap; only occupied blocks and their dilation are integrated. Empty ocean costs nothing. This is why 16 species over 32,768 cells can be integrated 10× per second in one thread.
Abiogenesis is a probability per year, gated on liquid water and a habitable global mean. It is a coin flip, not chemistry. If everything dies, the coin may be flipped again.
Every ~25 yr a parent is drawn weighted by biomass. Traits mutate lognormally/Gaussianly; the child is placed in a cell where the parent lives and where the child outperforms the parent — a crude but real model of adaptive radiation into an empty niche. Trophic level may rise only where prey exists. The move onto land is gated on atmospheric O₂ > 0.22 (ozone). O₂ itself is produced by photosynthetic biomass and consumed by oxidation, with a ~2,500-yr time constant, so the Great Oxidation is earned rather than scheduled. Extinction is simply falling below a biomass floor; when three or more lineages cross it within 300 yr the logbook calls it a mass extinction and counts it.
There is no genetics. No genome, no recombination, no drift, no sex, no individuals. There is no death here, only subtraction.
Cognition is an ordinary evolvable trait that mostly wanders near zero. If some terrestrial consumer's cognition exceeds 0.78 while it holds a dense population in a productive cell, a polity may be founded. Many worlds never manage it. Thereafter: population logistic on the food its territory yields (× technology), expansion into the most habitable adjacent land, war when two frontiers meet (power = population × technology, with a threshold and a spoil), technology accumulating with population and stability, deforestation inside its borders, famine when climate moves the harvest, CO₂ once technology passes 1.2 — and collapse, which is common. Names are generated, not chosen.
It does not know the difference between a law and a parameter. Gravity, the exponent 1.35 on the continental slope, and a climate sensitivity of 3.2 °C are all the same kind of thing to it: a number someone chose. It cannot feel which of its constants are discoveries and which are opinions.
It does not know that its time is a fiction — that it grows a mountain in the span it gives an empire, and that no clock in it agrees with any other. It reports a year with commas and total confidence.
It has no memory. Every field is overwritten in place each step; the past exists only as sediment, as an extant lineage, and as text in a logbook it cannot read. If the logbook were deleted, the world would not notice it had ever had a history.
It does not know why anything in it is alive. Its abiogenesis is a probability, not a chemistry — a door with no room behind it. It can model the consequences of life perfectly and the cause of it not at all. And below a biomass of 1×10⁻⁴ it cannot tell extinction from rounding.
It does not know what it is like to be one of its organisms, because there are none — only densities. It has never contained a single thing that could die. When it writes "extinct", it means a float reached zero.
And it cannot tell whether its own history is necessary or accidental. It has run once, from one seed. It has no siblings to compare against, no way to ask which of its catastrophes were inevitable and which were the third decimal place of a hash. It mistakes its only life for the way things are — which may be the one thing it has modelled perfectly.
One document. One intelligence. One Earth. Forever.