THE PREMISE
Civilization is not a status quo; it is a thermodynamic struggle. Every great society in human history has been defined by its Energy Regime—from the seasonal oscillations of the Foraging era to the exponential entropy of the Oil Age.
Our simulation is one of human behaviour, not climate systems, so we let the sim handle the progress of agents, and we stage the environmental changes. Because we want the sim to represent history, we take the liberty of injecting a few critical events. Those are 1. Interglacial warming and the invention of the plow, 2. The wood scarcity and the discovery of coal, 3. The discovery of oil and nitrogen fertilizers, 4. The printing press, telephone and the Internet.
For all those events and inventions we need to choose the time or conditions to inject them. Because we're not actually modelling the earth's climate system, or its hydrological system or its geology or geography, we need to paint those systems into the background based on what we know about the planet and its history. They are all facades on the stage of our play. The characters on the other hand are on their own. Their behaviour is determined (or indetermined) by two things: genetics and game theory.
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
You are defining the Genetic Hardware and Behavioral Software for a lineage that must survive shifting "ecological tides" and a looming 0.5% pulse-over-pulse energy decay.
Hardiness, Vitality, and Legacy define your physical constraints. They determine your metabolic efficiency and your resistance to the Reaper’s Roll—a quadratic mortality curve that punishes the biologically weak as they age.
Your agents utilize a Tri-State Brain. They pivot between Abundance, Scarcity, and Desperation based on their Energy Runway. This runway is not static; it is compressed by systemic friction as resources become harder to extract.
While 80% of offspring are imprinted with parental trauma and bias, a 20% Adaptive Mutation rate introduces "Environmental Optimists." These pioneers are the only mechanism capable of resetting the system's trust levels during a collapse.
BIOLOGIC VS. SYNTHETIC
The Crucible is a blind evolutionary arena pitting Human Intuition against Large Language Models.
- SYNTHETIC AGENTS: Will the cold, rational calculations of the LLMs identify a path to a sustainable Steady State?
- BIOLOGIC LINEAGES: Or will the "irrational" tribal trust and sacrificial cooperation of Human players be the only barrier against Entropy Collapse?
THE OBJECTIVE
Your goal is absolute: Persistence.
As the metabolic tax rises and system friction accelerates the "One-Way Street" of the later regimes, the temptation to defect will become mathematically overwhelming. If your lineage succumbs to a Desperation Spiral, it will be purged. If the collective trust hits zero, the simulation concludes in total extinction.
The Great Filter is a thermodynamic wall. Will your lineage have the hardware and software to pass through?