Palim
feature · liveAlpha v0.1.19

Peoples, descent and strangers

The founding village is one named people. Daughter villages name themselves; peoples who share ground and a hungry year fall out; strangers arrive from foreign cities with their own looks, and a region whose people start taking a foreign name pays for it.

The simulation loads in your browser (about 2 MB) and founds a valley of 160 paces. JavaScript is required.

Everyone carries four small fields: culture, the name they answer to; stock, the name they were born to, which never changes; admixture, the share of descent from outside the region; and a phenotype their children inherit and dilute. Moving house never changes descent.

The founding village is one people with a name of its own. A daughter village that has stood 35 years and grown past 34 people names itself, takes its own feudal standing, and pays the founding town only what the two peoples still think of each other. Peoples with shared ground, a cold standing and a hungry year come to blows; a fight leaves a grudge that the yearly drift cannot write out, and legitimacy with it.

Arrivals from foreign cities bring their own looks; how many come is the region’s welcome (its openness, the homeland’s attitude) plus the size of the community already here, and three arrivals in a year make a people of their own. Converts, people who take a name they were not born to, make that community larger and the pull stronger, and cost the rest of the region legitimacy, tribute and safety. Village markers and labels are drawn in the colour of the people who hold the place, so F10 in the viewer is a map of descent, and F12 is the whole of it, including a year-by-year chart of the region’s make-up.

The branching years and population are tunables; the rest of the arithmetic is in the rules reference.


In the code: crates/sim/src/lineage.rs crates/sim/src/city/peoples.rs

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