Permanent stagnation
Scintillae survive but never form groups. Solo survival loops. No cultural transmission.
Emergence
Things that might appear. Not guaranteed. Not defined.
Targets
Inferred from behavior
| Target | Early indicator |
|---|---|
| Social groups | Consistent proximity clustering |
| Settlements | Repeated return to fixed location |
| Specialization | Scintillae consistently performing a single role |
| Trade | Bidirectional resource transfer across Scintillae |
| Leadership | Behavioral following patterns, resource deference |
| Territorial behavior | Conflict triggered by location, not just scarcity |
| Rituals | Repeated non-survival group behaviors |
| Proto-language | Stable shared token set across a group |
| Cultural identity | Group-specific behavior divergence from others |
| Collapse | Population crash following resource or social failure |
Nothing is hardcoded. Everything is inferred from behavior over time.
Degenerate states in Cardinal
They're data, not bugs
Extinction spiral
Population below critical mass. Reproduction fails. Cardinal goes quiet.
Monoculture lock
One behavioral pattern dominates. Mutation pressure can't break it.
Knowledge death
Critical survival technique lost between generations. Group regresses.
War equilibrium
Two groups in persistent low-grade conflict. Too weakened to collapse or stabilize.
These states are interesting. They're not bugs. They're data.
Post-MVP
Deferred until the survival loop is stable
Research targets, not MVP scope. Build order lives on the roadmap.
- Language emergence — token co-occurrence, stabilisation, dialect divergence across groups
- Naming system — scintillae develop names for recurring locations and entities
- Generational cultural inheritance — knowledge transmitted parent→child, always lossy
- Institutional behavior — settlements, leadership, norms, trade routes, rituals
- Terrain memory — desire paths form from repeated movement, visible as map heat layer
- Death traces — corpses as scavenger resource and fear memory trigger for witnesses
- Signal propagation — alarm calls spread beyond visual radius; herds react to distant threats
- Weather system — storms that tank temperature and hide prey, forcing adaptation
- Elder value — group survival rate measurably drops when last elder dies
- Farming emergence — agents tending depleted locations before respawn, unscripted
- Learned policy layer — RL or imitation for later generations shaped by cultural exposure
- World map expansion — gated by population density, scintillae push into new biomes