procedural generation

gradient, an elevation lapse rate, and rain shadow approximated by a running maximum of elevation along the wind, so deserts end up behind mountains because the moisture rained out on the windward side and so on.

Drainage is D8 flow accumulation with depression-filled lakes and rivers extracted at the 98th percentile of accumulation.

Then Voronoi regions (nearest-seed kd-tree), macro-region clustering, and feature extraction that finds mountain passes and chokepoints, the strategic sites history will later care about.

And it now does care. The military layer reads geography when it picks wars (weighting how hard a target is to attack), scores which regions are worth taking, and routes raiders by path difficulty, so an unreachable target nearly drops off the map. The pass the feature extractor found gets to matter to a war declared two hundred simulated years later.

Political map and borders with traderoutes

# Economies that cascade

Production chains are declared in JSON (`ore → ingot → tools`), settlements consume from regional resource pools and write back to them. A small registry of cascade rules then routes upstream events to downstream consequences on a delay.

I'm currently reading a lot about the Bronze Age, and the Bronze Age collaps is such an interesting event that gave me some inspiration.

A major metal-goods crisis knocks a settlement's defense down a notch and, two years later, a second rule turns that weakened defense into banditry: a `bandit_pressure` condition that then raises ambush odds for caravans crossing the region. So a mine running thin in one decade becomes raiders on a trade road in the next, with no event scripted between them. Because each consequence traces to exactly one rule, I can read a finished world back and explain why a road is dangerous, not guess. The prices in the player-facing shop just read post-tick economic state and tag goods scarce or surplus on their own.

Resources, and Trade

# Gods that earn it

Inspired by Indo-European pantheon and its history, religion follows the same instinct: don't hand out importance, let the world generate it. Fifteen primordial concepts (fire, forge, death, war, nature) are universal archetypes, not gods; each culture filters them through its own experience, so the same concept becomes different deities, or none, depending on who's worshipping.

Unanswered prayers tick up on their own, so a god whose culture declines slides from major deity back toward local spirit. Gods don't usually die dramatically here. They're forgotten.

Religious system

# Learnings so far

Data-driven authoring is the multiplier: every system I made JSON-authorable paid for itself within a week; every one I hardcoded got rewritten.

Constraints beat randomness: the most believable output came from the most constrained systems, not the freest (arguably).

Wiring is harder than generation: building a drainage simulator is a fun weekend, but making a war care about a mountain pass is months, and that's the part that makes a world feel caused instead of decorated.

The dungeon generator that started all this is still in there, now sitting inside a procedurally-shaped continent, inside a settlement, inside a history that can account for it.

Techstack: Python 3.10, NumPy, NetworkX, pytest, scipy.

# General references that taught me most

\- Shaker, Togelius, Nelson, *Procedural Content Generation in Games* (2016), the survey http://pcgbook.com/

\- Red Blob Games (Amit Patel): https://www.redblobgames.com/ , practical reference for everything map-shaped.

\- Martin O'Leary, "Generating fantasy maps":

7 views20:59