Discovery
🚧 In progress — design gap.
Discovery is how knowledge changes: how a new meme enters the world, who can discover it, and how often. Without it, the meme tree is static and the whole simulation is inert — so this is on the critical path, not a polish item.
What’s decided
Section titled “What’s decided”- Discovery is gated by prerequisites (hard), eased by affinity, divided by size (an integer magnitude — a society must be large/specialised enough), and gated for ex-nihilo invention by material reach.
- Demand precedes intensification: an intensifying praxis only becomes a discovery candidate once demand for its material exists (see Authoring Rules).
- Intended discovery probability is roughly:
base × material_affinity × meme_affinity × prereq_gate × (capacity / size) × …
What’s open
Section titled “What’s open”- Frequency / cadence of discovery checks, and what triggers one.
- Per-individual vs. per-settlement discovery; the role of skill, traits, and institutions.
- How the player discovers/invents differently from NPCs (deliberate pursuit, novel combinations) — the heart of the Learn & Invent feature.
- How a newly discovered meme propagates into the storage tiers and transmission graph.
→ Tracked in Design Status.