Citizens sense terrain resource cells and material nodes, but never sense each other. There is no distance-to-nearest-citizen check anywhere in decideTargets. As a result, whatever clustering appears (and gets labeled by settlements.ts) is driven entirely by shared resource geography, everyone converging on the same fertile terrain blobs, not by any social preference for being near or away from other citizens.
Why it matters: without this, town formation cannot be distinguished from food happens to be here. A social settlement-formation result requires a social signal to exist in the first place.
Direction: add a cheap, local, heritable signal, for example a gregariousness gene that biases home-seeking and movement toward or away from citizen density within vision range. Keep it a gene under selection, not a hardcoded attraction constant, so whether sociality is worth it emerges rather than being assumed. For this gene to actually face selection pressure rather than being cosmetic, it should hook into the existing agriculture regrowth bonus tied to home density, so living near others has a real, measurable fitness consequence.
Related files: src/sim/systems/visionMovementHarvest.ts, src/sim/traits.ts
Citizens sense terrain resource cells and material nodes, but never sense each other. There is no distance-to-nearest-citizen check anywhere in decideTargets. As a result, whatever clustering appears (and gets labeled by settlements.ts) is driven entirely by shared resource geography, everyone converging on the same fertile terrain blobs, not by any social preference for being near or away from other citizens.
Why it matters: without this, town formation cannot be distinguished from food happens to be here. A social settlement-formation result requires a social signal to exist in the first place.
Direction: add a cheap, local, heritable signal, for example a gregariousness gene that biases home-seeking and movement toward or away from citizen density within vision range. Keep it a gene under selection, not a hardcoded attraction constant, so whether sociality is worth it emerges rather than being assumed. For this gene to actually face selection pressure rather than being cosmetic, it should hook into the existing agriculture regrowth bonus tied to home density, so living near others has a real, measurable fitness consequence.
Related files: src/sim/systems/visionMovementHarvest.ts, src/sim/traits.ts