Hrm, according to my notes I should have submitted a
LivingTrenchcoat
eats seeds
eats lichen
cold resistant
Tundra
herbivore, but it is not on the list of viable herbivores. Maybe I changed my mind and submitted something else?
From what I remember, an organism like that is technically viable even if it has 5.1 size by adding a point of e.g. weapons, right? If there was no competition, then one of it would eat the seeds, getting 72 entries into a 1.96% lottery, and N-1 of it would eat lichen, getting 48 entries into a 1.96% lottery, yielding an equilibrium population of 8 organisms, which might be large enough to avoid randomly fluctuating to zero. Or did I get the mechanics wrong?
According to my data, GuySrinivasan submitted SmolFire to the Tundra instead of LivingTrenchcoat. It has 2 weapons, 0 armor and 0 speed. Eats Seeds and Lichen.
Your organism is technically viable, contrary to what I wrote in the post. However, it has a very small carrying capacity (though not quite as small as the Frostwing Snipper) and its lack of both defense and predatory ability got it annihilated in the initial feeding frenzy.
Which random factors caused the frostwing snippers to die out? Them migrating out? Competitors or predators migrating in? Or is there some chance of not getting the seed, even if they're the only species left? I didn't get a good look at the source code, but I thought things were fairly deterministic once only one species was left.
The number of babies an organism has a random element. If it eats enough to replace itself then it will replace itself once in average but might do so zero or multiple times on average.
Migration is random too so there's a small chance of it migrating away too. The frosting snippers mostly needn't worry about invaders thanks to the heat.
A species will always get the seed if it is the only species left.
Why is the starting population of Frostwing Snippers 3500? As far as I can see, it has Size 14.1, and I don't know what kind of starting energy budget leads to a starting population of 3500.
(That also seems like a very large starting number, and makes me worry that even in more viable biomes there's going to be a huge population crash.)
Yeah, that seems crazy high, with only ~300 resources to fight over. If there were a steady state, you'd expect ~300 herbivores and fewer carnivores, across all species.
It's also not the energy budget in the code I downloaded (which was 1000, and even that might be pretty high in tundra given the number of entrants and available resources).
You're right. The code I released did have 1,000, not 50,000. This is an inconsistency between the code I released and the code I ran the game with. I apologize.
Thanks for noticing. This post tool a long time to write and basically the same thing happened (except faster) with 1,000 so I'm not going to re-write this whole post. The same goes for the Desert, which I have already written up too. I will use the correct value of 1,000 for the rest of the biomes.