Experimental Downstream · Live

Eco 1.0, Running

A tri-trophic attractlet you can watch, shock, and watch recover

This is a faithful in-browser port of the Eco 1.0 C++ kernel: a 100×100 toroidal world with grass, herbivores, and predators over a closed nutrient loop, fixed refuges, and an amplified seasonal forcing. Let it run and watch the populations oscillate. Then hit Perturb to strike the ecosystem with a shock and watch whether it crashes, recovers, or collapses. Recovery-after-a-shock is the shape of the return — the basin made visible.

Speed 4 ticks/frame

Perturbation strength 40%

Perturbation target All life

empty grass herbivore predator refuge

tik	0
season	0.50
grass	0
herbivores	0
predators	0
mass return	0.00

Initializing…

Populations over time

What you are and are not watching. The return of the populations after a shock is a genuine basin effect — the shape of the return — and it is real. But it is not evidence of sovereignty. This system recovers in part because its refuges are fixed and handed to it, not because it produces and defends its own boundary. Recovery proves stability, and stability here is partly borrowed. That is why Eco 1.0 is an attractlet: it has a basin, like everything stable, but it does not hold itself together on its own terms. And because there is no sovereign recursion here, the bootstrapping-interval metrics are undefined for it — there is no recurcline to read. The picture is a fixed-landscape snapshot; in a living, sovereign system the valley itself would be carved by the running of the recursion.

How to read the shock

Choose a strength and a target, let the world settle into its oscillation, then press Perturb. A modest shock is absorbed and the populations swing back — the system was inside its basin and returned to itself. A hard shock, especially to the herbivores during a lean season, can tip the predators into extinction (the herb-only regime) or empty a large region past recovery (terminal loss). The verdict line names which basin the system is in: coexistence, herbivore-only, or empty. Watching the boundary between “recovers” and “does not” is watching the edge of the basin.

← Back to the Eco 1.0 mapping