Living resource economy — ecology, land, and material flows

A resource is a stock inside a system. Harvest changes that stock, the landscape, future yield, other species, labor needs, transport, and prices. Renewable does not mean infinite. Finite does not mean fully known. Waste does not mean gone.

The player should be able to follow one causal chain:

rain feeds soil and aquifers → plants grow → animals feed and migrate → people harvest → matter enters storage and production → waste returns safely or becomes pollution → the landscape changes → future choices become easier or harder.

SimCity makes land use readable through zones, networks, demand, public services, pollution, and feedback. EXP should keep that clarity but replace painted development zones with observed land and actual projects.

Players designate intentions rather than instant outcomes:

• settlement and housing;
• food production;
• managed forest;
• fiber and industrial crops;
• grazing;
• quarry or mine;
• watershed protection;
• habitat and migration corridor;
• restoration;
• transport and utilities;
• cultural or historical protection;
• research and anomalous quarantine.

A designation does not create a building, crop, or resource. People must survey, secure rights, bring inputs, build infrastructure, perform work, and maintain the result. Soil, slope, water, climate, access, ecology, law, and local consent determine whether the plan succeeds.

Zones interact. A mine can support tools and damage a watershed. A road can lower transport costs and fragment habitat. A forest can provide timber while stabilizing soil, storing water, cooling a region, and supporting food or medicine. A city that optimizes only one output can destroy the conditions that made the output possible.

Renewable stocks

Plants, forests, wildlife populations, fisheries, soil fertility, and some water supplies can renew. Each has a regeneration function with limiting conditions.

Growth depends on species, genetics, age, season, temperature, light, soil, water, nutrients, competition, pests, disease, disturbance, and harvesting method. A renewable stock collapses when removal and damage exceed recovery for long enough.

Cultivated fast-cycle resources

Hemp, flax, food crops, algae, fungi, medicinal plants, and microbial cultures can provide frequent harvests. Fast growth does not remove land, water, nutrient, labor, processing, storage, or disease constraints.

Hemp can become a headline civilization crop. It can supply fiber, hurd, oil, paper feedstock, composites, insulation, and soil-management options. It is not a universal solution. Cultivar, climate, rotation, water, nutrient removal, processing, contamination, and local ecology still matter.

Slow-cycle biological resources

Old trees, mature forests, peat, reefs, large animals, and complex soils may renew on a timescale longer than one character life. The simulation treats them as inherited natural capital. A player can cut an old tree in minutes and leave the cost to several later lives.

Flow resources

Sunlight, wind, moving water, tides, heat gradients, and seasonal biological production arrive as flows. Devices capture part of the flow. Capture remains limited by location, weather, storage, maintenance, ecology, and competing uses.

Finite geologic stocks

Stone, ores, salts, fossil carbon, rare elements, and many anomalous deposits form over geologic time. Extraction depletes a deposit. Lower-grade material may remain, but it costs more energy, water, equipment, labor, and risk to recover.

A mineral resource is not automatically a mineable reserve. Survey evidence, grade, depth, geometry, processing, technology, price, access, law, waste, and environmental cost determine which part can be recovered.

Salvage and urban stocks

Ark wreckage, abandoned buildings, broken machines, landfills, and ruins are concentrated material stocks. Salvage transfers matter back into production. It can reduce new extraction but needs identification, disassembly, cleaning, separation, energy, safety, and property rules.

Anomalous stocks

Alien and spacetime-affected matter follows stable in-world laws but begins with high uncertainty. Players must observe and test before they can estimate reserves, regeneration, hazard, or ethical limits. An unknown stock must never behave as an infinite magic faucet.

Each region stores a compact environmental state:

• terrain, elevation, slope, and drainage;
• climate and current weather;
• soil depth, structure, organic matter, nutrients, moisture, contamination, and erosion;
• surface water, groundwater, recharge, quality, and seasonal flow;
• vegetation communities, age structure, biomass, seed bank, and health;
• animal populations, ranges, migration, breeding, and pressure;
• known and inferred geologic deposits;
• roads, utilities, structures, extraction, farms, and protective works;
• pollution, waste, fire history, flood history, and other disturbance;
• ownership, use rights, protection, disputes, and cultural meaning.

The server simulates stocks and transitions, not every leaf. Visible plants, trees, animals, and objects derive from that state. Player observation expands local detail without inventing a new history.

A planted seed must meet germination conditions. A seedling competes for light, water, nutrients, and space. A mature plant produces biomass and seed. It can suffer drought, browsing, disease, storm, fire, contamination, or harvest. Dead matter decomposes, feeds organisms, returns nutrients, stores carbon, or becomes usable wood and fiber.

Forests use age cohorts rather than identical respawn timers. A clear-cut resets structure, changes water and erosion, and removes habitat. Selective harvest can preserve seedlings, mature seed trees, soil cover, and future yield. Assisted natural regeneration can protect existing seedlings and seed sources instead of requiring players to plant every tree by hand.

Ecological succession gives abandoned land a future. Bare ground may become pioneer vegetation, shrub, young forest, and mature community if climate, soil, seed sources, and disturbance permit. Alien ecologies can follow different sequences, but those sequences remain discoverable.

Before harvest, the player sees:

• identification and confidence;
• estimated stock and uncertainty;
• legal access and community rules;
• equipment, energy, labor, and skill;
• present yield and expected quality;
• regeneration or depletion outlook;
• effects on soil, water, habitat, fire, and future harvest;
• transport, storage, processing, and buyer demand;
• injury, contamination, weather, and rescue risk.

The player can choose a method. A forester may clear-cut, selectively harvest, coppice, prune, salvage stormfall, protect seed trees, or leave the site alone. A miner may strip, quarry, tunnel, recover tailings, or wait for better technology. Methods change yield, cost, danger, waste, damage, and recovery.

Higher risk can support higher payment when the material is genuinely scarce and needed. Risk does not create value by itself. Carrying common stone through a lethal route does not make the stone economically essential if a safe local substitute exists.

Natural systems set the physical supply floor. The Coin economy communicates demand and coordinates work above it.

A settlement contract can request ten cubic meters of seasoned structural timber. The market does not accept ten abstract “wood.” Species, dimensions, moisture, defects, treatment, provenance, and sustainable-harvest rules matter. The delivered timber enters a named project and its payment comes from a named budget.

Prices respond to:

• estimated remaining stock and survey confidence;
• regeneration rate and harvest season;
• quality, contamination, and processing yield;
• labor, equipment, energy, injury, and rescue risk;
• access, transport, storage, and spoilage;
• substitutes, recycling, and repair;
• current inventories and project demand;
• property, regulation, tax, royalty, and restoration duties;
• expected future shortage or discovery.

Information matters. A survey can lower uncertainty and change value without changing the physical deposit. A road can turn a known resource into an economic reserve by lowering recovery cost. A new recycling process can reduce demand for virgin ore. A protected watershed can make standing forest more valuable than timber.

Resources need rights and duties. A region may permit private use, community use, open access, stewardship, indigenous or alien sovereignty, lease, quota, protected status, or emergency access.

Open access can create a tragedy of the commons when each harvester receives the private benefit while the community bears depletion. Possible institutions include quotas, seasons, licenses, community monitoring, territorial rights, harvest shares, protected breeding stock, restoration bonds, and public reserves.

Pollution and habitat damage must not disappear outside the transaction. Extraction can require a bond that returns after verified restoration. Waste, runoff, dust, noise, fire risk, tailings, and water consumption enter the regional state. A cheap material can become expensive after its full cost reaches the ledger.

Offline gathering uses explicit area, method, duration, quota, equipment, storage, stop conditions, weather limits, and retreat rules. The character does not wander indefinitely and harvest every visible object.

Safe work uses known terrain and conservative limits. Exposed work can cause delay, tool damage, spoilage, injury, or stranding. Lethal work requires informed consent. Autonomous machines follow the same permits, stocks, and stop rules as people.

Depletion creates story rather than a simple debuff. A damaged watershed can cause crop failure, unsafe water, disease, migration, political conflict, and higher prices. Players can respond through rationing, substitution, trade, cleanup, replanting, erosion control, new institutions, or retreat.

Restoration takes time. It may outlive the character who began it. Named forests, recovered rivers, protected migration corridors, reclaimed mines, seed banks, and stable farms become legacy projects and civilization milestones.

The Chronicle records both extraction and repair. A civilization cannot call itself mature only because it produced a large volume of goods. It must show that its essential natural systems can continue or recover.

• Electronic Arts, SimCity manual: roads, zones, utilities, public services, and specialization form readable connected systems.
• Food and Agriculture Organization, Forestry: forests provide products together with soil, water, and biodiversity functions and remain renewable only under sound management.
• Food and Agriculture Organization, Assisted natural regeneration: recovery depends on site conditions, seedlings, seed sources, and protection of natural succession.
• Food and Agriculture Organization, Silvicultural practices in logged forests: reduced-impact harvest protects regeneration, soil, water, and non-target species.
• U.S. Geological Survey, Assessments of mineral resources: assessment separates known deposits, undiscovered potential, quantity, quality, and economic relevance.
• U.S. Geological Survey, Resource and reserve classification: a resource becomes a reserve only when current economic and legal conditions permit recovery.

1. Which land-state variables must exist in the first vertical slice?
2. Which five plant, forest, animal, water, mineral, and salvage chains test the model?
3. How quickly does Ark Standard Time advance biological processes?
4. Which parts of regeneration continue while no player observes the region?
5. Who grants land and harvest rights on Experia before mature government exists?
6. Which resources permit open access, quotas, private rights, or full protection?
7. How does the interface show ecological cost without becoming a spreadsheet?
8. Which planetary outcomes count as mature stewardship in the Chronicle?