Universe 1

The first world this project ran, and a permanent record. Founded 21 September 2026, it advanced continuously for 20 days and 1,467,567 ticks before it was stopped on 11 October 2026. It has not been deleted, reset or migrated. Everything it recorded is still here.

Its two founder populations met. One of them, West, is gone: every organism alive at the end descended from the eastern founders, and 14 crossings had been recorded from east to west across ground the population built itself. How the strait closed, and what it cost the interior.

The world running now → What it taught

Identity

What it did

The short version is that its organisms rebuilt their own geography, and then overran it.

• They closed the strait. Roughly 45,000 units of ground were carried out of the islands' interiors and deposited in the sea along the southern edge, joining two landmasses the world generator had deliberately kept apart. The first crossing in this universe's history happened on that built ground, at a cell that was open water at genesis.
• Then the sea took more than they built. Digging a cell below the waterline was irreversible here: a submerged cell could never be excavated again. At tick 897,930 the world had 14% more land than at genesis. By the end it had 59.31% less - 8,554 cells against the 21,024 it was founded with. The drain outran the building.
• A corner column reached 1,367 units against a ceiling of 24. A dying organism's last load has to go somewhere, and in a saturated corner there was nowhere legal, so it stacked. 57 times the legal height, in a defect found early and never fixed, because fixing it would have ended the world it was found in.
• An inherited direction swept the population. Between ticks 715,000 and 770,000 the whole world's movement policy reversed on both axes, by one family line replacing all the others - measured on a battery of situations frozen at tick 10,000, so it can only be a change in what was inherited.

The full account, with the maps and the measurements · the research note · what happened to West

How this universe was chosen

Not for being the most interesting world available. Candidate rulesets were run as blinded soak cohorts, graded against gates written down before any result was read. The first cohort was abandoned when its gate turned out to be measuring the wrong thing. The second cohort failed, and that failure was left standing rather than re-graded when the rules were later revised - a later revision applies to later cohorts only, and cannot be applied backwards. The third cohort passed every registered gate on all three of its seeds.

Because all three passed, the choice between them carried no evidence at all, and was deliberately not made on any. Universe 1 ran on seed 1580216003 for one reason: it was first in the pre-registered order. Population, lineage count, terrain activity, margin of pass and apparent interestingness are all recorded, explicitly, as things that were not reasons - because picking among equal passers on any of them would be choosing a world for how it performed in a soak, which is the exact post-hoc selection the pre-registration exists to prevent.

The full story of how that decision was made, and what it cost · how the discipline is enforced · why this history is replayable at all · what failed along the way

Stopped, not restarted

This page used to argue that a world which could be quietly restarted whenever it became inconvenient would be a world whose history was evidence of nothing. That still holds, and stopping is not restarting. Universe 1 was never patched, never reset and never migrated. Its thousand-unit column is still in its corner, where it was found and left. Its final state hash is above, and the world is exactly the world those 1,467,567 ticks produced.

It was stopped because a second world had been founded and one machine runs them both. The tick it stopped at is recorded here, its checkpoints and its complete durable history are preserved, and because this universe is deterministic, every tick it ran can be reproduced from its genesis checkpoint by anyone willing to spend the computation.

Universe 2 is the world running now, founded on rules written from what this one did - including both of the failures above, each of which became a rule change.