Zyphos Simulation Brief

This note is the cross-repo design surface for the Zyphos demo in E:\Projects\Aquarium-Engine. It is not a complete canon note. It records what the renderer needs to know, what the setting has decided, and what questions the demo raises.

Authority

The Eusocial Interbeing vault owns setting canon. Aquarium owns rendering, interaction, performance constraints, and demo implementation.

Physics is a design authority for Zyphos. When the orbital or energy math disagrees with a desired image, the worldbuilding should adapt to the math instead of relaxing the constraint. The goal is a more compelling grounded world, not a decorative astronomy sticker.

Zyphos may force design questions into the open, but it does not silently decide canon. If the demo needs a continent shape, network pattern, glow behavior, settlement logic, or ecological signal, this note should hold the question or the accepted answer before shader code treats it as real.

Demo Premise

Zyphos should show a planet whose large-scale geography makes the setting’s core social ecologies visible:

• Airawa Home Continent: archival dependency, Mother Trees, imperial biological-memetic infrastructure, and surviving disconnected networks.
• Sa’auei’a Continent: mobile reciprocity, sacred Breeding Grounds, remembered routes, and family-unit political movement rather than permanent urban dominance.

The first pass should privilege planetary legibility over character detail. Species anatomy can wait. Continents, ecological memory structures, and civilizational path dependency cannot.

Current Canon Inputs

• Zyphos is one member of a close binary terrestrial system with its slightly smaller twin, Umbros.
• Zyphos and Umbros are mutually tidally locked, so each planet hangs in a fixed direction in the other’s sky except for precession and libration.
• The primary star is dim, placing the habitable zone close to the star and making the ecosystem energy-starved relative to Earth.
• Zyphos life is founded on Mutable Memory Endosymbiosis: a cellular endosymbiont for mutable memory storage and intercellular transmission.
• Every level of the biosphere participates in sentient, memory-bearing exchange; organisms can be partially independent, but evolutionary unplugging from the network is not a normal option.
• The Airawa home continent is dense with tree-mediated memory networks.
• The Airawa Empire controls roughly one quarter of that continent through the Biological Memetic Engine.
• The rest is a patchwork of native Nation Scale Interbeings with varied boundary permeability.
• Several Disconnected Tree Networks survived by severing themselves from the saturated living substrate.
• The Sa’auei’a continent never produced Airawa and was not shaped by mother-tree archival dependency.
• Sa’auei’a society is advanced, nomadic, and organized around mobile family units and breeding-ground commons.

Design Inference for Zyphos

The Airawa continent should not read as ordinary urban civilization painted green. Its visible structure should suggest memory infrastructure, coerced ecological transmission, and places where the network breaks or refuses.

The Sa’auei’a continent should not read as empty wilderness. Its civilization is mobile and remembered by ecology, so visible signs may include seasonal corridors, reciprocity routes, defended commons, recurring camps, managed migration paths, and breeding-ground clusters rather than fixed city constellations.

Creature and ecology design should not import Earth categories unmodified. Bird-, mammal-, insect-, amoeba-, tree-, and fungus-analogues are allowed as handles, but their anatomy, behavior, reproduction, disease, migration, and politics should emerge from mutable cellular memory and fractal eusocial contracts. See Zyphos Biosphere Examples for first concrete handles.

Future inhabitant-language names should come through the neighboring Weksa repo at E:\Projects\weksa. Names are not direct English substitutions; they should derive from speaker ontology, register, phonology, morphology, and history.

Night-side light should be treated carefully. Airawa signals may be controlled, networked, and infrastructural. Sa’auei’a signals may be intermittent, route-like, seasonal, or clustered around commons. This is a design inference, not final canon.

The sky should not behave like a normal Earth-like day with a decorative moon. Umbros is a stationary planet-scale presence. In the current working baseline it spans roughly 10-13 degrees of sky and produces daily central eclipses around one hour long near the relevant equatorial path. Longer dimming and penumbra are available, but multi-hour hard eclipses require changing the star, masses, or separation.

Open Questions

• What are the provisional names and rough silhouettes of the two continents?
• What planetary-scale signature marks a mother-tree network from orbit?
• What does an imperial biological-memetic transmission corridor look like at continental scale?
• How do disconnected networks appear without making them obvious to the empire?
• What visible pattern distinguishes Sa’auei’a breeding grounds from camps, routes, and ecological partner sites?
• Does Zyphos show one historical moment, or can the demo expose time slices of seasonal and political change?
• What exact primary-star mass/luminosity and Zyphos-Umbros separation should be accepted after the first physics pass?
• Which continental or oceanic regions live under the most reliable daily eclipse track?