Vitality

The principle

Designing a mechanic is choosing rates of benefit and harm. Every organism with a condition runs the same model: condition is the buffer between dying and thriving, normal at 100. Benefit rates raise it and damage rates lower it, so nothing dies or heals instantly.

A threshold that switches a mechanism on or off is a defect; a rate that starts at a tolerance edge is not (Rates into stocks).

One hour

Each hour an organism lists what is doing it good and what is harming it, both in condition points per hour, and one shared step settles them, with the repair its energy budget paid for — fish, plants and the blooms alike.

Term	Is
Benefits	Income from favourable conditions, earned on how fed its reserve is — a plant’s and a bloom’s also on how full its stores run. Hardiness never scales them
Stressors	Damage, hardened by each organism: × (1 − hardiness), or by moving where harm starts. A fish’s toxins charge on its load, not the water
Starvation	One stressor among them: the share of the hour’s upkeep its budget left unpaid
Repair	A first-order share of the deficit at healingRate and the organism’s pace, priced at healingCost hours of its own upkeep a point and paid from its reserve inside the budget’s hour. An empty reserve repairs nothing

Condition past 100 is lost. The reserve is the buffer — it pays maintenance first and repair after, so a fed organism repairs as it is harmed and a starving one cannot.

Sickness

An organism is sick while its damage outruns its income and repair, so its condition falls. Sickness is not a separate mechanic: the damage rate is the sickness, and it ends when the rates turn round.

Organism	Repair	Shipped
Fish	At its Arrhenius pace	0.005 /h at 20 °C, half an hour of upkeep a point
Plant · bloom	At the flora’s Q10 pace, on the plants’ constants	0.05 /h at 25 °C, an hour of upkeep a point

What the budget buys

Organism	Low condition	Its budget buys
Fish	Dies at 0	Growth and broods — see The budget
Plant	Sheds tissue, with the square of the deficit; dies at 0	Growth on its least-filled store, and the plantlet its offshoot buffer builds — see The budget
Algae	Sheds as a plant does; dies back at 0	Growth alone, its whole release to the soma: its growth is its reproduction — see Algae

Status

Mechanic	Status	Why
The balance	settled	One step for every organism. Each hardens its own charges, so a channel can move its edge instead of scaling its charge
Condition at 100	settled	Condition past 100 is lost; the reserve is the only buffer, and maintenance comes before repair
Repair from reserve	settled	First order on the deficit at the organism’s pace, priced in its own upkeep, paid inside its budget’s hour — no floor, switch or clamp
Sickness	settled	A reading of the rates, not a state: condition falling is the whole of it
Tolerance-band benefits	settled	Graded to zero at each edge, and the matching damage starts from zero at or past it, so net never jumps as a reading leaves its band
Offspring	settled	A buffer the reserve’s other share fills — a fish’s brood, a plant’s plantlet — released once it holds one: filling it is the price and the cooldown

Source

src/simulation/systems/ holds the shared step, the reserve and repair every budget shares, the flora law plants and the blooms run on, and each organism’s factor builders; src/simulation/flora/ runs plants and the blooms through one pass, and src/simulation/livestock/ the fish.