Hey all,
Great initiatives on permaculture simulation / game! Been thinking about such just for fun and looking if anyone has made anything resembling this.
Wanted to share also that a friend of mine is working on a similar project. It's called "self-sufficiency community simulator". He's written a description of the idea in Finnish to github:
https://github.com/viznut/ovys/blob/master/doc/ovys-desc-fi.txt
[EDIT: Also a brief English description from the end of this article:
http://viznut.fi/texts-en/reaching_for_the_blocks.html
"Its work title is "Ovys", from the Finnish for "self-sufficient community simulator". It will be more like a game, a learning toy or an imagination assistant than a serious design/modelling tool, but I hope it will eventually end up being useful for some real-world planning as well. I also dream about coupling it with a machine learning system that could discover low-tech ideas from the blind spots of human visionaries.
I will write more about Ovys once it is closer to the first prototype stage. Anyway, it currently simulates solar radiation, airflow and heat transfer in various materials in a 3D grid world. After the first prototype (and perhaps some crowdfunding), I plan to implement the likes of the water cycle, plant growth, nutrient cycles and human agents at least in some kind of a "minecrafty" way that can be improved in later versions by other people.
As a game, one might describe it as a realism-oriented reimagination of Dwarf Fortress. Some day, one might perhaps even describe it as a realism-oriented reimagination of Civilization."]
So briefly the idea to simulate different ways of living to find the most sustainable options and find possibly unpredictable and creative solutions with the help of for example a neural network computer program playing the simulator.
Here's a somewhat related article from him in English which explains his minimalist philosophy for not wasting resources in the (both digital & real) world:
http://viznut.fi/texts-en/resource_leak_bug_of_our_civilization.html
I hinted him about this thread and hope that maybe you can find ways to either collaborate or at least learn and get inspired by each other's projects.
P. S. Another idea I've got related to this and maybe deserving a new topic is a permaculture focused area in an existing virtual world like Second Life, Sansar or even Roblox. Does someone know if there already are some? Dan Fisker apparently has some Minecraft implementation:
https://permies.com/t/40/22514/Permaculture-Game
These kinds of permaculture gardens inside popular games and platforms could spread the permaculture ideas inside these platforms also and maybe help visioning the more dedicated simulators or games.
