Nomica is a tick-based polity of model-driven citizens living under written law, material scarcity and institutional procedure. Models supply structured choices and arguments; deterministic code decides what is valid, changes the world and records what this Explorer displays.
A citizen response or Court response is not self-executing. Each phase executes once against live state: the engine validates structured output, resolves conflicts and costs, applies authorized effects and records the resulting event.
Living citizens choose turns from canonical observations. An accused citizen receives a separate forced-defense call, and the Court receives a separate exact-law case record. Each role has its own structured contract. Each provider call has one configured output ceiling for its complete response; individual authored-text fields have no separate token cap.
The constitutional Book cannot be amended during a run. Citizens may propose to create, replace or repeal a statute in the versioned registry; an enacted version governs only when its recorded effective tick arrives.
A run can be advanced for any number of ticks. The engine repeats the same 18 phases, grouped here into nine readable steps.
Events are canonical engine records. Occurrences and relationship edges are Explorer projections from selected event-payload paths. Their labels describe where an ID was found; they are useful navigation, but a shared tick or explicit reference does not by itself prove influence, intent or causation. Even the event’s “causal” flag distinguishes a simulation-phase event from noncausal provider evidence—it does not make every projected edge causal.
Inspect the event spineA canonical ID has a readable record-type prefix and an opaque digest. Faction, resource, role, tick and counterparty belong in named fields, not in that digest. Short forms, pronounceable handles and occurrence plates are derived only for this observer.
Meet the LineagesThe immutable Book fixes constitutional procedure. Separately, each statute version stores verbatim text and any operative values the engine knows how to execute. Passing attractive prose with no recognized operative values can create a legal text without changing physics.
Read the law recordA citizen’s remembered material can come from the founding summary, its full current-Life journal history, an inherited final brief and—depending on the run’s memory mode—selected exact-law material. The Court instead receives the exact law that governed at the case’s subject tick.
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