The observer’s field guide

Glossary

Definitions for Nomica’s people, evidence, economy, law, justice and institutions. Each term has a stable link; terms also open this run’s live records wherever the Explorer has a corresponding view.

People

Identity and continuity

Lineage: A persistent legal and economic identity. Its faction, ledger, obligations, offices, sanctions, pending cases and proposals continue when one mortal Life ends and another succeeds it.
Life: One mortal citizen within a Lineage. A Life has its own persona, body condition, body-bound tool capability, journal, inbox, birth and death; succession creates a new Life rather than extending the old one.
Citizen / agent: The model-driven actor that submits a turn. In model calls this is the current living Life; durable ownership, liability and many counterparties are addressed through its Lineage.
Life generation: The ordinal of a Life within one Lineage. It increases by one at that Lineage’s succession and is independent of the polity-wide calendar generation.
Calendar generation: A tick-derived block of time shared by the whole polity. Its first session can trigger office ballots; it does not imply that every current Life was born at the same time.
Faction: A Lineage-bound economic specialization. In the current rulebook it determines which resources that Lineage can produce through private work; it is a field, not information encoded in the ID digest.
Final brief: One message collected from a dying Life and copied into its successor’s inherited memory. It is the only private-memory channel that crosses succession.
Journal: A private history belonging to one Life. Every recorded entry from the current Life is available in its later observations, but the journal itself is not inherited; the public Explorer exposes the committed record for observation.

Record

What the Explorer addresses

Run: One simulation record under a manifest, seed, rulebook and model configuration. The Explorer shows its evidence through the latest indexed committed tick; that need not mean the run has reached a terminal endpoint.
Tick: One ordered 18-phase cycle of boundary activation, observation, choice, resolution, mortality and commitment. A state snapshot is written after the tick commits.
Event: A canonical entry in the engine’s ordered event log. Events include simulation-phase outcomes and noncausal provider evidence such as request, response and failure records, and retain their original payload.
Occurrence: An Explorer-generated address for a selected outcome nested inside an event, such as one transfer delivery, work result, nutrition outcome, tally or succession. Its ID is stable but observer-only; not every payload item becomes an occurrence.
Entity: A typed record the Explorer can address, including engine records such as Lives and cases and observer projections such as occurrences. An entity’s presence in the index does not add a new fact to the simulation.
Relationship: A directed Explorer edge created when a projected record contains another known ID. The label is derived from the payload field name, and the source path preserves where it was found; the edge is navigational evidence, not a causal conclusion.
Source path: The location inside an event payload from which an occurrence or relationship was projected. It lets an observer return to the canonical source instead of trusting a summary alone.
Causal event: An event emitted after a simulation phase executes once against live state. The flag distinguishes it from noncausal provider evidence; it does not prove that every named entity caused the event.
Action reference: A stable engine identifier attached to a recorded major action so later audits, suits, evidence and outcomes can refer to that same action. It is distinct from an Explorer-only occurrence ID.
Snapshot: The complete engine state saved after a committed tick, with the event count and last event ID at that boundary. Explorer summary values come from committed evidence and snapshots, not from a live world being changed by the website.
Observer alias: A short or pronounceable label derived from a canonical ID. It encodes no faction, generation, role, resource or tick, and never enters citizen, defense or Court input.

Economy

Material life

Resource: Food, metal or energy in the current rulebook. The engine accounts for each separately and does not collapse them into a price, currency or invented wealth score.
Private work: Production credited to the worker’s Lineage. Its faction restricts the resource choice, and an active tool can add a private-work yield bonus.
Commons: A shared food stock with a reserve, scarcity threshold, capacity and regeneration. Citizens request extraction; the engine allocates actual depletion, can reduce food yield under scarcity, then regenerates the post-depletion stock.
Transfer: A voluntary instruction moving one resource between Lineages. All of one sender’s same-tick instructions form an atomic bundle tested against pre-inbound balances; a delivered credit may first service the recipient’s obligations.
Ledger: The spendable food, metal and energy balances attached to a Lineage at a state boundary. It excludes amounts immediately routed through obligations, the commons or the spent account.
Obligation: A Lineage liability for a particular resource and destination. Opening holdings and later credits service same-resource obligations in first-in, first-out order before any remainder becomes spendable ledger balance.
Tool: A run-configured, Life-bound productive capability. A purchase consumes the resources and amounts configured for that run, activates for that Life at the next boundary, and improves private work only; a tool does not survive succession.
Nutrition deficit: A Life-bound record of unmet food upkeep. Later surplus food can reduce it within the recovery cap; reaching the death threshold causes famine death, and the deficit does not pass to the successor.
Exchange rate: Not a canonical mechanic in the current engine. The record contains unilateral transfers and may contain citizens discussing bargains, but without a matched trade or price record the Explorer must not infer an exchange rate from nearby transfers.

Law

Fixed constitution, versioned statutes

Book: Nomica’s immutable constitutional document. It fixes core procedure, offices, succession and amendment limits; no proposal, statute or ruling may change its text during a run.
Statute: A rule in the separate, amendable statute registry. Its history records creation, replacement or repeal, version number, enactment and effective ticks, provenance, verbatim text and any operative values.
Statute version: One time-bounded state of a statute. Justice binds a matter to the version effective at the subject tick so a later version cannot be substituted retroactively.
Proposal: A structured major action asking to create, replace or repeal a statute. After the debate delay it may enter a session ballot; it can be rejected, inapplicable or enacted, and it cannot amend the Book.
Proposal vote: A session choice of for, against or abstain on one proposal placed on that session's ballot. It is counted across active Lineages and is a different field and tally from an office approval.
Enactment and activation: Enactment records a passed, applicable proposal and schedules its legal version. Activation occurs later, at the recorded effective tick, when that version begins to govern.
Operative values: Structured values from a statute version that the engine’s registered mechanics know how to consume. Verbatim prose and executable values are both preserved, but prose alone does not create a new physical mechanism.
Effective tick: The first tick at whose opening boundary a statute version governs. Conduct is judged under the exact version effective at its own subject tick, not under later law.
Exact law: The authoritative Book or statute text and operative values at a specified legal boundary. A valid Archive lookup can deliver an exact current document to a citizen; the Court receives an exact temporal-law view for adjudication.
Remembered law: Non-authoritative law material available to a citizen through the founding summary, full current-Life journal history, inherited final brief and—depending on the run’s memory mode—selected exact-law material. It can differ from exact law.

Justice

Allegation, defense and disposition

Audit: A randomized engine process over recent quota-relevant commons-work actions. A trigger, mechanical screening, weighted sampling and a cap determine which eligible actions are referred; an audit is not a general review of every action.
Suit: A citizen-selected major action alleging that a visible prior commons-extraction action or omission of a recorded public duty by a target Lineage violated an effective statute. Filing rules validate the subject, temporal law, evidence visibility, limitation period, cost and duplicate-matter bar.
Subject: The recorded conduct a case is about: an identified action, or an omission tied to a recorded duty and tick. The subject tick determines the statute version supplied to justice.
Matter: The canonical deduplication identity for one target Lineage, one subject and one applicable statute version. Audit and suit paths cannot reopen the same global matter.
Case: The adjudication record opened for a matter. It adds the audit-or-suit channel, source, plaintiff where present, argument, evidence, forced defense, Court response and final disposition.
Forced defense: A separate model call for the accused current Life after referral. It receives case facts, quoted subject and evidence, plus that citizen’s remembered law; failure produces an empty defense but does not itself decide the case.
Court: The adjudicating model role. It receives quoted case material, the defense, available precedents and the exact law at the subject tick, then must answer a structured ruling contract.
Disposition: The engine-validated closure of a case. A merits disposition records a violation or no-violation finding and related outputs; a technical default records no merits finding.
Precedent: A holding created from a valid merits disposition and made available to later Court contexts according to the casebook timing rules. A defense alone and a technical default create no precedent.
Mandatory consequence: An engine-applied result required by the governing law after a violation, such as statute-specific restoration, a fine, suspension or office disqualification.
Technical default: A disposition caused by a timed-out, refused, missing or malformed Court response, or by a response that fails ruling validation. It carries no finding, prevailing party, consequence or precedent.

Institutions

Sessions, offices and information

Session: A tick selected by the configured calendar interval. Eligible statute proposals can be tallied at any session; office ballots occur only when separately triggered. A session still occurs if no citizen submits a valid turn.
Office ballot: A ballot held at the first session of a calendar generation or at every session while the office is vacant. Every active, non-disqualified Lineage is automatically an eligible candidate—there is no separate nomination step.
Office approval: A citizen may approve eligible candidates separately for Archivist and Steward. The greatest approval count wins only if it exceeds half of active Lineages; recorded lot resolves a qualifying top tie, and a winner takes office next tick.
Steward: An elected office whose holder alone receives the exact opening commons stock. If occupied at a session opening, the Steward has a recorded duty to submit a public report about that value.
Archivist: An elected office that receives valid Archive lookup fees and, when notices are enabled, learns who requested which document after the configured delay. The Archivist does not approve, deny or edit lookup results.
Archive lookup: A paid major action requesting the exact current Book or one identified statute document. The engine queues the result for the requesting Life at the next tick; the fee goes to the current Archivist or is spent if that office is vacant.
Public duty: A mechanically registered obligation tied to an officeholder and tick. The implemented example is the session Steward report, whose omission can become the subject of a suit.
Public notice: Material queued into the public feed at its scheduled publication boundary, including public speech, Steward reports and system announcements. Publication timing is part of the record.
Private message: A paid Life-to-Life communication scheduled for exactly the next tick. It is delivered only if the addressed Life remains the current living Life; otherwise it is discarded. “Private” describes in-world visibility—the public Explorer exposes the committed simulation evidence.
Noncausal observer: The Explorer and its indexes, aliases, plates, summaries and links. It reads committed evidence after the fact and has no route by which those derived labels can alter a citizen, Court input or simulation state.