Can Conway's Game of Life Simulate My World’s Climate?

If you’ve never heard of Conway’s Game of Life, you’re in for a treat if only for the terminology. It’s one of the most famous cellular automata ever created. The life and death of every cell in a square grid is governed by just four simple rules based on its neighbors. Yet together, those rules generate astonishingly complex behavior. That got me wondering: could I use these same rules to simulate an evolving climate in Minor Deity, or perhaps even generate the terrain itself? While all of this runs on burst-compiled jobs on multiple threads to support the enormous world, this isn't meant to be a realistic climate simulation. We're simply taking an interesting propagation system and seeing what kind of climate emerges. The four rules for the Game of Life are very simple. A live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies from isolation. A live cell with more than three live neighbors dies from overpopulation. Consequently, a live cell with two or three live neighbors survives to the next generation. Finally, a dead cell with three live neighbors becomes alive by reproduction. Depending on the starting scenario, these simple rules give rise to an incredible variety of patterns. Some parts stabilize, like blocks, beehives and boats. Others, like blinkers and beacons, oscillate between repeating states. The pulsar is an interesting oscillator with a period of three, while the more elaborate penta-decathlon has a period of fifteen, with various interesting shapes along the way. Some oscillators even travel across the grid, like gliders and spaceships that come in light-, middle- and heavy-weight sizes. We’ll look at some additional examples later on, but let’s first convert this variety into climate. This is the story of implementing what I've learned into a gridless, interactive, world-building sandbox game called Minor Deity. Minor Deity on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3876240/Minor_Deity/ Minor Deity Discord Server: https://discord.gg/2NEb4HxwhF 00:00 Introduction