Mythoku science catalogue

The plate mosaic: each plate one colour (oceanic plates dimmed), boundaries drawn by type. Continents ride the continental plates; the belts, arcs and rifts of every later layer are born on these lines.

Each cell tagged by the most energetic boundary influencing it: collision builds the great ranges, subduction the arcs and trenches, rifts the young seas and shoulders, transforms the offset coasts.

Continental crust by history. Old cratons are stiff and flat; young crust is where the last belts were welded on; plateau plates carry a raised block; terranes are the small minor plates that become island arcs and peninsulas.

Continuous crust age used by the relief: old crust gets cratonic basins, epeiric fills and gentle coasts; young crust keeps its fractures and massifs.

Rigid-plate speed from each plate's Euler pole. Fast plates against slow ones give the strongest convergence.

Velocity arrows on the plate mosaic. Where arrows point at each other across a boundary a range or an arc rises; where they part, a rift opens.

Signed-side distance to the nearest continent–continent collision. The orogen sculptor's uplift and the foreland basin are functions of this distance.

Distance to the arc line that stands ~100–150 km behind a subduction trench, on the over-riding plate only (the trench-side gate).

Old sutures inside a plate: worn-down ranges (Urals, Appalachians) that still steer drainage and rock type.

How far inside the continental crust a cell sits — the reach used by plateaus, basins and the passive-margin shelf.

Where a plateau plate's raised block applies (Tibet, Altiplano analogues): the geometric cap keeps it ≤ 3 % of land.

Intracratonic sag basins on old crust — the flat interiors (Congo, Chad, Amazon foreland) that become plains, wetlands and inland seas.

Welds between colliding continents that never fully closed: flooded seams (Mediterranean-type) exempt from the basin fills and the sculptor.

The tectonic surface after the steady-state stream-power sculptor has carved the belts (Cordonnier/Braun-Willett), before hypsometric fitting and long-term erosion.

Land heights re-ranked onto Earth's hypsometric curve (q02…q99.9 → 5…3700 m, plateau interiors kept). A rank-preserving map: it moves the distribution, never the pattern.

After the stream-power erosion passes, dissection, deltas and the shelf — the final relief before glaciers.

Everything the fluvial stage did between the two taps: stream-power erosion (brown), valley fill, deltas and plains (green), plus the basin tilt and plateau passes that move whole blocks. The eustatic re-solve shifts the whole surface by a constant; that land-median offset is removed. Signed-log scale so a 10 m valley and a 300 m block both read.

The reference map: the same tint and shade as the 1:1 regional crops beside Earth. Breaks at 0, 350, 1100, 2000, 3200 m.

Land height on a perceptual ramp, range from the 2–98 % quantiles of this world, so a low world is not painted as if it had Himalayas.

Sea-floor depth: abyssal plains near −3600 m, trenches to −8800 m, shelves and suture seas shallow. The shelf break sits at ~130 m.

Gradient magnitude on the hex-free lattice. Gates the soils (steep = bare rock), the alpine biome and the look of dissection.

Light from the north-west with the exaggeration used by every other layer; the texture of the ranges on its own.

How deep the priority-flood fill had to raise a cell to drain it: the endorheic basins that become lakes, playas or inland seas.

Channel discharge (catchment ≥ 800 km²) over a muted land, darker with catchment; lakes and salt pans as the lake stage left them.

Upstream area feeding each channel cell (D∞ routing on the sphere), from 200 km² up on a log scale: the great rivers are three orders above the creeks. Hillslope cells stay in the land tone.

The two-regime router's first pass: water on hillslopes before it is captured by a channel.

Every cell coloured by the outlet its water reaches; basins under 200 cells grey. Endorheic basins end at a lake, not the sea.

Terminal lakes shrink to the area their inflow keeps wet (Budyko); what remains is saline when residence is long, and a playa when the floor is arid.

Water column of the standing lakes. Deep lakes sit in glacial troughs and rift floors; shallow ones on the plains.

Continentality: the maritime thermostat and the moisture supply both decay with this distance. 800 km is deep interior.

Precipitation over potential evapotranspiration (PET = k·T^1.1 as the lake stage uses it). UNEP: < 0.05 hyper-arid, < 0.2 arid, < 0.5 semi-arid, < 0.65 dry sub-humid. Earth has ~41 % of land drier than 0.65.

Surplus (green) runs off and fills lakes; deficit (brown) is where rivers lose water and salt accumulates.

The SAME wind the moisture march uses, drawn as streamlines - trade easterlies about 12 deg, westerlies about 45, polar easterlies about 80, each with the surface branch of its overturning cell (equatorward under the trades and the polar cell, poleward under the westerlies) and a light deflection around high ground. Emitting a second wind model for the map would let the arrows contradict the rainfall they are supposed to explain. Ground tint is precipitation, so you can read the wind against what it delivers.

The share of each cell's rain that soaks in: flat ground drinks, steep ground sheds.

Soaked water routed down the same receiver graph the rivers use, damped by seepage. Springs surface where strong baseflow meets a slope break.

Hydrological springs (baseflow surfacing on a slope break) and the karst reaches where a river runs underground and resurges.

Annual-mean sunlight on a zero-tilt planet: cos(latitude). No seasons yet; the seasons driver is a Phase-B decision.

The atmosphere bends light δ past the horizon, so day is dominant everywhere; δ = 15° gives 14 h/10 h at the equator and continuous day poleward of 75°. Earth's refraction value is 0.83°.

Latitudes where the sun never sets under the Lingering Light: the pale lands of the canon.

Zonal insolation curve plus the gyre anomalies: warm western boundary currents, cold eastern currents and upwelling, floored at the freezing point.

Departure from the latitude curve. Each ocean basin wide enough gets a gyre: poleward warm water on its west side, equatorward cold water on its east side, displaced across the split latitude.

Arrows are the gyre circulation, colour is the temperature the current carries. Derived from the SAME terms that make the SST anomaly, so the streams and the temperature cannot disagree. THE SIGN FLIPS WITH THE WIND BELT and any model that hard-codes "west coast warm" gets half the planet backwards: the subtropical anticyclonic gyre runs west WARM and poleward (Gulf Stream, Kuroshio) and east COLD and equatorward (Canary, California); poleward of the westerly maximum the subpolar cyclonic gyre flips both — west cold (Labrador, Oyashio), east warm (the North Atlantic Drift, the Alaska Current). The equatorial current runs west with the trades whatever the gyre does.

Ekman upwelling on subtropical eastern boundaries (8–38°): the cold water that caps the air and makes the fog deserts (Atacama, Namib, Baja).

Sea ice where the unfloored equilibrium sea temperature is below freezing; land ice where the annual mean is below the land-ice threshold.

Sea-level temperature from insolation, lapsed 6.5 °C/km with height, pulled toward the sea by the maritime term, plus the current anomalies along the coasts.

The latitude curve alone — what the temperature layer would be on a flat planet. The difference between the two is the mountains.

Annual-mean bands: polar < −10, subpolar −10…0, cool temperate 0…10, warm temperate 10…20, subtropical 20…25, tropical ≥ 25 °C.

Precipitable water marched with the wind: evaporation at sea, Hadley/polar-cell ascent and subsidence, orographic wringing on windward slopes, inversion capping over cold water, mid-latitude eddy supply. Log scale: deserts are 20–70 mm, rain forests 2500+. Known deficit: poleward of 60° ours is 3–8× under Earth (no meridional moisture transport into the polar cap yet).

How much the sea sets a cell's temperature: 1 on the coast, decaying inland with the advection term; continental interiors near 0.

Whittaker-style classification of temperature × precipitation with the alpine and ice rules; the solved map palette. The canonical world map.

Every dry cell sub-classified by what else the world knows: sand deserts, steppe, wasteland, burning lands on live volcanism, salt flats in the closed evaporite basins.

Cells with a positive mass balance that grew ice: the sheets and the mountain glaciers.

Shallow-ice thickness from the balance flux; capped by hMax. Thick centres are the domes of the sheets.

Accumulation minus ablation (Ohmura 1996 fit on temperature and precipitation): positive feeds the glacier, negative melts it. The equilibrium line is the zero. Clipped at ±2 m/yr: everything warmer than that saturates to deep blue, and the map is about where the line runs.

Downhill ice discharge routed like water: the outlet glaciers and ice streams that do the eroding.

Rock removed by ice (∝ flux), widened into troughs and cirques; the buzzsaw keeps peaks near the ELA. Deposition returns a share as moraine downstream.

Height where accumulation equals ablation: near sea level at the poles, above 5000 m in the dry tropics. Mountains above it carry ice.

Rock from tectonic setting: shield basement on old crust, platform clastics and carbonates in basins and warm margins, metamorphics in belts, arc volcanics and unroofed plutons on arcs, basalt on rifts.

Soil from climate × rock × slope: laterite in the wet tropics, chernozem under temperate grass, podzol under conifers, aridisol in deserts, terra rossa on warm karst, alluvium on floodplains, gelisol on permafrost, andosol on young ash.

Regolith thickness: deep on old flat crust in warm wet climates, nil on steep slopes, ice and fresh volcanics.

Carbonate under enough rain with drainage cut: sinkholes, poljes and dry valleys; the classical landscape of Dinaric Croatia.

Entrances of four kinds — karst sinkholes on old uplifted country under rain, lava tubes on live arcs, fault shatter zones on plate boundaries, void chasms under the maw — and the underdark network that joins them.

Five element fields derived from the physical world — Chi from biomass and height, Sui from moisture and rain, Ka from volcanism and heat, Fū from wind and exposure, Kū from the void's proximity and the absence of the others — and the one that stands strongest in each cell. Chi green, Sui blue, Ka red, Fū ivory, Kū violet (canon).

The Chi (earth) field on its own. Fields overlap; the dominant-element map is their argmax, the leylines run where two of them stand together.

The Sui (water) field on its own. Fields overlap; the dominant-element map is their argmax, the leylines run where two of them stand together.

The Ka (fire) field on its own. Fields overlap; the dominant-element map is their argmax, the leylines run where two of them stand together.

The Fū (wind) field on its own. Fields overlap; the dominant-element map is their argmax, the leylines run where two of them stand together.

The Kū (void) field on its own. Fields overlap; the dominant-element map is their argmax, the leylines run where two of them stand together.

Springs where two elements stand near-equal and strong (confluence), trunks routed by least cost through the fields, charge growing along the trunk, nexuses where trunks meet. The materia law: where charge runs and surfaces, leystone crystallises.

Danger and value in one field: the void's proximity, the nexuses' overload, and the places where the material elements fail to hold. Blight mints where it is high; the corrupted guild lives above 0.42.

The phases pass derives five CHANNELS from the physical fields (Chi, Sui, Ka, Fū and the Kū residual), measures imbalance (absence and lopsidedness), and names the element that rules each cell — Void only where it truly dominates. The coupling dial (0.35, Model B) lets the elements bias rates without inventing a cycle Godai does not have.

Absence (no element holds) plus lopsidedness (one element far above the rest): the field the disruption reads and the story's "things got out of balance".

The Japanese register placed by rules the world can defend: ley condensation where charge runs and surfaces (iwakura heartstone, kokūzō crystal…), blight minting where imbalance is high, the three regalia at the world's singular sites, and five one-of-a-kind goods on the only island or valley that can carry them.

Iron and copper on the volcanic arcs, gems in the oldest eroded roots, coal in the wet lowland basins, salt in the closed dry basins, the elemental stones where a Godai field runs deepest, voidglass where the blight is. Grouped for reading; the per-kind fields are in the run.

Suitability for iron from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Suitability for gold from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Suitability for gems from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Suitability for coal from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Suitability for rock-salt from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Suitability for leystone from the tectonic and climatic setting, before any dominant-kind competition.

Timber, stone, clay, salt, pearls, furs, spices, horses, fish, amber, wine, tea, silk, dyes, honey, incense, ivory — the renewable and climatic goods, each where its biome, coast and temperature allow. THE SEA IS PAINTED TOO: sea salt, pearls and fisheries are water goods, and while this layer masked every ocean cell they all read 0 % on a planet where the fishery alone covers 3.5 Mkm². A good that is present but never the strongest anywhere is listed under the legend rather than silently missing.

The one formula the soil map and the settlement pass both read: sediment, biomass, volcanic ash, river and rain, minus aridity.

A region's agricultural identity: the crop package whose climate envelope × fertility scores highest — winter-rain grains and olives, monsoon paddy, northern dry grain, the three sisters, highland roots, desert-margin dates and millet, wet-tropics tubers.

The mineral score fields resolved into bodies with a grade and a tonnage drawn from the lognormal fitted to 3,770 USGS deposits, placed province by province — because every real deposit family is strongly clustered (Clark-Evans R 0.03–0.40 against a uniform-on-land null). Dot size follows tonnage.

Richness rises with warmth and water and with the variety of neighbouring habitats (ecotones); isolated land breeds endemics.

The dominant wildlife character of a place: reef, herds, furbearers, raptors, jungle, wetland flocks — and the corrupted where the imbalance runs above 0.42.

The overlapping envelope model: every species a niche envelope over temperature, rain, height, water and coast; ranges overlap by construction, so a taiga cell holds moose, wolf, lynx, hare, beaver and grouse at once.

Island biogeography: isolated land breeds its own forms (dwarf, giant, flightless…) from the mainland base species; sky endemics on the high isolated massifs.

Read off a MEASURED temperature × precipitation table (MOD17A3, 16-year mean, binned through our own classifyBiome), not modelled: the Miami model cannot make the shape the measurement has — at 25–27.5 °C real NPP rises to 834 at 1,500–2,000 mm and then FALLS. Miami, de-biased per biome, fills the 0.02 % of land the table has no support for.

Fresh water × arable ground × defensibility × shelter, with the economy (minerals, fertility) folded in: a city needs several goods at once, so the score is product-like, not a sum. Nothing below places a city by hand.

Sixty-eight settlements at the best sites (grown three ticks), roads by least-cost paths over slope, water, forest and desert, the hundred cheapest all-water sea lanes between ports, and polities as amphibious cost-distance reach from the capitals — the first pass of the human layer, W1's hard cap: no economy simulation, no war.

The web of power, not a colour fill. Settled polities are ranked by wealth from their towns, ports, farmland and mines; steppe hordes are computed on the grass that cannot finance a state, so their strength comes FROM the settled neighbours they raid (Barfield's shadow-empire law). Fronts are the border cells where two powers bleed each other. Runs at depth 1 and above.

The measured cropland envelope (MOD12Q1 over WorldClim) × (1 − barren) × the measured slope factor × the occupation term. Cropland HUMPS against productivity — 0.28 at the 8th NPP decile, 0.07 at the 10th — because the most productive land on Earth is rainforest.

yield × arable ÷ grain need, or the measured forager density where that is higher. Gated on the medieval band of 2–5 people/km² in the temperate biomes (Britain and Germany about 800 AD).

Capacity × the cell's own spherical area. Log-scaled, because a river valley and a desert are three orders of magnitude apart.

Which way of living feeds more people on this ground, split by whether farming actually carries a person per km². Forager densities are MEASURED on 339 ethnographic societies (fishing 0.250 > gathering 0.125 > hunting 0.020 people/km²) — they are so low that once a cell can be cropped at all, farming wins. The map is nearly uniform because the FINDING is: the interesting line is not farm-or-forage, it is how thin the farming is.

A town eats its hinterland, and how far that reaches is DERIVED: grain stops being worth carting after 15 km, and water freight is five times cheaper, so a port or river town reaches 75 km. Dot size follows population; the tint is the hinterland each town holds.

THE COUNT OF TOWNS IS NO LONGER TYPED IN. It comes from Christaller's lattice anchored on a measured length: settlement.spacing_day_on_foot_km is 16-24 km and travel.foot_km_per_day is 20-25 — the same distance found twice, once from the geography of markets and once from how far a person walks. Each rung stands sqrt(3) further out than the one below (the k=3 market principle), and the number of centres each rung holds is the FARMLAND divided by its hexagon. Patches are the market regions of the top rung; dot size is the order. Was 68 towns 88 km apart, authored.

THE MASK THE WHOLE COUNT RESTS ON, and it moved the answer by a factor of three. A central place is a market for its hinterland's surplus, so the lattice tiles land that can produce one. The capacity layer's own `mode` — where farming beats foraging — says 93 % of this world, because measured forager densities are 0.02-0.25 people/km² and almost any arable at all clears them: it answers "which way of life wins", not "is there a surplus". The floor that answers it is measured: farmed land in Britain and Germany about 800 AD carried 2-5 people/km² (population.density_medieval_per_km2), and land that cannot reach the bottom of that band is grazing or waste.

The same walk the peoples pass makes, in DAYS instead of cost units: foot 22.5 km/day, cart 45 on a road, ship 120 along a lane, with the terrain penalties the peoples pass already uses. Stated in days because km² does not transfer between planets — an Achaemenid empire is 3.7 % of Earth and 40 % of here.

Core within five days of a seat, province within fifteen, a march within thirty, and beyond that tribute at best. This is the map that killed the authored polity count: at six the largest reaches its far edge in 155 days and half the world lay beyond any march. The count is now DERIVED from this world's own march radius (passes/hierarchy.mjs) and the largest reaches its edge in 38.6 days.

Similarity as a field on four axes — cost-distance, element, threshold, isolation — where Earth had only the first. The generated similarity-vs-distance curve tracks the measured one (832,695 Ethnographic Atlas pairs) to a mean absolute error of 0.017 across every bin a 12,000 km planet can populate.

THE gate of the culture layer: a boundary no axis explains is a bug. Two thirds of the boundaries on this world are not geographic, which is why a 12,000 km planet is not limited to the 1.9 culture areas Earth's rate alone would allow.

The nine Köppen groups that cover 92.7 % of Earth's land, through the ANNUAL PROXY measured in research/earth/koppen-reference.json — W2 has no seasons, so each rule ships with its recall and precision against real Köppen (arabian 0.83/0.99, steppe 0.75/0.79, polar 0.84/0.76, mediterranean 0.43/0.42). F05's claim is that the four human civs kuno named are four of these classes, not four authored themes; this is the map that claim stands or falls on.

A civ is a culture area x climate class, given an identity by four fields we already compute: CLIMATE (the Köppen group), ELEMENT (godaiDominant — Sui is Elven), THRESHOLD (imbalance + Kū + caves is the death threshold, so Necropolis), and ISOLATION (the weak-tie graph: a landmass outside the sea lanes diverges to the measured far-field similarity of 0.343). Every civ records WHY it was named — hover the legend. Nothing here is placed.

Land joined to land, and sea lanes bridging coasts. Innovations cross between clusters on WEAK TIES (D09 §3); cut them and clusters stay ignorant of each other, which is the mechanism behind F05's remote continent. A landmass in its own component receives nothing and exports nothing, and diverges to the measured far-field floor.

Gravity flow on the terms FITTED from 754,546 country-pair-years of CEPII: a shared border x2.10, a shared language x2.06, an imperial tie x5.13 (the corpus said 2.1 - off by two and a half times), a shared religion x1.47. Distance is in DAYS, over the reach layer's own cost field, because that is what a merchant pays. Brightness follows flow, and the atlas draws a few hundred of the 29,646 routes the model holds - the busiest quarter of each DAY-QUARTILE, not simply the busiest overall, because flow is (pa*pb)/days^beta and 'top by flow' is very nearly 'shortest': drawn that way the map showed no continental crossing at all under a caption about continental crossings. The STATISTICS read every route, because a gate that reads its own render budget is measuring the wrong thing.

Value-to-weight decides. Bulk (grain, timber, stone, clay) stops paying after about three days - the 15 km cart break-even - so it never leaves its region; the mid tier (iron, salt, wine, furs, horses) reaches a couple of weeks; only high value-to-weight crosses a continent. MEASURED here, over all 29,646 reachable pairs: bulk 2.5 days mean, mid 13.4, high 44.0, and the high-value share of cargo is 1.00 on the longest quarter of routes against 0.87 on the rest. Those numbers only became meaningful when the layer stopped keeping each town's nearest twelve partners and became the all-pairs gravity model its own coefficients were fitted on - until then the longest route on the planet was 22.5 days and nothing could ever reach the mid tier's 20-day break-even.

Total gravity flow through each town. A hub is not the biggest town, it is the best connected one - which is the difference between population and position, and the thing a map of population alone cannot show.

Every named relation between the powers: attrition fronts, puppets, standoffs, rivals, alliances, arms shipments and trade pairs, drawn seat to seat and coloured by kind. The horde relations - raids, rackets, extermination - are the steppe layer of it.

One language per civ region, its phonology drawn from PHOIBLE's 3,020 measured inventories — consonant and vowel counts sampled from the real quantiles (consonants p10 14, median 22, p90 37; vowels p10 5, median 9, p90 19) and segments chosen in order of cross-linguistic universality, so no language here has an inventory PHOIBLE would call impossible. The FAMILY is keyed on the region's civ archetype where it has one and on its dominant Köppen class otherwise; keying it on culture while the civs were keyed on region is what once had the necropolis speaking tropical, and left 70 of 104 languages unclassified. Every settlement name on the other layers is generated from the profile of the language that owns its ground.

The campaign names an ANCHOR and the world answers with a place — nothing here is a stored coordinate. That matters because two seeds of this world agree on land-versus-sea for only about 70 % of cells, so a saved lat/lon names somewhere else on every other world. Each anchor resolves from science already computed: the largest civ carrying an archetype, or the largest connected block of a Köppen class or biome where no civ carries it. THE MARCH is measured rather than chosen: a buffer must be outmatched by both neighbours AND actually separate them, because if the two powers already share a long border the small region beside them is a corner, not a march. Ranking on outmatched x separation alone returned exactly that — an 18.7x outmatch with a separation of 0.2 — so the floors qualify first and only the survivors are ranked. The window is the SMALLEST box holding the first-release factions, solved per seed, after a version sized in cells turned out to mean 23 % of the world at 160 wide and 0.9 % at 800.