Health & Energy

Health

Health is our "score" for an agent's success in the world. Full health pretty much means the agent is strong and very capable of living in it's environment, whereas an agent with close to 0 health is struggling, and once the counter hits 0, the agent is forced to drop everything, stops interacting with the world, and its body begins to decay. Agents which die without reproducing failed to progress their solution to the survival problem.

Health can be filled in only 2 ways: Intaking its desired food from the environment, or being Given health from another agent. (See Intake & Metabolism for more details)


Many things can remove health. The complete list of causes of death are as follows:

  • Hazard/waste in the Hazard layer.

  • Suffocation from wrong type of Terrain for Lung type.

  • Collisions with other agents.

  • Temperature Discomfort from being in the wrong temperature range.

  • Child Birth (typically Asexual reproductions only).

  • Excessive Generosity.

  • Attacks by other Agents via either Spikes or Jaws (and technically collisions too but those harm both agents).

  • a lack of "Oxygen" (which is just a health loss proportional to the number of agents in the world).

  • and various "Natural" causes including raising one's own spike, moving one's own wheels, aging, boosting, having an overactive brain, or just a lack of energy.


Agents can prevent themselves from loosing health from several sources using different other traits:

  • Jumping can remove the agent from selection as a collision, spike or bite target, allowing the agent to pass harmlessly "over" the attacking agent (until they "land" on the ground again!). Additionally, jumping prevents any food Intake, but also prevents harm from the Hazard layer

  • Child Birth injury is only applied to large asexual agents, so if the agent is medium to tiny sized, it will be unharmed. Asexual reproduction (splitting) favors small things!

  • For Temperature Discomfort, Collisions & Attacks from other agents, and Suffocation from terrain, agents can simply avoid these sources of danger and they do have senses for each one in one form or another.


Damage from spike raising, moving wheels, aging, boosting, brain activity, and lack of oxygen are unblockable (but are configurable if you would like to disable/enable them)


Spike raising, moving wheels, and brain activity currently do not cause health loss by default.


Once Health drops to 0, the agent is dead, however, it continues to exist for a time. Its outputs all fade to 0 and it comes to a slow stop. The reason for this is it is now a beacon; when it died it dropped meat food on that layer, and as long as there is meat under it, it will continue to exist.


Exhaustion

Also known as energy, this measure is a calculation of the raw output values totals per tick over time. If the agent is firing all outputs at 100%, this value rises very quickly, corresponding to a lack of energy. As a result, the agent slows down, becomes less vocal, and takes other penalties to multiple outputs and functions. Health is not directly effected, but since movement and Giving and other functions are effected, they of course can lead to a loss of health. This value is persistent with the agent, and is decremented every tick, allowing agents a maximum number of "free" actions before exhaustion increases enough to cause the penalties, a Base Exhaustion value. Currently this is set to a value of 5 but it is configurable.

Precisely, Exhaustion effects the following:

  • Food Intake speed penalty.

  • Wheel speeds (after Strength is applied but before agents are moved; it's a direct speed debuff).

  • Jump height set after jump activation.

  • Voice Volume output and Voice Tone change.

  • Spike raising speed and Jaw Snap output.

  • Grab activation threshold and Grab angle change.

Essentially, anything that has a physical action is diminished by Exhaustion. Agents can simply avoid exhaustion by minimizing their output sum below the aforementioned Base Exhaustion.