Conversion-flow POC — the fold-back made visible

done priority 2 estimate M

element-table/002 · created 2026-08-06 · updated 2026-08-12

What

The visual POC proposed in the fold-back design conversation (see overview): a single-file interactive HTML sim demonstrating the world as a conversion graph. Left pane: a tiny living world (volcano generator, trees drawing soil matter, apples sprouting into trees, newts eating apples and dropping eye of newt, a player wizard with an axe). Right pane: the live conversion graph, pulsing on every real event, each node labelled with its element’s origin. Bottom: a conservation ledger proving total matter = initial + volcano-sourced at all times.

Done

Built at land-of-lor/pocs/conversion-flow/ (index.html + README), no dependencies, open in a browser.
Headless-tested: conservation drift ≤ 1e-9 over 30 sim-minutes including chopping, pickups, and decay toggling; ecology is self-sustaining (newts oscillate 8–12, trees spread slowly, soil draws down as biomass accumulates).
Decay is a toggle, not a decision — the open sink question made playable.
Two ecology findings worth carrying into real design: matter strands where creatures die unless the ground itself flows (fixed with slow conserving soil diffusion), and consumers that always eat everything collapse the cycle (fixed with a hunger threshold — the cycle needs slack).

Review

Open land-of-lor/pocs/conversion-flow/index.html in a browser. Try: chop both trees before they fruit and watch eye of newt go unobtainable; toggle decay off and watch the world silt up.

Outcome — ditched (2026-08-12)

Reviewed by Kris. Verdict: an interesting exercise, but nothing in it carries through to the core — no code, no data shape, no mechanic. Ditched rather than adopted or partially kept, and marked ditched on land-of-lor/pocs/README.md’s status board.

It stays on disk as reference, but it is composted: it should not come into a future session’s context unless someone explicitly references it. The two ecology findings recorded above (matter strands unless the ground itself flows; consumers that eat everything collapse the cycle) are the only part worth remembering, and they’re written down here rather than left implicit in the POC’s source.

View source in repository · also available as raw markdown.