# SW1 Interview Answers — Product Owner Decisions **Date:** 2026-03-24 **Interviewer:** Team Lead **Product Owner:** Jeroen --- ## Galaxy Level **Q: Are the 300 systems fixed across playthroughs?** A: **Fixed galaxy, seeded drama.** Same 300+1 (Earth border-locked) systems, same wormhole routes. Internal economic/political state drifts via background simulation. **Q: Cultural geography framework?** A: The 7 abstract heritage roots (Frost/Stone/Tide/Vine/Dust/Iron/Salt) are **deprecated** as generator inputs. The wiki was written using real-world cultural migration corridors — Commonwealth (North), Iberian/Latin American + Southern African (South), East Asian + South/Southeast Asian (East), Northern/Central European (West) — per `docs/design/cultural-migration-pressure.md`. The wave model is the backstory explanation, but per-system cultural data is already authored in the 301 wiki entries and systems.db. **D-records D-104 and D-105 (heritage root grammar overlays) are STALE and need supersession.** **Q: Galaxy map feel?** A: **Full information from start.** Inserts logically contain a 300-system star chart. No fog on the galaxy level. --- ## System / Location Profiles **Q: How are per-planet/station/moon profiles populated?** A: **Extend the wiki.** Author per-planet profiles as wiki content for all systems. The generator reads from authored data, doesn't generate profiles. **Q: Economic depth of system profiles?** A: **Full economic profile** (endgame target). Multiple industries, power players, historical disruptions. Every economic axis must cascade visibly to at least district and room level. **Q: Settlement replayability?** A: NOT seed-based variation. Every run starts from the same wiki-authored canonical state. **Background simulation** (economic + sociological pressures on spare CPU cores) produces drift over time. Replayability comes from simulation trajectory differences, not seed differences. By the time the player reaches a location the second time, pressures will have changed things. Local painting algorithms work from the current situation, not a static seed. --- ## Topography **Q: How deeply does topography constrain generation?** A: **Hard constraint.** Mountains block corridors, rivers create district boundaries, coastlines produce port districts. Geography creates spatial reasoning the player can exploit. **Q: How are world maps created?** A: **Authored world maps for all planets and moons.** Topography is authored, not procedurally generated. **Q: Does cultural heritage shape settlement topology?** A: **Historical layering yes, but NOT along the 7 heritage root axes.** The cultural axes that matter are the real-world corridor identities from the cultural-migration-pressure document. First cultural wave takes preferred terrain, later waves adapt. --- ## Arrival **Q: What does the player see on arrival?** A: **Contextual by travel method.** Charter flight = port arrival. Gate transit = station interior. Smuggler route = low orbit in the dark. Orbital view is the default for normal transit. **Q: Is arrival a scouting window?** A: **Yes — made diegetic.** An insert context window opens with system stats, a planetary screenshot, and the GTTR (Guide to the Reach) entry. The GTTR entry (already authored narrative) gets enhanced with statistics and art. Information asymmetry starts at arrival. --- ## Background Simulation & Content Spidering **Q: Does the world live before the player arrives?** A: **Yes.** Full economic + social + political background simulation. Needs its own dedicated design workshop. **Q: Environmental archaeology?** A: **Only from real simulation events.** No fabricated history. If there's rubble, the simulation produced the explosion. If there's a memorial, someone died in the simulation. Integrity preserved. **Q: Generation hooks?** A: Two key hook types: 1. **NPC-driven generation:** Meet someone from a distant planet (more than casually) → their house, family, friends, neighborhood get generated at that location. Their address becomes a real visitable place. 2. **News-driven generation:** Reach-wide news reports events (gas main explosion in an east_reach town). That location must exist when visited. Sparse frequency to avoid disruption. **Q: CPU load?** A: **Capped idle-time generation.** Background sim runs at capped load. Player's system stays quiet — no full-fan-blazing. --- ## Generated Spaces **Q: Are rooms simulation primitives or visual backdrops?** A: **Full simulation primitives with LOD.** A visited bar needs: monthly turnover, cost, employee count, current staff and visitors. If the player BUYS the bar, deeper simulation activates. Economic success follows regional prosperity (prosperous/faltering/growing/stable). Depth scales with player engagement. **Q: How do NPCs populate spaces?** A: **Hybrid with evolution.** Zone-function baselines (commercial zones get foot traffic). Any auto-generated ambient NPC can evolve into a narrative NPC through player interaction. No hard line between background and story characters. --- ## Spatial Design Principles **Q: Do era transitions leave visible spatial scars?** A: **Context-dependent.** Sometimes spatial archaeology (when people wanted a clean break). Sometimes people keep building what they built. Dramatic shifts bias toward change. Sometimes people start building differently because of culture or taste. **Key principle: cohesion at small/middle scale (not messy), variety at middle/large scale (not predictable).** --- --- ## Round 2 Follow-up Answers **Q: World map format?** A: **Annotated heightmaps** (grayscale heightmap PNG + metadata JSON per planet/moon, with rivers/coastlines/biome zones as overlay layers). Additionally, use a **planetary shader plugin** to generate visual screenshots of each planet (earthlike, jungle, desert, mars-like, ocean, etc.) for embedding in wiki pages and GTTR entries. **Q: Heritage root D-records (D-104, D-105, D-101, D-107)?** A: **Superseded — clean break.** The 7 abstract roots are retired. New D-records will describe how real-world corridor identities (Commonwealth, Iberian/Latin American, East Asian, Germanic) map to room grammar, spatial tokens, and NPC behavior. **Q: Simulation convergence / replayability?** A: **Reframed.** Three key points: 1. **Player agency is the primary replayability lever.** Who you create, what you do, where you go across 300+ systems already provides massive variety. The background sim is secondary variety, not the core mechanism. 2. **Equilibrium is signal, not failure.** A stable economy shows the effect of the player's choices (or non-choices). That's information, not boredom. 3. **The interconnected network IS the propagation mechanism.** Any event that tweaks core dials on any system — corporate disaster, portal closing, political shift, successful development effort — propagates and rebalances through the trade/political network. Corporate disasters are ONE entropy source, not THE entropy source. Bulk import/export lists per system inform both simulation (trade flows) and content (what's on store shelves). Set up the propagation properly and emergence follows naturally. --- ## Process Notes - Zone type families (Interior/Urban/Natural) are implementation detail for sub-workshop 2, not endgame feature decisions. - The background simulation system needs its own dedicated design workshop. Design brief: model bulk trade flows between systems with corporate facility dependencies, political pressure, and disaster injection. Central challenge is not "keep it chaotic" but "set up propagation properly." - Heritage root D-records (D-104, D-105, D-101, D-107) superseded — flagged for Qatux.