HINTERLAND · A PROCEDURAL ATLAS OF WHO PAYS

A generator of unequal worlds

Every map this makes is an argument about inequality: who gets served and who sits in darkness, who breathes the poison and who ships it downstream, who holds the gates and who pays the toll — none of it painted, all of it emergent from blind geology, a cost-gated grid, and factions that seize, tax, and go to war. The fantasy is the carrier; the attribute table is the argument. Seeded, reproducible, QGIS-ready.

WHAT THIS WORLD SHOWS — COMPUTED FROM ITS OWN EXPORTED COLUMNS

THE WORLD

Seed

Any text or number. Drives the whole world.

Regions

Relaxation

Lloyd passes: 0 = organic, 8 = even.

Capital

Unpinned, the seat settles in fertile lowland. Clicking the map INSPECTS a region; arm the pin to move the seat instead.

THE ECONOMY

Income mix (wealth weights) retained extraction refining value-add trade / connectivity (seat + sea) legacy capital gradient

Gradient 0 = fully emergent wealth. Gradient 100 with the rest at 0 = the old explicit diagram.

Gradient steepness

Shapes only the legacy gradient term above.

POLICY

Grid threshold

The benefit a settlement must promise before the conduit reaches it. 0 = everyone connected.

Dump bias λ

How much refinery spoil is hauled onto poor land. 0 = blight follows only wind and terrain.

Same rock, same wind, same dice — only the policy differs. The gap is the policy.

THE SEAT

Responsiveness

How likely the seat answers the realm's first wound with a mercy instead of a fist. The dice still roll; this weights them. 45 = the old world.

close the harbors

Seal the quays: no sea trade, no port tolls — and no door for the Dominion. Isolation is a policy with a price.

TIME

Epochs

Run the world forward: ore depletes, wealth compounds, people migrate, the grid chases the winners, the seat decrees, towns rise. 0 = the founding snapshot.

📜 The Chronicle — the world narrating itself