Building placement

The five parts that turn up most often in simulation games don't simulate anything.

We broke 179 of them into their parts. First is the pause button, in 46 percent of them. Then placing buildings where you like, support for mods, a tech tree, and scenario goals.

Production chains come sixth, and they're the first part on the list that models something in the world: ore into plates, plates into gears.

The parts a game is known for are rare. RimWorld's storyteller, its mood breaks and its body-part injuries each show up in fewer than ten catalog games.

A border-checkpoint game from 2013 and a daughter-raising game from 1993 belong to the same family.

We grouped 179 simulation games by the parts they're built from, then redid the grouping on 1000 random subsets of the catalog. These two land together almost every time.

Both give you time in fixed slots: a shift at the border, three slots a month for your daughter. Both keep money tight. Both keep sending authored events at you.

Princess Maker 2 is filed as a life sim, and it lands far from The Sims.

Only one game in our catalog lets you place buildings and also runs chains of story events: 77 games do the first, 17 the second.

In Cities: Skylines, a district built all at once grows old all at once. Decades later its residents die in a wave, and the hearses back up. The game treats it as a services problem. Nothing tells you a story about any of them.

The exception is Surviving Mars, which lays authored mysteries like plagues and AI revolts over a colony you lay out yourself. Even there, the mysteries are layered on top of the colony.

The most common parts of simulation games almost went uncounted in our dataset.

The first catalog was built by AI agents working in parallel. Each one recorded the parts that made a game distinctive and skipped the obvious ones: the pause button, placing buildings, tech trees. An outside review caught it.

Once the gaps were filled, the pause button turned out to be the most common part of all, in 46 percent of the catalog. Now every number in this series is checked against the data each time it's built.