Factories with a living workforce

The white-space analysis shows production chains and agent lifecycles are both common yet almost never combined: factory games are run by machines or faceless workers, and games with aging, family-forming agents rarely have deep production. Colony sims and Workers & Resources sit closest. A factory whose throughput depends on a workforce with skills, schooling, households, and turnover couples production chains, among the ten most widely used mechanics in the catalog, to the systems that generate the most attachment. Salience-gated language agents make that workforce individually legible without per-tick cost.

Machines need operators with trained skills; skilled workers age and retire; children of workers attend schools the player builds; housing, food, and morale affect shift output. A bottleneck can be a missing machine or a missing mentor. Generational play replaces the usual tech-tree endgame with succession planning for the workforce.

Prototype a small automation map where each machine needs a skilled operator drawn from a simulated population with aging and schooling; compare session length and self-reported attachment with a machines-only control. Success: longer sessions and higher attachment without lower throughput-puzzle ratings.

• Workforce management can bury the logistics puzzle players came for.
• Agent counts at factory scale strain compute.
• Two audiences (automation and life-sim) may each find half the game unwanted.

The text above states findings about this dataset. The build fails (E032) if any of these stops holding.

• rank.whitespace.lifecycle-aging.production-chain <= 10
• cooccur.lifecycle-aging.production-chain <= 1
• derived.production-chain.prevalence_rank <= 10