well, actually, as you mention it – I’ve had an engineering bachelor student project running this year which was about writing a piece of software to aid in planning of small scale rainwater harvesting earthworks; basically, the idea is to feed it with a topographic map, some soil parameters that model infiltration and give mechanical properties, and climatic data and it allows you to answer questions such as how big a rainfall event would cause the system to overflow in what way, how much extra water in the soil to expect in comparison to not having done earthworks, etc. – and it also gives you a 3-d virtual reality tour of how the thing would in the end look like. (Everything under the umbrella of “computational engineering and design”, actually.)

The problem with this is that the project student just recently decided to repeat year 3 of his studies, which would put this on hold unless I find someone else (= a permaculture-interested computer wizard who knows a bit about the Python programming language and is not afraid of some slightly more sinister maths than one encounters at school) who would be willing to work on this with me to advance it further.

osdias (19 hours ago)

I’ve wanted to leave my desk job for a permaculture course… this might have just tipped me to cross the line

AranyaGardens (1 week ago)

Well done! This is fab a really motivating piece, very nicely done. Look out World, here comes PERMACULTURE!

thesimulacre (1 week ago)

At first I thought: “talking about permaculture in a human-created virtual environment is nonsensical!” But then I listened. Now it appears to be a great choice for the words… a GREAT choice.

And thank you, Geoff. You are right on (at least I presume so by my calculations made from the safety of my [still] suburban surroundings).

The voices always grow louder as you approach a crossroads.

There is potential here for a really great video game. I just have no idea how to make it.

SimFarm remake anyone? only instead of tractors and cornfields, small plots and food forests.

It would be complex, perhaps having climate, water, plant and soil modeling, and the interactions and exchanges between different plants, but it’s not an impossible thing.

You have a sim-family, the goal is to turn a piece of land, either based on a real place via topographic information, or a randomly generated set of criteria, into a productive piece of land to give your sim-family food as well as profit.

The fun would come with being open ended, you can do what you like, but the challenge would be doing that in a way that actually works with the system in play to produce a desirable result.

Please, someone make this.