Every seeker carries a genome: vigor (speed), pull (homing), thrift (lifespan). A seeker that returns home replicates — its mutated genome plants the next spore. One that dissipates is replaced by the seed's baseline.
Every 40 returns, the seed genome drifts toward the mean of recent winners. The field learns what survives its own weather: drought selects for pull — only the sure-homed return; rain favors vigor; wind's selection is the weakest, punishing vigor more than rewarding any one trait.
Filaments inherit the freshest spore and record their generation. Tip glow shows the dominant trait — green for vigor, gold for pull, blue for thrift. Each generation is built from the last: recursive growth. And nothing is immortal: branches wither from the root once they've lived their span — drought withers faster, rain preserves — so the field turns over like a real mycelium and returns keep building forever.
A return fitter than the swarm's own mean recruits a new seeker — and the chance scales with headroom, so the bloom tracks the weather: eager when starved, tapering at the cap. Each weather sets a carrying capacity — rain blooms the swarm, drought starves it — and a neutral bottleneck culls the excess when the weather turns, genome-blind, so the breathing never rewrites selection. The chart at the bottom-right is the field's own history: population and trait means, the compounding made legible.
And the weather answers back. The field keeps two memories of its own canopy — a fast one and a slow one — and while the canopy is still growing into itself, it pulls rain toward the field and shortens the droughts: when the pill reads "field +35%", the field lengthened that weather itself. As the field matures, the weather settles back to its own rhythm. Calm and wind never move. The seed can't opt out of drought — but it can answer it.
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