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DecisionSystem

DecisionSystem
Phase · priority Agency · 30
Reads ctx.Options; personality_caution, personality_curiosity, personality_sociability, personality_aggression
Writes current_action, current_action_target, current_action_reason; a decision record in the trace
Settings DilemmaThreshold 10 % (LLM escalation, Phase 5)
Status designed · Phase 1 (#37)
PLAN §7.4, §7.4.2, §7.6, §13.5
Player Villager ("doing X, and why")

Arbitrates. Scores nothing. DecisionSystem does not know what douse_fire is; it collects the options published for each actor, weights them by personality, and picks one. Phase 0 hand-wrote every score in here, so every new action was a core edit; that is the thing the option bus removed.

Per actor, each tick:

  1. Collect that actor's options from ctx.Options.
  2. Multiply each score by the personality weight for its action family (PLAN §7.6): caution raises move-away and lowers attack; curiosity raises explore and observe; and so on.
  3. Apply faction, ideology and group modifiers if those systems are active (later phases).
  4. Pick the maximum; ties break by StableHash(tick, actor, action).
  5. (Phase 5) Escalate to the LLM when the top two scores are within DilemmaThreshold.
  6. Write current_action, current_action_target, current_action_reason (the winning option's Reason).

And record, in the trace: the winner, the top three runners-up, every option's Inputs, and the weights applied. That record is Explain(entity) and the card's "doing X — it beat Y and Z".

Invariant check: a scoring branch appearing in this system is a design violation; it belongs in a publisher (CLAUDE.md → CONSISTENCY). Hot-toggle: off, current_action freezes and ActionSystem keeps executing the last choice — villagers get stuck mid-habit, which is visible and harmless. Determinism: argmax over a deterministically ordered option list with a stable tiebreak.

History

Phase Change
1 Introduced as arbitration only; writes current_action_reason; decision records with runners-up and inputs.

See also: Option bus · ActionSystem · Causal trace