What villagers know¶

Knowledge and memory


Kind	What a person believes about the world
Comes from	seeing; the village's shared knowledge
Fades	yes — by how long ago, and by what kind of thing
Holds	about 200 things per person
Since	Phase 1
Status	designed · Phase 1
Technical	PerceptionSystem · The graph (facts are edges)

Nobody in Riverside Village has a map in their head. A villager knows exactly three kinds of thing: what they can see right now, what they remember seeing, and what the village knows. Everything they do is decided from those three, and nothing else. There is no hidden fairness that tells a hungry villager where the nearest full bush is. If they don't know, they don't know.

Seeing¶

A villager sees and hears their own place and places up to two steps away, fainter through walls and distance. Whatever they see goes into memory: the bush and how full it was, the bucket and whether it had water, how hot it was in here. Not everything — nobody memorises the colour of a wall — only the things that matter to a decision.

Remembering¶

A memory keeps what was seen and when. Over time the villager trusts it less:

What	Half-trusted after
Where a place is	about a month
How full a bush was; how much water a bucket held; how much wood is in a pile	about a day
How dangerous a place was	about two hours

So a villager who saw a full bush yesterday will still walk to it, a bit less surely than one who saw it this morning — and a villager who saw a fire two hours ago is already willing to go back and look. A person holds about 200 things at once; when something new comes in, the stalest, least useful memory goes.

Stale is the point

Kira remembers the forest-edge bush at eighteen meals. It was stripped yesterday. She walks there, sees an empty bush, her memory is corrected on the spot, and she decides again. The chronicle gets "Kira went to the forest for berries and found the bush stripped" — a small story that could not exist if everyone simply knew.

What the village knows¶

Everyone belongs to the village, and the village has shared knowledge: the eight places, and where the berries, wood piles, campfire, river and buckets were at the start. Every villager reads that as their own. It is why the storehouse's five people, who can see nothing edible from where they are, set off for the forest edge when they get hungry — their village knows where food is — rather than wandering until they stumble on it.

What the village knows does not update on its own in Phase 1. If the forest-edge bushes are stripped, the village still "knows" there are berries there until someone goes, sees, and (from Phase 2) tells the others. Talking is what turns one person's memory into the village's, and it arrives in the next phase.

Where it shows¶

On the character card, under what they know — in words: remembers berries at the forest edge (this morning).
In Explain this: "Kira walked to the forest because she remembered the bushes there were full" — the memory, and how old it was, is part of the chain.
Everywhere a villager is wrong: walking to a bush that is empty, running from a fire that is out.

History¶

Phase	Change
1	Introduced: seeing two places away; personal memories that fade by kind; the village's seeded shared knowledge.