After Here Be Dragons led me on a long, path of weather simulation leading to modelling tidal forces and moisture levels, a path without any obvious end or destination, Wu Xing was an experiment to try and make the simplest, yet most complete version of an emergent space I could think of. I wanted a system that could work both locally and globally. The cyclic and oppositional nature of the 5 elements figuring in the classical Wu Xing elemental system inspired an emergent and complete system that produced mountain ranges, deserts, and geologic cycles, and extended to chemical processes and simulated “biology.” The world was complicated enough to play with and simple enough to manage on as a designer.

The project when through dozens of iterations, and I learned much about how to balance shifting quantities, and achieving a balance between sterile stability and uncontrolled chaos, while achieving a world that went through predictable cyclical evolution while retaining variety and vitality. Moving from two to three dimensions was easy in comparison. I collected several emergent tools like Reaction-Diffusion Cellular Automata, and Diffusion Limited Aggregation Systems, which are everywhere in nature if you know where to look.

The “Five Processes,” usually depicted as Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal also have associations with personalities, numbers, planets, seasons, musical notes, just about anything you might think of, and applying these to a literal space has been informative from a system point of view. I’m not using the system to reproduce a realistic simulation of reality, I’m trying to see “what the other worlds are like,” to paraphrase Candide.