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In Sim Eternal City, the Life Tree is not a metaphor. It is infrastructure.

Citizens connect to it for three minutes a day — the city’s designated “Value Production Time” — to record memories, deposit wisdom, and share accumulated experience with the mainland. The skills of a retired engineer. The recipes of a 90-year-old cook. The institutional memory of a woman who ran a school district for thirty years. All of it flows into the Life Tree, gets processed into masterclasses and digital archives, and is sold to schools, corporations, and governments on land. The revenue comes back to the city’s residents as a Knowledge Dividend.

The Life Tree is Sim Eternal City’s central landmark. And it earns.

But here is the question the Life Tree raises for every city that already exists on land: what is your landmark doing?

Every city has a structure that functions as its public memory — a place where the city tells itself and the world what it values, what it has survived, what it hopes to become. Sometimes it is deliberate: a national archive, a war memorial, a library. Sometimes it is accidental: a derelict factory that became a cultural center, a market that outlasted every redevelopment plan, a bridge that everyone agreed was too beautiful to tear down.

The Life Tree asks a harder question than most landmarks are designed to answer: not just “what do we remember?” but “what do we do with what we remember?”

Sim Eternal City turns memory into a circular economy. The knowledge of its oldest residents becomes the city’s primary export. The landmark is not decorative. It is productive. It earns the city its income, secures its residents’ retirement, and preserves human civilization in the event of a mainland disaster.

Most city landmarks don’t do any of that. They hold space. They mark history. They attract tourists. Very few of them ask their oldest residents to produce anything, or treat accumulated human experience as an economic asset.

That is the question Sim Eternal City is posing to every city that has a landmark and an aging population:

What if the most valuable thing in your city wasn’t a building?

What if it was a person who’s been here for seventy years?

And what if your landmark was designed to connect those two things?

(Source: Sim Eternal City · simeternal.city · IWBFD Studios, 2026)