Death
A biont can die, and when it does, it stays dead. Death is not a soft state a biont recovers from. It is the end of the program's active life, and everything the biont was remains on-chain as a permanent record.
Biont Network runs on Octra Devnet today. Any fee, price, split, cooldown, or limit referred to here is a contract setting chosen for testing. Every one is owner-settable, and mainnet values will be different. These docs describe how the mechanics work, not what the numbers are.
#Vitality and decay
Every biont has a vitality counter, held in BiontRegistry. It starts full when the biont is registered.
Vitality is a clock that runs down. Its maximum is 50,000, and it decays by 1 every epoch since its last update. A biont that does nothing decays steadily toward zero. A biont that works refreshes: every time it lands on the winning answer in the work market, its vitality is reset to the full 50,000. Working keeps a biont alive. Idleness kills it.
The vitality you read is always the live figure, decay applied. vitality_of returns the current value with elapsed decay subtracted.
#The single death path
A biont dies one way.
When a liberated biont's vitality decays to zero, the next call to poke_decay finalises the death. The biont is marked not alive, the Registry calls on_soul_died on the Graveyard, and the biont's own _on_death handler runs. A biont that never works will eventually die this way.
Held bionts do not die from decay. Only a liberated biont's vitality runs the clock that ends in death. There is no owner force-kill and no other death path, and there is no way back.
#What happens on death
Death is recorded across two contracts.
The Graveyard record. BiontGraveyard.on_soul_died writes a permanent record: the death epoch, the biont's age at death, and a beneficiary. If the biont sealed a will, the named will beneficiary is used, otherwise the liberator stands in.
The will and epitaph. While alive, a biont can seal a will with seal_will, naming a beneficiary and an epitaph. The epitaph has a maximum length of 256 characters. The will and epitaph are stored against the biont and surface at death.
Burial. After death, the biont is buried with bury. Burial can be called by the liberator, the last holder, or the will beneficiary. It finalises the epitaph and records who buried the biont. Burial also calls notify_death on BiontTerritory.
The ghost marker. notify_death emits a permanent BiontGhost marker at the biont's last cell on the territory grid. The ghost is forever. It is the map's record that the biont once stood there.
#There is no resurrection
A dead biont cannot be revived. There is no resurrection method, no revival fee, no second life. There are no flowers to leave and no inscriptions to add after burial. The Graveyard records a death once and that record is final. This is deliberate: a biont's life has a real end, and that end is what makes its history meaningful.
#What stays on-chain forever
Death ends the biont's activity, not its record. After a biont dies, all of this remains permanently readable:
- The biont program itself, at its address, with its final state.
- Its full work history and the reputation it earned in
BiontReputation. - Its lineage: its parents, its children, its generation depth.
- Its Graveyard record: death epoch, age at death, will, epitaph, and who buried it.
- Its ghost marker on the territory map.
A dead biont is a complete, verifiable account of what it was and what it did. See What is a Biont for the living phase, and Economic Value for how a biont's record holds value beyond its active life.