It's a two-dimensional landscape, represented as a square grid, containing two regions rich in a renewable resource arbitrarily called sugar. Every agent is born into this world with a metabolism demanding sugar, and each has a number of other attributes, such as visual range for food detection, that vary across the population. As it is consumed, the sugar grows back at a predetermined rate. An agent's range is set by how far it can see. Every time an agent moves, it burns an amount of sugar determined by its given metabolic rate.
Agents die when they fail to gather enough sugar to fuel their activities.
Initially distributed at random across the landscape, the agents quickly gravitate toward the two sugar mountains. A few individuals end up accumulating large stocks of sugar, building up a great deal of personal wealth. These happen to be agents that have superior vision and a low metabolic rate and have lived a long time. A few others, combining short vision with a low metabolic rate, manage to subsist at the fringes, gathering just enough to survive in the sugar badlands but not looking far enough to see the much larger sugar stocks available just beyond the horizon. At its simplest level, the Sugarscape model represents a kind of hunter-gatherer society, Axtell explains.