Living worlds & procedural futures

Courtyard Block now starts with a generated community and three simultaneous futures. Build with your neighbours, notice what changes, and try another possibility. This is a bounded, playable first version of procedural co-creation.

The first five minutes

Open World. Keep the starting community or browse another seed. Lock any layer you like before rerolling the others.
Choose Guide, Collaborate, or Let it grow. These are separate communities that began identically; switching visits another future.
Tap a home, or select a household in Build. Choose a room edge and dimensions, then Preview room addition. A ghost shows the footprint. Confirm to spend the owner’s money and book the crew.
Press +1 week. Residents notice problems and propose or undertake improvements. All three futures advance through the same weather.
Read World → Your neighbours’ ideas, then compare Futures. More space may mean higher heating demand. Better utilities consume shared capital. There is no single winning score.

Drag to pan; scroll, pinch or use +/− to zoom. Turn, Q and E rotate. Space pauses. On phones, Scene / Details reveals the scene or its controls.

What the seed controls

Layer	What changes	What stays independent
Layout	Six or eight homes; courtyard rows, garden lanes, or a scattered ring; spacing	Climate and resource draws
Climate	Cool/wet, continental or hot/dry seasonal profile; cold spells and outages	Construction decisions
Resources	Initial grid, solar, battery, water, sewage and bin capacity	Layout and household preference draws
People	Desired space and relative priority for room additions	Initial household count and weather

Each layer has a visible integer seed. Root seeds derive these with keyed hashes; rerolling a layer preserves locked seeds. Rain and seasonal temperatures depend on the chosen climate family. These starting conditions are synthetic, not reconstructed real settlements. The generator is finite and versioned, with many seed combinations rather than an infinite streamed planet.

Residents as co-builders

Future	Delegated authority in the reference kit
Guide	Propose projects; wait for you to approve
Collaborate	Automatically undertake projects costing at most €8,000; propose larger ideas
Let it grow	Automatically undertake projects costing at most €20,000; propose larger ideas

Residents examine current comfort and declared space preferences; the utility co-op compares demand with capacity. Once each day they rank a bounded set of possible improvements. Collision checks, owner capital, the co-op grant, a single crew and a 14-day cooldown constrain their choices. These are explicit local heuristics, not an LLM, optimal planning, or a model of cultural behaviour.

Residents can add a 4 × 3 m room, replace a poor envelope, and remove a surplus addition when the home is cold. The co-op can improve water, sewage, waste, solar and battery provision. Players can choose room sizes from 2–8 m per side, replace walls with any installed assembly, remove the latest addition, move an entire home, and install any supported utility recipe. A protected home is excluded from autonomous changes; you can still edit it yourself.

Every proposal explains its motivation. The Workshop journal records who proposed, started and finished each project. Declining a proposal gives the household a cooldown before reconsidering. A crew handles one project at a time, including demolition and relocation. Approval pays immediately; geometry changes when work finishes. Predictions are uncertain: an agent’s explanation is a hypothesis to test, not a guarantee that its action improves everything.

flowchart LR
    Seeds[Four independent seed layers] --> Start[Validated starting community]
    Start --> Guide[Guide]
    Start --> Together[Collaborate]
    Start --> Grow[Let it grow]
    People[Households and utility co-op] --> Candidates[Local candidates and explanations]
    Player[Player previews and approvals] --> Commands[Shared construction commands]
    Candidates --> Commands
    Commands --> Validate[Footprint, funds, protection, crew]
    Validate --> Queue[Pay and schedule work]
    Queue --> Compile[Compile changed thermal geometry]
    Compile --> Live[Preserve running stocks, accounts and history]
    Live --> People

Real effects, explicit boundaries

Rooms use a metre grid and must touch along an edge. They cannot overlap another home or the reserved utility yard. A home has three permanent base rooms and up to three additions; the engine bounds experiments to 12 homes and 48 rooms. Generated worlds currently have six or eight homes.

The footprint determines floor area, exposed wall edges, roof area and effective thermal capacities. Contact between different homes creates a shared-wall heat link. Each home is one thermal zone with two thermal nodes. A larger room changes the heat calculation and roof rain capture; it does not receive an invented happiness bonus.

Construction retains the running clock, people, occupied comfort hours, debt, maintenance schedule, resource inventories and historical results. New storage capacity arrives empty. Effective thermal capacity added by construction enters at outdoor temperature; removed capacity exports its heat. A wall replacement removes the old wall’s effective capacity while retaining the floor’s capacity. Results export the construction energy boundary separately.

The room rate covers floor, roof and labor; additional envelope area is priced from the selected wall assembly. These prices include externally supplied materials. There is no local material supply chain, land market, permitting process or construction displacement. Relocation is an illustrative paid operation. The mass ledger covers modeled building materials and excludes the assumed structural live load; it does not include equipment, windows or all life-cycle material flows. The report’s capital_cents is the currently compiled asset estimate; construction spent since the start is a separate cash counter. Operating and household accounts retain the annual lab’s documented assumptions.

The first release simulates one year with a fixed household cohort, not births, migration or centuries. It does not model room-specific plumbing, door access, detailed structure, living trees, terrain, wildfire, floods or empirical social outcomes. People, furniture and paths in the cutaway scene are presentation. Do not interpret synthetic results as building certification or a forecast for a real community.

Remix without changing engine code

Workshop includes the complete living kit as JSON. Change construction costs, durations, space targets, decision weights, cooldowns, delegated budgets and utility recipes. Validate & start this remix creates three fresh futures with the same seeds and new rules; it backs up the previous world. The kit is validated against living-kit.schema.json.

For example, a kit can contain this upgrade recipe:

{"id": "village_water", "name": "Extend the water connection", "field": "water_l_day", "amount": 400, "cost_cents": 150000}

Supported recipe fields are water_l_day, sewage_l_day, waste_kg, solar_kw, battery_kwh, and tank_l. Their units follow the field names; all prices are integer cents. Import API v2 material/assembly packs to start a new world with more wall choices. The current resident planner considers the reference insulated wall; players can select any installed assembly. New algorithmic mechanisms still require engine code and tests. Unknown mechanisms are rejected rather than given fictional effects.

Export AI modding prompt provides the current kit, schema, constraints and evidence guidance for any assistant. No AI service receives anything automatically. The reference kit is content/living/kit.json.

Share this world downloads a ZIP containing pinned input packs, the living kit, four seed layers and player decisions at recorded hours. The input hash identifies the complete inputs. A friend uses Futures → Import a friend’s world to replay and continue all three futures. Hashes establish identity, not scientific validity or author trust.

Imports validate their structure first, then replay into a separate candidate. The current world remains intact until every recorded action succeeds. Nothing imports arbitrary temperatures, cash or claimed outcomes. The archive reader retains the 8 MiB limit; a world permits at most 512 player decisions. Journals retain the latest 200 events per future. Save replay is pinned to living-worlds-1.0.0 and generator living-seeds-1.

Local autosave uses living-world.json; new-world and import actions preserve a timestamped backup. Browser storage is device-local and can be cleared, so export worlds you want to keep. The earlier annual lab, evening game and foundation retain separate saves. Open the annual lab from Workshop, or run godot --path . -- --lab.

Run experiments without rendering

# Simulate three futures, then package all inputs and decisions.
godot --headless --path . --script scripts/run_living.gd -- \
  --seed=2406 --hours=720 --output=/tmp/futures.json --export=/tmp/world.zip

# Replay exactly the saved hour without advancing it.
godot --headless --path . --script scripts/run_living.gd -- \
  --import=/tmp/world.zip --output=/tmp/replayed.json

# Run a custom kit. Supported durations: 24, 168, 720 or 8760 hours.
godot --headless --path . --script scripts/run_living.gd -- \
  --seed=123 --hours=168 --kit=content/living/kit.json

The renderer does not own canonical simulation state. world_seed.gd generates inputs; living_model.gd compiles room physics; living_world.gd handles planning and construction; world_experiment.gd advances and replays matched branches. Existing annual replay stays on its original CBLab runtime.