Day 14 · Late autumn
A potter from the downstream village has been welcomed; her mark — a heron's foot, in red — has been pressed twice into the storehouse jars. The council watched as the second mark dried.
A civilization, in four objects.
The seal that grows. The map that breathes. The chronicle that writes itself. The radar of eight pillars by which the historians of the future will judge it. Hover, click, and pull these apart.
i.
The Seal — six layers of slow heraldry
Updates · weekly
Each civilization is given a circular seal at founding — a mark by which it will be known to its friends, and to its own future.
The seal is built in six layers: shield shape, field colour, ordinaries, charges, supporters, and a motto. The first three are determined at founding, by terrain and by the values you lock. The last three accrete over months — a charge is added when a major choice is made, a supporter appears in the middle game, the motto is composed by your chronicler from your founding values and your present state.
Toggle the layers on the right to see the seal as it would appear at different points in your game's history. By the late game, no two seals are alike.
Inspired by European, Persian, Indian and East Asian seal traditions. The MVP ships with five hundred discrete heraldic charges, each hand-drawn.
A sample seal — the Kindred of the Marsh
“Kin before kingdom.” — composed by the second chronicler of the Kindred, in the latter days of the Neolithic.
ii.
The Map — terrain remembers what was done to it
Updates · bi-weekly
Each civilization spawns on a procedurally rendered watercolor map — a river valley, a coast, a forest, a steppe, a highland, a mixed temperate land, an island.
Geography is not destiny. It applies a soft 0.8×–1.2× modifier to certain stat movements: a coast makes Plenty easier and Legacy harder; a highland makes Liberty easier and Plenty harder. You can fight the terrain, and sometimes you should.
What is unique is the map's memory. As you choose, the terrain accretes named places— Hearthtown, Reed-Crossing, Salt-Mouth — drawn in the chronicler's hand, complete with marginalia. The slider on the right scrubs through the centuries.
In MVP, three map states per epoch. By Phase 4, monthly transitions and a fully animated time-slider.
River-Valley · Neolithic · year 142
"so far the river has been kind."
iii.
The Chronicle — your civilization, in someone else's hand
Updates · daily
A fictional chronicler is assigned to your civilization at founding — a court scribe, a Sufi poet, an abbess, a cartographer's apprentice, a wandering ethnographer.
Every choice you make is rendered, two or three sentences at a time, in this chronicler's voice. Their voice is consistent across the whole game; it evolves slightly when, every few epochs, a chronicler dies and an apprentice takes the pen.
The fragment-stream becomes a long scroll — by the end of the second epoch, your civilization has roughly four hundred fragments. Pull-quotes are surfaced automatically. Footnotes link to the historical society your chronicle most resembles, in this season.
Generated. Caching is aggressive. Epoch books are passed through human editorial review for the first six months post-launch.
Reading the chronicle of the Kindred of the Marsh
Day 18
The first frost. We banked the long fire and slept eight to a hearth. There were old songs, and one new one, made up by a child who is not yet old enough to remember them by spring.
Day 22
A traveler from beyond the eastern hills, who would not give his name, slept three nights at the hearth of the smith. He left with a piece of antler-work and, it is rumoured, with the smith's apprentice.
Day 25 · Solstice eve
The solstice was kept short. There was illness in two of the houses, though not yet the kind that one fears. The chronicler — myself — was made to read aloud from the founding-tablets while the others ate.
Day 30
A council was held about the marsh. The young have begun to dig at the edges; the old say it ought to be left as it has been left since before any of us were born. The young won, but only by half.
“My apprentice, who is also my niece, has begun keeping the night-watch entries.”
iv.
The Pillars — eight, decomposing to thirty, decomposing to four hundred and fifty-two
Hidden · most of the time
The pillars are how your civilization is read by the engine. Eight at the surface; thirty underneath, for those who want to look; four hundred and fifty-two at the floor, where the simulation lives.
Power, Plenty, Knowledge, Health, Liberty, Harmony, Legacy, Beauty. The radar is illustrative — your real readings appear inside the app. Click a pillar to see the dimensions it gathers up.
Players who like detail can drill in. Those who prefer to read by feel can leave the radar collapsed and never see a number. Both ways are honoured.
The full thirty-dimension framework is published, including for skeptics, on /framework.
A sample radar — illustrative, not yours
PlentyDecomposes to three dimensions: Economic Opportunity, Food System, Financial System. Twelve sub-categories. Forty-eight atomic points the engine watches in private.
Read the framework, all thirty dimensions of it.
Four hundred and fifty-two atomic points. The single most important asset of the game.
Read the framework →