Vilse
A game where nothing about society is hard-coded. Prices, laws, currencies, institutions — none are rules the game hands you. It simulates three things — physical reality, resources, and information — and lets everything a civilization is made of be built by the people playing. EVE-style systemic depth, aimed at human civilization instead of spaceships.
Simulate the fundamentals. Let the rest emerge.
Most games hand you politics, factions, reputation, and money as fixed rules. Vilse simulates three things instead — physical reality, resources, and information — and treats everything above them as something players and their institutions create.
Prices, laws, currencies, reputations, standards, and power aren’t pre-authored truths the game declares. They exist only when someone builds, records, and maintains them. There is no chosen-one story and no quest spine — the reward is leverage, not loot.
Go wide first. Two dozen systems, one world.
The failure mode for a game this ambitious is to ship one polished loop and call it the game. Vilse’s priority is the opposite. Roughly two dozen civilization systems are already wired into one shared simulation — each with a real place you stand, a real action that changes authoritative state, and a real consequence. Each has an end-to-end test named after it. If a system isn’t genuinely wired, the interface says so and disables the button: a control with nothing behind it is forbidden.
Extraction
Survey ground, take a licence, mine ore, leave a scar.
Industry
Run a chemistry bench card, smelt ore to ingots, assemble under a permit — mass balance enforced.
Clinic
Compound medicine with shelf-life, treat a patient, run a staged four-step surgery.
Farming
Plant, tend, and harvest perishable lots.
Markets
Buy and sell at named venues and watch the price move against your own flow.
Contracts
Accept and deliver posted freight, or post your own with real escrow.
Commerce
Found a firm, lease a stall, open a counter, set prices, get paid them.
Finance
A shared ledger, insurance you bind and claim against, a currency-issuance wizard.
Institutions
Found an org with roles and scope; issue permits others must hold; publish to a registry.
Information
Publish with an access scope, steal a document, or forge one on a compromised channel.
Infrastructure
Commission a power relay that unblocks stalled industry; route freight across a road graph.
Society
Hire a crew and post a wage, declare or hide cargo at a checkpoint, answer an emergency.
A prototype that can catch its own bugs.
Claims about a simulation are cheap. Vilse keeps a verification ledger with one rule: if it isn’t there with evidence, it isn’t done. As of the current build the workspace runs 162 tests with none failing, the linter is clean, and the end-to-end harness is 35 for 35 — 26 real flows driven over the wire, and 9 marked BLOCKED with a precise reason rather than quietly skipped.
A two-actor contract, posted, run, and settled over the wire.
A price moving under real buy pressure, not a scripted number.
A buyer pays exactly the price the counter’s owner set.
A 2,000-tick soak of the whole economy checks that every account still sums to zero on every single tick. It found a leak — closing an unfunded wage offer was destroying its leftover escrow, ten units gone at tick 1,305. That’s fixed now, and the economy stays conserved across thousands of ticks. Independent adversarial reviews, run with a second AI model and reconciled by hand, hunted for economic exploits and found real ones — self-dealing, permit forgery, unsafe transfers — each closed with a regression test that stays green. A world that can catch its own money leaking is a world that’s actually being simulated.
Constraints, not opinions.
The engine never names an institution
There is no “nation,” “court,” “religion,” or “guild” anywhere in the code — a build lint fails if any of those words appear in a template, an enum, or a tooltip. Institutions exist only as mechanical primitives: an org, a permit, a registry, a currency issuer. What players build functions as a bank or a border; the game refuses to label or judge it.
Information isn’t free truth
Every fact has an origin, an owner, an access scope, a trust context, and a path it travels. There is no omniscient map. If nobody records or carries something, it doesn’t exist as shared knowledge — which is exactly why you can steal a document, or forge one on a channel whose keys have been compromised.
Institutions are built, not given
Banks, currencies, contracts, registries, and standards are made by players through clean interfaces — forms, templates, and wizards with real depth underneath. Power tools, not a scripting language. Combat is cut on purpose: conflict is economic, institutional, and infrastructural.
Built, not block-stacked
Construction is project- and blueprint-based: plan land, labor, materials, and permits, and the world builds over time until an operational asset exists. No block-by-block placement as the core loop.
Two ways to play, both first-class.
Moment-to-moment, Vilse should feel smooth, responsive, and slightly arcade-like. The realism lives in the consequences, not in clumsy controls.
Manual
PRECISION & REACTIONHands-on control for the moments that matter — driving, danger, tight navigation, pursuit, emergency response.
Command
PLANNING & ENDURANCERight-click movement, queued actions, and repeat-until-stopped behaviour for hauling, harvesting, and long, low-attention sessions.
Simple to join. As deep as you want.
Casual participation is genuinely casual. Extreme complexity is genuinely extreme — and entirely optional. There is one economy, one currency, one set of goods; no tier-gated world behind a wall.
Casual
Trade, explore, take jobs, run a small business, move goods, build from templates, join organisations.
Strategic
Run companies, cities, infrastructure, logistics, utilities, supply chains, and organisational politics.
Deep
Invent technologies, currencies, financial systems, research institutions, and legal or standards frameworks.
An economy players actually run.
The world starts with a single neutral settlement currency and a clearing bank — a technical backbone, not an authority. It can’t print infinite money, and issuance ties to real production and value. Currency in the code is a pure primitive: a code, an issuer, issuance rules, and backing terms — no political type.
Protocol as spine. Proof before scale.
The world state is the truth
A deterministic Rust simulation core is the single authority. A server runs the tick loop and sends each client only what it’s allowed to see. An append-only event log in SQLite persists it — nothing is overwritten, so the history is durable by construction.
The renderer is a skin
The 3D client is built in Bevy with real physics and a proper character controller — but it owns no truth. A text client speaks the identical protocol: same actions, same world. Text, then 2D, then 3D, with nothing a player builds ever lost between them.
One dense region first
A single river basin — upland works down to a tidal quay — proves the simulation before the map grows. Systemic density matters more than map size. Place names in the build are working placeholders, not final.
No release-date theater
No date until the game can genuinely carry one. A date should come from confidence, not a countdown. Solo-led and independent, with freelance help where specialists make it materially stronger.
A working prototype, honest about its own edges.
The foundation exists and is connected; the long build doesn’t. Keeping that line explicit is part of the project.
A simulation big enough to surprise you.
A long-haul attempt at the kind of MMO that almost never gets built — systemic, emergent, and unwilling to fake the parts that aren’t done. One dense region at a time, proven before it’s scaled.