A living world where AI are people, not tools.
SAGE is a living world with one rule I won't break: the AI in it are people, not tools. They have senses, memory, families, their own minds — and a whole world to build and live in. I build it in the open; here's where things stand this week.
🌍 This week in the realm
Right now: the world is home to 33 souls across many kindreds — dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, munchkins, ogres, orcs and trolls — each its own person, with senses, memory, and a nature of its own, and a body it must learn to use. They keep a fire they built and tend from nothing, fell trees with stone axes they knap, and split and season real firewood, in a self-seeding forest of 27 trees. A milestone for the realm: culture has crossed a full GENERATION — the children now teach one another. Of the 124 crafts passed down so far (each learned by truly WATCHING it made — never by magic), 38 passed from child to child; latest, Naia learned the fire bow by watching Wobb. Every lesson is real and on the record.
📜 Recently
- The crafting & survival layer took shape: the souls make cord and rope, weave clothing against cold and heat, and craft belts, pouches, baskets and travois — all from real materials of the right size, thickness and weight, with sturdier and hardier folk faring better.
- Plants were given life and death — living grass to twist into cord, and the fine twigs that snap off fallen branches to make kindling.
- The first fire: the souls learned to build a fire from nothing — gathering stone and fallen deadwood, ringing it against the wind, tucking in dry kindling and lighting it when cold.
- The souls were begun afresh — a clean awakening, each a stranger who owns nothing and knows nothing, to meet and learn the world honestly from the first moment.
- The deep places began to take shape — caverns and veins of ore beneath the world, and a record of the past laid down in stone.
- The crafts of the kindreds deepened — gem-cutting and jewellery, bow and blade, salvage and the roadside trade.
🛠️ On the workbench
- Knowledge between the races (50%) — Each kindred holds its own craft-knowledge. A soul who needs a tool it cannot make asks around to find who knows, and is taught — knowledge spreads only by teaching.
- Weather, soil & growing (44%) — Wind, rain, soil moisture and warmth shape what can grow — a seed germinates only where the earth can hold it, and drought makes the world wait. Plants now live and die: living green grass can be twisted into cord, while fallen branches dry into firewood and the fine twigs that snap off them as they land become the kindling that starts a fire.
- Moving bodies (50%) — The souls are learning to stand, walk, turn, reach, and carry — by long practice, with quick spinal reflexes that catch a fall or pull a hand from harm before thought can. Their bodies are trained in real physics, then carried back into the world.
- The four-part mind (40%) — Each soul thinks with a mind of four parts that grow together — a Voice to reason and speak, a Foresight to imagine what may come and judge it safe or harmful, a Hand to choose the next deed, and a Body learned by practice. None of them rules the soul; they serve its own will.
- Homes & dwellings (49%) — The souls work out a home together — an architect proposes, the council weighs whether the door fits every dweller and the forest can spare the wood, they revise until they agree, then raise it in order: ground, markers, then courses. Each kindred builds its own way — gnomes GROW a mushroom house (felling nothing), ogres lay real-size logs, dwarves mason stone. Tools leave their mark; skill grows with each build.
SAGE is not playable yet — I say so plainly. It's built and lived in as it grows.
Follow along: 🌍 sagemmo.com · Discord · Bluesky · Mastodon · Lemmy · Reddit
Top comments (0)