Veridian Contraption
A World-Simulator of Considerable Density and Dubious Intent.
The gates of Weneld-Uck admitted Ist-Wedilk in the usual manner, which is to say: with neither welcome nor objection.
An autonomous ASCII world-simulator. Settlements glow amber. Caravans crawl along trade routes. Forgotten beasts patrol in magenta. Levies march in blood-red. The narrative log reads like a bureaucrat who has absorbed too much Borges.
Civilizations rise and decline. Factions schism. Wars start over insults. Cults emerge, persecute, escalate, or fizzle. Eschatons arrive and reshape the map without ending the simulation. The world is doing something on its own, and you are watching it happen — come back later and there is always more to read.
Built for the audience that liked Dwarf Fortress's narrative layer more than the colony management. Players who thought Dune's appendices were the best part. You are spectator, occasional nudge, curator of emergent absurdity.
Play it in your browser
The genuine simulation engine, compiled to WebAssembly — the same Rust worldgen, 196+ event types, and procedural bureaucratic prose as the full game. It runs autonomously: the world proceeds whether you watch or not. It opens fullscreen in a new tab — Space to pause, L for the map legend, ? for help.
| System | What it does |
|---|---|
| Simulation core | 196+ event types in five prose registers (Clinical, Lyrical, Bureaucratic, Ominous, Conspiratorial). 21 quest types pursued autonomously by agents. |
| Patron actions | Sponsor artists. Introduce rumors. Declare embargoes. Found guilds, cults, and mercenary companies. Grant titles. |
| Military | Levies, cavalry, artillery. CRT combat resolved with tabletop-inspired tables. Sieges with organic wall development. Multi-phase off-map invasions with three-tier foreshadowing. |
| Magic | Six traditions: Necromancer, Elementalist, Geomancer, Bureaucromancer, Cleric, Illusionist. Wizard towers, corruption, rogue wizards. |
| Politics | Coups, purges, show trials, espionage, demagogues, ideological spread. |
| Anomalies | Sixteen rare localized event types. R'lyeh Deep One Emergence with foreshadowing, surfacing, and diplomatic Deep Ones. Seven Eschaton catastrophe classes that reshape the world without ending the simulation. |
| Trade and ecology | 27 trade goods. A* caravan pathfinding. Naval blockades during sieges. 24 animal species with predator-prey dynamics and seasonal cycles. |
| Artist system | Poets, bards, and visual artists create feeling-driven works. Great works enter the World Annals. |
| World presets | Five flavors: The Long Bureaucracy, The Burning Provinces, The Deep Taxonomy, The Conspiratorial Age, Unguided. |
| Cross-world | The Atlas screen tracks entities and expeditions across multiple saved worlds. The Bureau of Absent Persons keeps records. |
Soundtrack
Fourteen original tracks, written, performed, and recorded by Ray Weiss. The title piece, Movement 2, opens the game and sits in a shuffle-without-replacement pool — it recurs about once a cycle, like any other track. Normalized to −16 LUFS and mixed low: the music sits under whatever else you are doing.
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The composition matches the register the simulation has been gesturing at: slow accretion, dense detail, occasional bursts of weirdness, the sense that the world is doing something on its own.
Stack
Rust 2021, a terminal with truecolor support. Variable world size from Small to Huge, scrollable viewport and minimap. Byte-identical save/load — resume from any saved tick and the world history is bit-for-bit identical — backed by a 25,000-tick determinism gate in the test suite. Multiple named worlds, autosave, eleven document report types, TXT history export.
Lineage
The aesthetic: Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, early D&D modules, Nabokov. Read into the design: Engels, Dupuy, Clausewitz, Kafka, the Principia Discordia, Norman Cohn, Thomas Müntzer, Lovecraft, and Shea & Wilson.
Buy
On itch under Conflict Simulations LLC at $3 — conflict-simulations-llc.itch.io/veridian-contraption. Buy in now and you are done paying: when Veridian Contraption debuts on Steam at $9.99, existing itch owners get free Steam keys, no repurchase. The itch price rises to $9.99 in lockstep with the Steam launch — but anyone who bought early stays at the price they paid.
If you played along through Early Access — thank you. The bug
reports, the world screenshots, and the occasional message about a
strange Eschaton playthrough turned this into a real release rather
than a research project.
— Ray