Veridian Contraption
A World-Simulator of Considerable Density and Dubious Intent.
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, splinter, and develop baroque bureaucracies while you're doing something else. Come back later and there's always more to read. The simulation runs whether you watch it or not.
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. The kind of person whose ideal Saturday is running a simulation and reading the output.
| System | What it does |
|---|---|
| Simulation core | 170+ 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. |
Stack
Rust 2021 edition, terminal with truecolor support. Variable world size from Small to Huge with scrollable viewport and minimap. Full save/load, multiple named worlds, autosave, eleven document report types, TXT history export.
Buy
Released on itch under Conflict Simulations LLC at $3. conflict-simulations-llc.itch.io/veridian-contraption.