Usurper Reborn · published
The biggest NPC overhaul in the game's history. The simulated population around you finally has agency, real combat, persistent grudges, distinct voices, and long-arc goals that drive their behavior for weeks at a time.
For a long time the world simulator has been a beautifully detailed Rube Goldberg machine that mostly produced nothing. NPCs had personalities, relationships, memory systems, emotional states, a goal stack. They had jobs to do. They had places to go. And then, every tick, a random number generator picked one of seventeen verbs and the NPC did that thing regardless of anything else. They spawned naked, fought monsters they couldn't damage, got drained by inn tabs they couldn't afford, and died.
Walk into the dungeon now and the NPCs you bump into are actually advancing. The Lv 14 fighter you saw last week is Lv 16 now because she's been winning her team dungeons instead of dying in them. Her wounds heal at the healer for a sane price. Her share of the gambling pot at the Dark Alley pays off two times out of three because she has the Wisdom for it. She bought a sword. She's saving for armor.
Walk past the Inn and a sociable Bard is running a forty-gold tab instead of going bankrupt at a hundred. Three tables over a brawl is breaking out because two NPCs with bad blood between them ended up at the same bar. Tomorrow the news feed will mention it.
Engage one of them in conversation and the line they greet you with is colored by their current mood. Scowling, they say... if they're angry. Eyes alight, they say... if they're proud. If you bailed them out of trouble last week the line that follows mentions you haven't forgotten what you did for them. If you killed their cousin in a back alley and they witnessed it, the line that follows alludes to it sideways. None of it spells out the event. The NPC just sounds like someone who remembers.
Propose to them and the response isn't a die roll against personality stats. It's a decision, made by an actor that read your full relationship history, your charisma modifier, the heuristic acceptance chance, and their own personality, then picked accept or hesitate or refuse on character grounds. Sometimes they'll surprise you.
Examine a notable NPC at Team Corner and the first-impression paragraph at the top reads like something a stranger would say after spending five minutes with them. Korr Stonewarden carries himself like a man who has counted out coin in every shop in the city and is still not done counting. His hands are merchant's hands; his eyes are not.
Die in the dungeon while pursuing an Old God and the news feed will sometimes carry a eulogy that talks about who you were, what you were doing, and who put the blade in. Not for every commoner. But for named characters and people who mattered.
None of this is the game's narrative spine. The game still plays the same way. But the world around you is noisier, more specific, more alive.
This release rolls together two bodies of work. The first is a focused NPC economy rebalance driven by 14 days of live telemetry: 283,117 decisions across 196 unique NPCs, 9,635 deaths against 138 level-ups, an entire population stuck at Level 50 because the math literally did not allow them to progress. The second is the full Brain v2 architectural overhaul: a utility scorer that picks actions like a person would, real combat for high-stakes NPCs, persistent goal stacks that learn from world events, dialogue flavor that adapts to personality and history, and optional LLM-rendered moments for online servers running on the live game host.
The combat engine players use is completely untouched. The 830 unit tests all pass. The deploy is rollback-safe.
The full technical writeup is on the website and in the repo's release notes file.
As always, thanks for playing. The Discord is open at discord.gg/EZhwgDT6Ta if you want to compare notes, report bugs, or just heckle the design choices.