The World — Contents

01

VOLUME 01 · YOU ARE HERE

A World That Ticks

Go and podman from zero, ending in a container that never stops

A simulation server that advances on a fixed tick from a seed you chose, and a log you can prove replays byte-identical.

you finish with → worldd, ticking rock and water inside a podman container

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01 The WorkstationInstalling Go and podman before writing a line of simulation code 02 A Place on the GridStructs and methods for the coordinate a cell lives at 03 Rock, Water, SoilA terrain grid of rock, water and soil in one typed slice 04 One Seed, One WorldA seeded generator that draws the same terrain every time 05 Something in the WorldEntities as data, identified by an ID that outlives them 06 Errors That Don't LieReturned errors and the bounds check a bad coordinate can't get past 07 The Fixed TickWhy the world advances in equal steps instead of following the clock 08 What the World RemembersAn append-only log of every event the tick loop produces 09 Running Two at OnceA tick loop on its own goroutine, stopped through a channel 10 Prove It TwiceRunning the same seed twice and diffing the logs 11 A World in a ContainerBuilding worldd's image and running it under podman

02

VOLUME 02 · YOU ARE HERE

Drawing the World

A 2D engine from scratch, watching Volume 1's world instead of reading its log

A thin platform layer, a software framebuffer, and a tileset drawn for The Hollow.

you finish with → A window that renders worldd's ticking terrain in real time

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12 The Pixel and the NumberOne flat slice of 32-bit colors, indexed the way the terrain grid is 13 Rectangles First, Then LinesInteger-only drawing that refuses to write outside the clip rectangle 14 A Picture You Can DiffWriting the framebuffer out as a PNG, then hashing it in a test 15 The Window OpensAn engine borrowed for its window alone: write our pixels, read the keys 16 The Pixels a Sprite SkipsBlitting from an atlas, blending exactly what the alpha channel says to blend 17 Sixteen Pixels AcrossPixel-art fundamentals in a free editor: clusters, outlines, a ramp of five colors 18 A Tileset for The HollowDrawing ground tiles that meet cleanly at every soil-water boundary 19 The Map Draws ItselfA renderer that reads sim.Grid and picks each edge tile from a four-bit neighbor mask 20 Where the Camera StandsTurning world coordinates into screen pixels, skipping every tile the viewport cannot hold 21 A Font Drawn by HandA bitmap glyph sheet, blitted in screen space where the camera cannot carry it off 22 Between Two TicksRendering faster than the simulation advances, without lying about where anything is 23 Watching the Spring SeepThe sim on a goroutine, the shell owning the frame loop, seed 5 on the screen

03

VOLUME 03 · YOU ARE HERE

Forces of Nature

The nature-of-code toolkit everything alive in the world is built from

Vectors, oscillation, particles, steering, L-systems, and cellular automata, all rendered live.

you finish with → Wind, water, flocking, and growing plant forms in the V2 client

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24 Numbers With a DirectionVector arithmetic done in plain numbers, then a dot that crosses the window 25 Motion in Three VectorsThe update every moving thing in this book runs, once per tick 26 Everything Pushing at OnceAn accumulator per body, divided by mass and cleared every tick 27 Wind Is a Function of PlaceSampling a force from where a body stands, then letting drag fight the speed it builds 28 The Circle Behind the SineReading a wave off a point that travels around a circle 29 A Row of Springs Makes a WaveHooke's law in the force accumulator, then many oscillators side by side 30 Thousands of Small BodiesAn emitter with a budget, a lifespan per particle, a pool that never allocates 31 Mannerisms Before MindsSeek, flee, arrive and wander as forces, and a walker that startles at a predator 32 The Herd That BunchesThree rules per body, then the grid buckets that stop the neighbor count from squaring 33 A Plant Grown From a StringRewrite rules that grow a string, then a turtle that draws it 34 Fire Crosses the GridOne rule per cell, run over the terrain the world already keeps

04

VOLUME 04 · YOU ARE HERE

The Terrarium

Plant physiology and the control theory that keeps an ecology alive

An ecosystem that survives accelerated time instead of crashing.

you finish with → A seeded, stabilized plant ecology that replays

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35 Light In, Mass OutOne plant's tick as four numbers: light caught, water drawn, upkeep paid, mass added 36 Two Numbers Under Every CellMoisture and nutrients stored per cell, drawn down by whatever has roots in them 37 The Spring Feeds the SoilMoisture running downhill by the valley's heights, soaking in, drying out 38 Tall Plants Eat FirstA light grid the canopy writes shade into before a seedling gets to read it 39 A Species Is a Row of NumbersOne parameter block driving both the grammar that draws a plant and the budget that feeds it 40 Winter Comes on ScheduleOne oscillator driving light, warmth and rain, then the dormancy that follows 41 Seeds Ride the WindReproduction charged to the mass budget, dispersal handed to the wind, germination refused where the ground cannot pay 42 Run It Until It DiesTwo hundred years unpaced, one census a year, one species left standing 43 A Loop With No BrakeArrows drawn from the code, gain measured off the run, and the brake nothing in this valley has 44 A Valley That Stays GreenRefuges cut into the rim, the density coefficient swept, and a thousand years that replay

05

VOLUME 05 · YOU ARE HERE

Bodies and Brains

Energy, metabolism, and a neural network written from scratch

3,000 creature brains running a forward pass inside a 50 ms tick.

you finish with → Creatures with bodies, senses, and controllers

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45 Eating What the Valley GrewA store of energy filled by grams bitten off a plant that stood in the valley 46 Speed Has a PriceMovement charged to the store at a rate that climbs with the square of the speed 47 Nine Lines of SightStepping a ray cell by cell until it meets something, then reporting how far it went 48 Which Way the Numbers RiseFour neighbour samples reduced to a direction, then every reading packed into one fixed row 49 One Action a TickA priced table of actions the engine checks before any of them happens 50 What the Body LeavesAn empty store, a creature struck from the roster, its grams dropped into the litter 51 Multiply, Add, DecideOne neuron worked by hand in plain numbers before a line of it is written in Go 52 Rows of Neurons, Run in OrderThe forward pass as two nested loops over one flat slice of weights 53 Choosing the SquashStep, sigmoid, tanh and ReLU measured against what a controller actually has to say 54 Where the Weights Come FromEvery weight in one flat row of numbers, drawn from a seeded stream, never trained 55 The Loop ClosesTwenty-four numbers in, six out, one action taken from what the rays returned 56 Three Thousand BrainsWhere a tick's fifty milliseconds go, and the arithmetic of how many creatures fit

06

VOLUME 06 · YOU ARE HERE

Evolution

Genomes, mutation, and selection with energy as the only fitness function

Lineages that speciate, grow new senses, and inherit temperament.

you finish with → A seeded, ordered evolutionary run, byte-identical in CI

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57 The Row Becomes a GenomeTen inherited factors that stamp out the creature already walking when every one of them is 1.00 58 A Copy With One Number ChangedPerturbation and replacement at stated rates, clamped back into range 59 A Bench That Keeps ScoreAn explicit fitness function measured over fixed trials in a closed arena 60 Keeping the WinnersTournament size and one champion carried through untouched, swept against the score curve 61 Two Parents, One ChildMatched genes crossed at a stated rate, measured against making children alone 62 The Fitness Function Comes OutA birth priced as a bite run backwards, paid for out of the store 63 Two Hundred Years With No ScoreThe population curve of a valley where dying is the whole of the selection 64 Networks That GrowNodes and links carrying innovation numbers, added and split one at a time 65 Senses a Parent Never HadEight input channels no founder reads, each with a bill attached 66 Who Can Breed With WhomCompatibility distance over two genomes, with a threshold that splits a lineage 67 Every Genome That Ever LivedAn append-only archive, and the drift of three genes nothing reads 68 A Lineage Looks Like ItselfPalette, size and part variants read straight off the genome 69 The Same Two Hundred Years, TwiceOrdering rules that make an evolutionary run reproduce to the byte

07

VOLUME 07 · YOU ARE HERE

The Living Valley

The trophic web wired together, and Postgres arrives

A valley that runs unattended for weeks and survives a restart.

you finish with → An unattended, evolving valley on Postgres that survives being killed

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70 A Seventh Thing To DoWhat widening a table of six costs every controller already drawn 71 Something That Eats the DeadA second creature row whose mouth takes mass off the litter instead of off a plant 72 The StrikeOne creature's work spent on another creature's store 73 Three Genes Find a ReaderAggression priced at the blow and wariness priced by the tick 74 Who Limits WhomA pyramid measured over two centuries, and the winter that sets its height 75 A Second ContainerPostgres on a network with no way out, reached by a dependency the build never fetches 76 The World as TablesA schema where the columns you query are columns and the rest is one blob 77 A Snapshot on a Tick BoundaryTwenty bytes of generator state per stream, written in one transaction 78 The Archive Becomes a TableAncestry answered by a recursive query instead of by walking a file 79 The Founding DocumentNames written at tick zero, into a chronicle that never rewrites a row 80 Weeks Without YouA daemon killed mid-tick that comes back as the same run

08

VOLUME 08 · YOU ARE HERE

Words

Language models at the depth this book needs, then a model you can run

Enough of tokens, attention, and quantization to reason about a local model's cost.

you finish with → Ollama serving a local model inside the 8 GB floor

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81 Pieces of a WordA merge table trained on the world's own chronicle 82 Every Word Looks at Every OtherOne attention head worked by hand on four tokens 83 Guessing What Comes NextNext-token prediction on a table of counts, sampled under a seed 84 A Model You Did Not BuildPinned by digest, pulled once, then served behind a closed network 85 The Same Block, Over and OverReading a GGUF header until the architecture falls out of it 86 Four Bits and a ScaleWhere a quantized file's bytes actually go 87 Meaning as a DirectionCosine similarity built on numbers you can check on paper 88 Asking the Chronicle a QuestionA vector table welded to the model that filled it 89 Eight GigabytesWeights, cache and overhead priced from the files on disk

09

VOLUME 09 · YOU ARE HERE

The Village

Memory, reflection, and the proposes-validates seam villagers live inside

20-30 villagers whose actions the engine, not the model, decides are legal, served by bounded inference workers with replayable result admission.

you finish with → A console harness where a bandit can rob you and a merchant remembers you

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90 The First VillagerTwo actions appended to a table no frozen controller can name 91 Nothing Waits for a ThoughtA one-slot mailbox the tick reads without ever blocking 92 A Memory Is a RowWeighed once at the tick it happened, then never touched 93 What Comes to MindRecency, weight and relevance normalised onto one scale 94 Making Something of a DayQuestions drawn out of a day, answered with citations that must exist 95 Plans as DataA closed verb table and one JSON object a decision 96 The Engine DecidesSix checks in order, each cheaper than the next one down 97 Law in a FileWhat a bandit may propose that a merchant may not 98 Whose Turn to ThinkA priority queue over a budget of one call at a time 99 Drawing the NeighboursPortrait parts chosen off a villager's own record 100 The Box the Words Sit InA nine-slice frame, a name plate, six-by-eight text wrapped to fit 101 Somebody Talks to a VillagerWhat it costs to let a person put words into a memory 102 A Bandit and a MerchantTwo scenarios replayed from recorded proposals, then run live

10

VOLUME 10 · YOU ARE HERE

Creature-Speakers

Animals whose goals a model writes into the row their evolved controller reads

Creatures whose reflexes stay evolved while their goals come from a model.

you finish with → Speaker creatures naming themselves and remembering you

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103 Two Numbers of Twenty-FourA goal written into one ray of an evolved controller's own senses 104 Twenty Browsers Beside the VillageTwenty arena-bred controllers founded on the console ground with goals pressed off a flag 105 Three Kinds and No WordsRows of numbers an animal keeps about the bodies that came near it

11

VOLUME 11 Somebody Logs In PLANNED

Two people on a LAN, walking the living valley together.

you finish with → worldd and worldc talking over TLS, with a diegetic inspect panel

12

VOLUME 12 Steel and Spell PLANNED

A dungeon, loot, and death with a cost, all tested as replayed seeded fights.

you finish with → The adventuring spine, playable and balanced

13

VOLUME 13 A Working Society PLANNED

Shops, guilds, and deeded housing, priced in a unit the world named itself.

you finish with → A functioning economy with the emergent-naming machinery proven

14

VOLUME 14 Masters and Apprentices PLANNED

Recipe provenance genealogies and dynamic professions entering the world.

you finish with → Lost-recipe recovery quests generated from real historical loss

15

VOLUME 15 The Ranch PLANNED

Heritability you can measure, on animals you named and bred.

you finish with → A working ranch with a domesticated lineage

16

VOLUME 16 The Fake Internet PLANNED

A world that explains itself in-fiction without ever announcing anything.

you finish with → The Monument, the rumor engine, and the Cardinal daemon, all live

17

VOLUME 17 Three Words PLANNED

A gate address that deterministically means a specific kind of field.

you finish with → The three-slot keyword system, with hybrid player- and NPC-minted words

18

VOLUME 18 Fields That Live PLANNED

Thousands of frozen fields, and settlements that grew while you were away.

you finish with → The HOT/FROZEN/ARCHIVED field lifecycle, driven from Go

19

VOLUME 19 Expeditions PLANNED

Contact between the valley and its fields: trade, migration, and conflict.

you finish with → A gene bank, gossip, and visitors that grow while you sleep

20

VOLUME 20 Her Own Words PLANNED

A villager whose voice you trained, and a tiny model built on the chronicle alone.

you finish with → QLoRA adapters and a from-scratch model, both local and free

21

VOLUME 21 The Nursery PLANNED

A mystery the reader operates and the players can only investigate.

you finish with → The nursery daemon, checkpointed and running under the no-announcement rule

22

VOLUME 22 The Third Dimension PLANNED

The valley's own world data, rendered in first person.

you finish with → A 3D pipeline owned end to end

23

VOLUME 23 The GPU PLANNED

A playable 3D client with real-time lighting and skeletal animation.

you finish with → The 3D client, shipping playable

24

VOLUME 24 Light as Geometry PLANNED

Shadows and global light where rasterization only fakes them.

you finish with → Lightmaps and ambient occlusion feeding the shipped renderer

25

VOLUME 25 The World Seed PLANNED

A portable package another reader can host, and a character export between two worlds.

you finish with → The machine room at full depth, and the final milestone