A home becomes a household
Shelter, food, water, warmth, belongings, money, obligations, and relationships turn a building into a place someone has reason to return to.
Open-world settlement RTS / RPG
They were busy
before you arrived.
People work, remember, form households, take risks, and build a place worth defending. Watch the ordinary days. Step in when a day stops being ordinary.
Production roadmap
Built in order, so the world can keep its promises.
Current milestone
First Inhabited Settlement
Construction tuning · slice 3 of 13
Active development
Phase 16 · First Inhabited Settlement
Compose the completed systems into one small settlement that visibly works, struggles, and responds to player direction.
Hover, focus, or tap a milestone to read its purpose.
Design note 01
The world is not a waiting room.
Worldforge is about governing a settlement whose inhabitants are people, not worker tokens.
Villagers choose work, carry goods, make plans, remember outcomes, form bonds, and react to danger through the same world rules whether the player is watching or miles away. A bridge, a shortage, a bad road, or a missing friend can matter for more than one afternoon.
The player observes first. Set priorities, assign work, organize a party, or explicitly take control of someone when precision matters. Once released, that person returns to autonomous life with every bruise, favor, promise, and sack of turnips intact.
0–13
engine roadmap sealed
20,000
actors in representative scale test
137
documented Lua API symbols
1
small settlement taking shape
A settlement from the inside out
Start with a roof. Find out who keeps it standing.
Growth is not a ladder of bigger labels. A settlement becomes capable because real people, material, knowledge, infrastructure, and trust are present—and can lose those capabilities when life goes badly.
Work becomes a material chain
Trees do not become houses by appearing in a counter. Somebody finds them, claims the work, cuts them, hauls them, reserves them, and builds with them.
A village becomes its own answer
One town may fund a forge. Another may choose a tavern, shrine, granary, watchtower, or nothing sensible at all. Prosperity is possible. So is decline.
A settlement at a glance
The view from the hill.
Every person, priority, storehouse, route, and distant concern has a place. Keep the whole settlement in the palm of your hand—and reach in when it needs you.
Hearthvale · Early Autumn · Day 42
Timber 184
Stone 91
Food 236
Coin 37.8
2
homes
!
fuel low
Household ledger
Six lives, one very small roof.
People retain their identity, possessions, relationships, memories, obligations, and plans whether they are nearby or far from the camera.
Forager · Age 29
Mara Vale
Cautious, sociable, tired of rain
Trailwise 7Carrying 4Kin 3
Carpenter · Age 38
Bran Alder
Steady, practical, owes Mara a favor
Craft 9Resolve 6Kin 2
Mara → Bran
Trust grew after the northern-road rescue.
Bran → Cooper household
Committed to repair the roof before first frost.
Household → Hearthvale
Fuel reserve is becoming a shared concern.
HearthvaleHome · 12 residents
Greycap Mine2 days · route uncertain
Old river keepUnexplored
Population12+1 expected
Food horizon18dstable
Fuel horizon3dshortage
Private wealth71.4coin
Household stores
Cooper22 food · 3 fuel
Alder16 food · 8 fuel
Vale9 food · 5 fuel
Work pressure
Fuel gatheringUrgent
Roof repairCommitted
SmokehouseProposed
Trade promises
Iron deliveryPending
Wool purchaseFunded
Autumn market12 days
Interface studies show intended presentation and planned content breadth. Final art and layout will continue to evolve.
Choice with a paper trail
People make plans.
They also change them.
Each person weighs needs, danger, duty, opportunity, memory, and temperament across a flexible utility model. The winning intent becomes an inspectable plan, then real steps in the world. Hunger matters—but so does finishing the roof before the rain.
A frightened scout may refuse a routine trip. A master craftsperson may finish work quickly. Someone carrying lunch may keep working. Someone heartbroken may not. The important part is that the same rules produce the decision, and the player can understand why.
Mara is reconsideringFinish gathering or return home?
Rain risk72
Food need41
Duty83
Route fear28
Chosen plan
- Fill the last basket
- Take the lower trail
- Deliver to shared storage
- Eat with the household
Your hand, when it matters
Watch. Direct. Step in.
Clicking a person never hijacks their life. Observe them, inspect what they know, or assign work while they remain autonomous. Take direct control only when a hunt, journey, defense, or bad idea deserves your full attention.
Observe
Follow a life without changing it.
Assign
Give intent. The world still owns the work.
Take control
Move directly, lead a party, and own the consequence.
Let go
They return to their plans with the outcome intact.
Lua interface addons
The interface is another part of the world you can shape.
Worldforge’s Lua package system can read detached world information, compose movable panels, listen for completed events, and submit validated player commands. Packages reload without restarting the game. Faulting packages are isolated and can be disabled while the simulation continues.
Food236
Timber184
Stone91
Firewood26 ↓
Firewood
Urgent
Affected2 households
Horizon3 days
4 settled
1 worried
1 cold
Try dragging the addon panels.
plugins/hearth-ledger/main.luaLua
function draw_ledger()
local stock = world.query(
"world.resource.counts",
{ page_size = 16 }
)
assert(stock.status == "completed", stock.detail)
ui.begin_panel({
id = "hearth-ledger",
title = "Hearth Ledger",
anchor = "top-left",
movable = true,
semantic_label = "Settlement resources",
semantic_role = "status"
})
for _, item in ipairs(stock.records) do
ui.row(item.key, tostring(item.total))
end
ui.end_panel()
end
Public world query
Package-scoped panel
Safe live reload
A broad world, selectively alive
Not every footstep needs an audience.
Nearby people move and work in detail. Distant settlements, travelers, routes, weather, ecology, trade, and conflict continue at the fidelity their consequences require. Identity and causality persist even when the camera is elsewhere.
- Connected 64-meter world chunks
- Persistent travel across regional routes
- Hot, warm, and cold simulation budgets
- Danger that can interrupt ordinary journeys
Inside the workshop
Years of design, now under one roof.
Worldforge spent years as notes, prototypes, system sketches, and stubborn questions. Production now moves through small, proven phases, supported by tools built around the project rather than scattered documents and one-off asset work.
Design and implementation record
DocForge
Keeps design decisions, current engine behavior, phase ownership, proof, and future work connected as the project grows.
Graphics production pipeline
AssetForge
Organizes templating, masking, directional variants, consistency checks, and repeatable asset preparation for a world that needs a great many small things.
Runtime foundation
Worldforge Engine
Built in C++ and SDL around deterministic simulation, streaming space, persistent identities, recoverable saves, reproducible proof, and a player interface that can change without recompiling the game.
A lifelong project, finally in production
The dream was never the biggest map.
It was making the person crossing it matter.
Worldforge draws inspiration from the systemic consequence of Dwarf Fortress, the readable command language of Age of Empires, the grand presentation of Endless Space 2, and the attachment that grows inside long-lived MMO worlds.
The result is its own peculiar thing: part settlement sim, part RTS, part personal RPG, and part careful attempt to find out how many turnips a believable civilization actually needs.