Kindling

A civilization terrarium you watch rather than play.

Status: In development
Platforms: Mac
Started: 2026
Built with: Rust, llama.cpp, Qwen, TOML

Why I made it

I wanted something to leave open beside my study notes and just watch: a small world that gets on with its own history without needing me.

Nothing in Kindling unlocks on a timer. Bands start out knowing almost nothing and advance only by their own work, and every discovery can be traced back to a person, an experiment and a day.

What it does

Three bands of fifty people forage, hunt, build shelters, make clothing, marry, have children, fall ill and die.
Every run gets its own seed: geography, climate, geology, species, language and story.
A small local AI model voices people's intentions, conversations and reactions as speech bubbles.
Discoveries come from luck during relevant work, and are taught on to others.
Grounded in real numbers: a 360-day year, nutrition down to vitamins, animal energy budgets, rock hardness.
Click anyone to see their thoughts, plans, quirks, values and relationships.
Opens straight back into your world and runs hands-free. Interacting is optional.

Screenshots

Under the hood

A “knowledge firewall” stops the AI from leaking modern knowledge: a 1,100-word starting vocabulary, a 2,100-word anachronism filter, and words the bands coin themselves.
The model is called sparingly through a prioritised worker pool. In Calm mode it uses about 550 tokens a minute at 29 fps, quiet enough that the fans stay off.
Everything people make has to be sourced, tool by tool, back to what bare hands can gather.
No game engine: its own Rust renderer, about 87,000 lines across six crates, with all content in data files.