🕯️ Elsewhere

Unbounded input, entering a bounded deterministic reality engine — and an AI beside you that has to narrate the result and live with it exactly like you do.

An idle RPG inside Claude Code. It runs in real time whether you are there or not.

🌐 https://netmobster.github.io/elsewhere-idle-cc/

📖 The Elsewhere Logs — a five-part series on why this exists, what broke building it, and the architecture underneath. Start at Day 0.

▶ Watch a complete game, scene by scene — eight in-world days, the chat and the board side by side. Every line the player typed is verbatim; every roll comes from the engine's ledger.

Two minutes a day. Three neighbours who each want something. One set of eyes, and three directions to point it.

You will lose. The interesting part is finding out how — because the story of what happened while you were looking the other way is written for you at the end.

🕯️  OSSEN'S REACH — the dawn watch          124 coin · 10 hands · queue 0/5

    THE SUNDERED CHARTER   builders   ████████░░  8/10   EYES ON
    THE LONG HAND          diggers    ░░░░░░░░░░    ?     no eyes
    THE NINTH WATCH        raiders    ░░░░░░░░░░    ?     no eyes

    WHAT IS COMING
    The Sundered Charter is about a day away.
    They want to raise a second wall across the reach.

Those ░░░ are not zero. They are unknown. That distinction is the whole game.

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The one-minute version

You run a small holding. Three neighbours are each working toward something that will change the world permanently when they finish. Each has a bar of ten segments.

The bars fill in real time. Not while the app is open — in real time. Close the laptop, come back tomorrow, and two days of world have happened without you.

You have one lookout. Point it at a neighbour and you see their real number, they work slower, and they will not rob you. The other two go dark. Point it at all three from the hill instead and you get a vague band on everyone and no protection at all.

Then you leave standing orders — up to five, one fires every eight hours — and you go away.

The catch, and it is the entire design:

An order happens when it comes up, not when you wrote it.

You paid for a shipment from a dock you never finished buying. The dock changed hands on Tuesday. Your grain went to the village at whatever they'd pay. They were delighted.

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But the real reason to play

The five orders are a shortcut, not the rules.

You can type anything you can describe, and it becomes a real order with a real price, a real roll, and real consequences. Here is an actual playthrough — Fen's Reach, eight days, seed 691420631.

Day two. The lord surveyed his hungover population and issued this:

"the hands that can move proceed to walk towards the Iron Hand, pantsless and erect, ready to duel and duo with their, erm, mighty swords"

They rolled a 2. On a perilous order. That is the number where men do not come home.

Every one of them came home. They came home nineteen coin richer.

The Iron Hand were raiders working toward a coast road that would belong to nobody but them — and they happened to roll maximum openness in that world. Openness turns out to mean that when a column of naked hungover men walks uphill at you at dawn with their swords out, you do not kill them. You laugh. Then you do business. Then you stop sending crews out on the dawn shift, because you cannot stop laughing.

That was disrupt 2 on the coast road, bought with nothing but dignity.

Later, the same lord committed the entire population to a single industry for seventy-two hours:

"the entire reach is shocked by the advancement in erect quilt technology and the village puts their hands to both having erections and making quilts"

d6 6   + receptive 3   − overreach 1   =  8      needed 8

Eight hands of ten. The engine docked a point for overreach, because committing your whole population to one trade is a stretch even when the trade is that one. It landed on the nose: 135 coin, the single most profitable act in the reach's history.

Nobody designed that move. Nobody wrote a rule for quilts. It was in the numbers.

The full playthrough, the architecture underneath it, and where it breaks: Day 4-ish — Ask For Anything.

And then the part you did not see

The Iron Hand advanced nine of their ten segments while nobody was watching them. The ledger is brutally consistent about it — the road stood still on exactly the three ticks somebody had eyes on it, and moved on every other one.

The disrupt expired. The lord was offered a fresh one for 60 coin and spent it on the shaft instead, where it misfired and bought nothing. It is the only order in eight days that returned literally nothing, and it is the one that cost him the world.

Final score 1019. Two of three neighbours denied, an altar to the Erect Champions tended by priests nobody asked, and quilts on the saddle of every raider on the coast road — a road he no longer owns, closed to everybody on earth except the people who sold them the blankets.

It is just that somewhere out past the waystations, a faction of raiders finished a job while the entire population of Fen's Reach was extremely busy, for seventy-two consecutive hours, with erections and quilts.

That paragraph is from the chronicle the game wrote itself, from the ledger, at the end.

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Four surfaces, four jobs

	does	never does
The board	State. Exactly what is true, rolled by the engine, arithmetic showing.	Interpret. Advise. Invent.
The chat	Intelligence. Reads the ledger and tells you what it means.	Decide outcomes. Contradict a roll.
The modal	Orientation. Priced options that show you the shape of the possible.	Be the only way to play.
Freeform	Anything not on the menu. You ask; the world answers.	Break the engine.

The first three are a UI. The fourth is why this needs an agent.

And the modal is not a menu — it is a map. Four priced options tell you what this world takes seriously and roughly what it costs, in about three seconds. Then you can aim a sentence at it. The freeform layer does not escape the modal; the modal is what makes freeform usable. Options first, intent second.

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How it actually works

Python rules. The model narrates. They are not the same job and they never swap.

Every outcome in the game — every clock tick, every raid, every order, every absurd improvised scheme — is decided by engine.py with a seeded RNG and written to an append-only ledger with its arithmetic showing. Click any row on the board and you get what you ordered · what had changed · what it rolled · what that means · net cost.

The model's job is to read that ledger and tell you what it means, in the register you brought to it. It translates your chaos into costs and modifiers. It does not get a vote on whether your chaos worked.

When a roll surprises the narrator, that surprise is genuine — and it is the strongest evidence you have that the dice are real.

A narrator that decided outcomes could not be surprised, and you would be able to tell.

Determinism is enforced, not hoped for: per-tick RNG derives from (seed, tick) and nothing else. No clock, no dict ordering, no wall time. Same seed plus same elapsed time reproduces a world exactly, on any machine, forever.

(It took two separate bugs to get that right. Both are documented in NOTES.md, including the one where the bench returned different verdicts for identical code and invalidated six iterations of tuning. The build log is honest about what broke.)

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Fog is not decoration

Four visibility values, borrowed wholesale from SEREN:

	the world	you
true	it is so	have not learned it
known	it is so	know it
suspected	it is so	suspect, unconfirmed
false	it is not so	believe it anyway

false is the one the design exists to keep. A player who is confidently wrong is the most playable state in the game, and the board will never tell you which of your beliefs is the wrong one.

The renderer never emits a true fact. Ledger rows for neighbours you weren't watching are withheld. An unwatched bar shows fog, never a number. If any of that leaks, the fog is just a graphic.

Why fog exists at all, and what else fell out of the same four-word spec: Day 1-ish — Four Words Of Spec.

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And then you find out

When a neighbour completes their agenda, the world settles and the fog lifts.

The epilogue fires automatically: a badge with your score, and a chronicle — a real narrative history of your holding, written from the ledger, including every single thing you never saw.

It is not a defeat, exactly. Nobody died. Not one hand was lost in eight days, and two of those days involved naked men walking at raiders on purpose.

That paragraph is true, and the ledger can prove every clause of it. The chronicle is written from the rows, not from memory — including the nine segments the Iron Hand gained on the exact ticks nobody was looking.

This is the payoff, and it is why losing feels good.

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Install

There is no installer. Clone it and ask Claude Code to play.

git clone https://github.com/netmobster/elsewhere-idle-cc
cd elsewhere-idle-cc

Then, in Claude Code:

/elsewhere

It rolls you a world, renders the board, and takes your first orders. The /elsewhere command ships inside the repo, so cloning installs it.

Requirements: Python 3.9+. No packages, no build step, no server, no account.

The board is a plain HTML file on disk — elsewhere-board.html, double-clickable. If your plan supports Claude Code Artifacts it'll publish to a live pane that updates each turn, which is nicer. That's an upgrade, not a requirement.

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What's in here

file	what it is
engine.py	Truth. Every outcome in the game is decided here.
render.py	The board. Renders your file on the world, never the world.
epilogue.py	The ending. Lifts the fog, scores the world, writes the badge.
sim.py	Fast-forward. Scripted players so a fortnight runs in a second.
bench.py	The judge. Six fitness criteria across twelve seeds.
PRD-TRD.md	Design and technical spec.
NOTES.md	The build log, including everything that broke.
CHANGELOG.md	The shipping record, release by release.
demo.html	A complete played game, scene by scene.
resources.md	Everything, linked and explained.

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Is it balanced?

python bench.py 12 runs four strategies across twelve worlds and reports against six criteria. Current:

attentive    941   14.5 days   lost a front in 10 of 12 worlds
hoarder      644    8.3 days   beat careful play in 3 of 12
erratic      283    6.6 days
absentee     274    6.2 days

PASS 6/6

The week this harness kept telling me the game was broken and I kept not believing it: Day 3-ish — Two Determinism Bugs And Six Wasted Iterations.

Attention is worth about three and a half times an absentee's score, and more than twice their lifespan. But it does not make you safe: the attentive player still loses a neighbour in five worlds out of six. A game the attentive player always won would be as broken as one they always lost.

The hoarder is the interesting one. It loses on average and beats careful play one time in four. That's the gamble, and it's deliberate — sitting on a fat strongbox makes you a bigger target, and sometimes you get away with it anyway.

Those numbers moved recently, and it is worth saying why. The world used to end only when all three neighbours finished. It now ends when the first one does — because if they won, you lost, and a finished world that keeps running is not a finished world. That single change cut every world from ~17 days to ~6 and handed the game to the hoarder, since compounding interest does not care how short the game is but spending does. The clocks were slowed to put the long world back. NOTES.md has the full account.

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Genesis

The engine, the ledger and the roll system descend from SEREN — a single-player AI dungeon master whose own description is "files and the shell keep the numbers honest."

What came across:

from SEREN	what it became here
"the model narrates a result it did not choose"	the single load-bearing rule
fronts and clocks	"advances when the party is elsewhere" → "advances while you sleep"
an append-only ledger, arithmetic showing	every row clickable, every number checkable
four visibility values	SEREN specced them and never wired a consumer. This is the consumer.

SEREN is the immersive one — an evening, a campaign, a world you live in. Elsewhere is pick up and play. Same engineering honesty, different cadence.

Why I built a second game instead of playing the first one: Day 2-ish — Seren, And What A Good Evening Costs.

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Licence

Apache 2.0. Take it, fork it, build a different world with it.

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More: echofiles.substack.com — where the playthroughs get written up, including the one where a municipal quilt mandate outperformed every sensible decision in the game.

Built in Claude Code, over about a week, mostly at night. The worst decisions are all documented.