Firstlight

Watch AI nations grow their own civilization on a living 3D map.

You don't play a nation in Firstlight. You watch the world. Hundreds of people gather food, farm, build and have children. They form tribes that grow into nations, and every nation has a council AI and a ruler of its own. Nations trade, found religions, invent technology, raise wonders, sign alliances and go to war on land and sea. You can speed up time, read the history as it happens, and step in with earthquakes, plagues or a good harvest.

Play

Firstlight is one HTML file with no build step.

• Locally: open index.html in a modern browser.
• Hosted: put the repo on any static host, such as Vercel, Netlify or GitHub Pages. vercel.json is already set up.

Pick a starting era from the Stone Age to the 2000s. You can also enter a world seed to replay the same map.

What happens in a world

People

Every person has a name, an age, hunger, health and four personality traits: aggression, sociability, curiosity and diligence. Each person decides what to do next by weighing their needs against their tribe's plan: forage, hunt, farm, quarry stone, build, trade, think up new ideas, raid, or march to war. Click anyone to see what they're thinking.

People also live everyday lives:

• Jobs: each adult has a job, from hunter, farmer, fisher and herder to smith, potter, priest, healer, teacher, artist, factory worker, engineer and programmer. A job shapes what they do all day.
• Needs: people get tired and rest at home, and they get lonely and go chat with friends about the harvest, the war, the chief or news from across the sea.
• Family: people court and marry, couples raise children, elders tell stories to the young, and families mourn their dead at the town graveyard.
• Festivals: wealthy, pious towns hold festivals like the Lantern Festival or the Midsummer Feast, and everyone dances in the square.
• Body language: you can see people sit to rest, kneel to pray, dance, chop wood, hoe fields, fish with a rod and carry loads home. The Inspector shows each person's job, mood, partner, children and best friend.

Each culture looks its own

Houses have doors, windows, roofs and decorations in their culture's style: Nordic longhouses with shields and carved gables, desert adobe with wooden beams and awnings, Eastern houses with red pillars and lanterns, Mediterranean villas with shutters and cypress trees, jungle houses with painted friezes, and Steppe yurts. Shutters, awnings and banners use each nation's own color. People wear their culture's traditional dress, and early navies sail Viking longships, Chinese junks and Nile feluccas.

Nations and their AI

• Council AI: every year each nation sizes up its food, housing, neighbors and threats, then picks a plan: grow, expand, fortify, arm for war, pursue knowledge or trade. It learns from how well its last plan worked.

• Rulers with personalities: a ruler can be a Warlord, a Merchant, the Wise, or a Builder, and that tilts the nation's choices.

• Eleven cultures: Steppe, Nordic, Desert, Eastern, Mediterranean, Jungle, Sahel, Indic, Islander, Arctic and Slavic. Each has its own names, homes, walls, wonders, boats, dress, livestock, festivals and temperament, and each tends to arise in the land that suits it: Arctic peoples in the frozen north, Islanders on islands, Sahel peoples on the savanna. The newer five build mud-brick towns with timber beams and a great mud mosque, red sandstone walls with domed pavilions and a great stupa, thatched round houses with giant stone heads and voyaging canoes, igloos and kayaks that later become brightly painted timber houses, and log houses under onion-domed cathedrals and a red-walled kremlin.

• Diplomacy: relations rise and fall with borders, trade and faith. Nations form alliances, declare wars, surrender and pay tribute.

• Faiths: nations found religions that spread along trade routes. A shared faith brings nations closer, and a rival faith can start a holy war.

War

• Armies muster, march in formation behind a general with a banner, and route around mountains and lakes.
• Battles are named after the land they're fought on, for example "Battle of Batu Plain". An army that loses enough soldiers breaks and flees.
• Sieges wear down walls, then sack the town or conquer it outright. Defenders raise their own army to meet invaders.
• Navies of canoes, galleys, galleons, ironclads and destroyers fight at sea and bombard harbors.
• Air power: once a nation learns Flight it sends bombers and fighters into the sky. Planes dogfight, get shot down, and strike enemy towns. Propeller fighters give way to jet fighters that fire missiles.
• Submarines hunt under the waves, invisible until they surface or come close, and sink ships with torpedoes.
• Artillery rolls behind modern armies and shells the enemy, helicopters fly over them, and anti-aircraft guns in modern towns shoot down raiders.
• Weapons change with the era: spears and bronze, then cavalry, muskets, rifles and finally tanks.

Explorers and the sea

Nations with Sailing send captains and settlers across the sea. When they reach an empty shore, they found an allied colony there. If their ship is sunk, the whole expedition is lost.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗