A god-game and civilization simulator where every creature thinks with its own tiny neural network — a real brain that mutates and evolves across generations. Nobody is scripted. They learn to survive, find water, gather, build, band into nations, research, trade, worship, and war over land. It's WorldBox meets Civilization, with a soul.
Runs 100% in your browser. No servers. Nothing is sent anywhere. Free and open source.
- Survival — play like Civ. Create a people (name, banner, heritage), then lead that one nation in a living world of rival peoples. Set policy, prioritize research, do diplomacy (ally / trade / war), muster and march your army, choose a destiny — all by steering your neural-net citizens, not micromanaging them. No god powers; you live by the world's rules.
- Creative — play like WorldBox. The divine hand: raise mountains, carve seas, grow forests, spawn life, smite. Shape the world and watch civilizations rise and fall.
- Real evolving brains — a tiny fixed-topology MLP per creature; genomes mutate & interbreed; selection shapes behavior. Traits (size, speed, diet, aggression, vision…) are heritable and visible. Click any creature to see its mind.
- Needs — hunger and thirst (drink at the water's edge or perish → peoples settle near water).
- Economy — wood / stone / ore nodes that deplete & regrow; creatures evolve into gatherers who haul resources home to the national stockpile; ore is refined into metal (tech + a town).
- Tech tree (science) + Civics tree (culture → governments: Chiefdom → Monarchy → Republic → Democracy…). Capabilities are earned: no water travel until Sailing → boats, no flight until Flight → planes.
- Settlements — settlers found permanent cities that grow Camp → Village → Town → City and reshape the land (farmland, urban sprawl).
- Territory & borders — cities claim land that expands outward and persists; spend gold to claim faster; lose it to an enemy who conquers what you can't defend.
- Combat & unit roles — civilians, warriors (melee), rangers (ranged); army size set by your aggression policy; stamina, home-defense bonus, weapons powered by your metal reserve.
- Diplomacy — stances, alliances, grievances, a transparent war-pressure model; the same GovernanceAPI drives both you and the AI nations.
- Anthropology — each people grows an emergent ethos (Militaristic / Communal / Devout / Industrious / Scholarly / Free) and customs from how they actually live; kindred cultures keep peace.
- A wilderness — prey & predator ecosystem living alongside the people.
- A world that breathes — day/night, seasons of weather, shimmering water, drifting clouds, chimney smoke, creatures that walk, haul loads and breathe.
AEON is early and under active development — the simulation runs, but the game around it is still coming together. Be skeptical of anything that sounds finished; here's the honest state.
Landed in Sprint 1 (2026-06-13):
- Found-a-City is now reachable — a nation banks enough gold to actually pay the found cost, and rejected tiles now explain why (too close / water / occupied) instead of silently failing.
- Ordered foot units pathfind — a flow-field routes them around water and mountains; an isolated unit now arrives at its target instead of stalling on the first obstacle.
- ~29× faster rendering — viewport culling, level-of-detail, and a quality/dpr governor took a heavy frame from ~34 ms down to ~1 ms in the probe (fixes the slow GitHub Pages load on high-dpr devices).
Known broken / next up (tracked as GitHub issues):
- The player nation passively declines and there is no win/defeat screen yet — the core survival loop and fail-state are the headline gap (#8, P0).
- Long marches don't finish in real play — ordered units don't forage or rest mid-march, so they run down before arriving even though the pathfinding itself is correct (#8, #3).
- Command / Found modes aren't discoverable — they're silent toggles with no banner or cursor cue (#5).
Planned directions (designed, not built — see the design docs):
- Deeper economy — actions cost currency and founded cities carry ongoing needs (#6,
ECONOMY_DESIGN.md). - Living agents ("Free Guy" principle) — feelings, hunger, community and personal behavior, not
just survival drives (#7,
AGENT_LIFE_DESIGN.md). - A true-3D WebGL2 renderer — direction is locked and a local spike exists, but it is not wired
in or shipped (#9,
GRAPHICS_3D_DESIGN.md).
A GitHub Actions check runs the headless "life persists & evolves" invariant on every push, and all
work is tracked as GitHub issues (#1–#9) with a SPRINT_PLAN.md.
It's plain ES-module JavaScript — no build step, no dependencies.
# any static server works; this repo ships a tiny zero-dep one:
node serve.mjs # → http://localhost:8123
# run the headless invariant (life persists & evolves) — same check CI runs:
npm test # → node test/headless.mjsOr just open index.html through any static file server (ES modules need http, not file://).
- Scroll zoom (one continuous space from orbit to the ground) · Drag pan
- Click a creature (zoomed in) or a nation/city (zoomed out) → context info & options
- Space pause · 1–5 speed · ☰ menu · **? ** intro
- In a nation: Policies / Research / Diplomacy / Destiny tabs · ⚔ Army to march your soldiers
- Creative tools (left dock): raise / lower / forest / spawn / bless / smite / possess
Local-first, dependency-free, no build:
src/sim/— the simulation:world,brain(the NN),agent,sim(the loop),tech,civics,culture,anthropology,settlement,territory,resources,animals,diplomacy,heritage.src/render/—renderer+visuals(stylized canvas),camera,fx.src/game/—game(controller),governance(the symmetric human/AI nation API),ui,input.test/headless.mjs— runs the sim with no browser to verify life persists & evolves.
Design docs (the full thinking): DESIGN.md, MECHANICS.md, GAME_RULES.md, FEATURES.md,
COMBAT.md, TECH_TREE_DESIGN.md, GAMEPLAY_FLOW.md, ARCHITECTURE.md, CHANGELOG.md.
MIT — do anything, no warranty. Make worlds.