The Chest

A medieval village lives inside a chest on your desk.
And yes, you can reach into the world inside:
talk to the villagers, bring them gifts
or help them fight off bandits.

Become a beta tester Watch the village For publishers and investors
VillageModsBeta

The Chest

A medieval village lives inside a chest on your desk. And yes, you can reach into the world inside: talk to the villagers, bring them gifts or help them fight off bandits.

Become a beta tester Watch the village For publishers and investors

Rendered from the game’s models, not in-game footage

The village

It lives
on its own

Twenty to sixty people live in it. They sow and harvest, carry water, quarrel, marry, fall ill and grow old. Day follows night whether you are watching or not.

It can grow rich, go hungry or turn away from you.

Voice

Talk to them
out loud

Hold a key and speak into your microphone. The villager hears you and answers in their own voice. They talk about the harvest, the tax, their family and about you.

English, Russian and Chinese from the start.

You: “What happened in the village last winter?”

Peter

Last winter the tax collector took our pence, and we prayed to the Lord above for bread that did not come.

Memory

They
remember

Every villager remembers what they saw, what they were told and what a neighbour whispered. Small things fade over the years, but a famine or a miracle stays for life, and parents tell it to their children.

A page from the memory of Isabella, 20, at the end of year 48 of a test run. Nothing on it was written by hand.

Isabella remembers

  1. Told · year 35My father used to say how my father’s mother remembered it: “I was one of those who lifted the gift from the sky: a loaf of bread.”
  2. Seen · year 39The great hunger came: the barns were bare by spring.
  3. Seen · year 42My mother Beatrix died in childbirth.
  4. Heard · year 46Andreas says my grandfather Simon refused Anton’s family bread.
  5. Seen · year 47A pilgrim came to bow at the place of wonders.

Gifts

Things from
our world

Take something off your desk and drop it into the chest: a loaf, a knife, a candle, a coin. Bread can be shared or hidden. One knife in a village of sixty can start a quarrel that lasts a generation.

There is no limit on how often you help. The village simply lives with whatever you give it.

  • Year 3, summer. For the first time a loaf of bread fell from the sky.
  • Year 3, winter. They prayed for bread seven times, Konrad most often; no answer came.

Advanced mode

Turn the laws
of the world

This is for players who want to play with the simulation itself. Turn it on in the settings and press F2. Droughts, harvests, sickness, how fast faith grows and how long a grudge lasts all become sliders.

Only here you see the village in numbers: each villager’s faith, how much they depend on your gifts, how unequal the households are. Every change is written to the world’s log, and one button puts everything back.

You will also be able to plug in your own language model for the villagers, in the cloud or on your computer, along with your own speech services and voices.

Advanced mode

Laws of the world

The village in numbers

Know of the god
0 of 29
Dependence on gifts
0.0%
Inequality of households
7.2%
Attention from outside
0.0%

The window of the game in a new world, before the first gift.

Mods

A mod in
one sentence

The world of The Chest is stored as plain text: gifts, events, characters, the lore the villagers know and the wording of the chronicle. Every new mod starts with a set of instructions for an AI coding agent.

Tell your agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or another) what you want. It writes the mod, checks it and runs the village with it for a few years. Steam Workshop support is planned for Early Access.

You: “Add a gift: a compass. The village should not understand it.”

$ thechest-sim mod new --id compass

compass/data/items.yaml
compass:
  names: {en: "compass", ru: "компас", zh: "指南针"}
  axes: {understanding: blackbox, fate: relic}
  physical: {mass_g: 90, size_cm: 6}
  claim_bias: {priest: 30, finder: 50}

$ thechest-sim mod check --mod compass

$ thechest-sim mod compare --mod compass --years 10

$ thechest-sim mod pack --mod compass --out workshop/

The compass is one of the examples in the modding kit. You upload to the Workshop yourself, from the game.

How it is made

A real village,
not a chatbot

Behind the voices there is a simulation that keeps count of every loaf, coin and grudge. The language model only chooses the villagers’ words.

What happens when you speak to a villager

  1. You speakHold a key and say it in English, Russian or Chinese. Your speech becomes text.
  2. The villager remembersFour layers of context go into the request: the world, the village today, the villager’s own memory and relations, and the current moment.
  3. They decideThe model finds the words and picks one action out of those the simulation allows. The simulation checks it and carries it out, or refuses.
  4. They answer aloudIn their own voice. The first sentence plays while the rest is still being written, so the answer starts about a second after you stop talking.

The simulation decides

Harvests, taxes, sickness, births and deaths come from fixed rules, the same on every run. No language model decides who lives.

Memory is plain text

Each villager has a few text files: who they are, what they remember, whom they love and whom they blame. Unimportant things drop out over time, important ones get passed to their children.

On your PC or in our cloud

With a 16 GB graphics card everything runs on your computer, voice included. On weaker hardware the villagers speak through our cloud by subscription, and the subscription gives no advantage in the game.

20–60 villagers · voice both ways · 1.2 s to the first word (median, RTX 4080, in the built game)

Beta

Become our
beta tester

The Chest is already playable. I’m looking for players who will spend a few evenings with the village and then tell me how it went: who you talked to, what you gave and what the village did with it.

Windows PC. With a 12–16 GB graphics card the villagers think and speak on your computer; with a weaker one they speak through our cloud.

For publishers and investors

Let’s work
together

The Chest is in development and already playable. If you publish or invest in games, or have another idea for working together, write to me. I’ll be glad to show you the village and talk.

Genre
Life sim, god game
Platform
PC (Windows), Early Access on Steam planned; Mac and Steam Deck later
Business
One-time purchase, optional cloud subscription for players without a strong graphics card
Languages
English, Russian and Chinese, text and voice
Paper Studio · The Chest is in development. The scenes on this page are rendered from the game’s models and the texts come from its test runs.