The Chest

The Chest is a game about a medieval village that lives inside a chest on your desk

Lift the lid and you’re looking down at fields, a dozen roofs, a well and a road into the forest. About thirty people live down there. They plough, get married, fall ill, argue about where one field ends and the next begins, and pray in the evenings. None of it needs you. You can just watch them, the way you’d watch an ant farm.

Or you can step in. You can talk to the villagers through your microphone and they’ll answer you out loud. You can drop things from your desk into the chest: bread, salt, a knife, a book. To them it’s a miracle from the sky, and every miracle changes something. Someone keeps the gift, someone holds a grudge, someone starts waiting for the next one.

They remember all of it. Every villager has their own memory of what happened to them, who helped, who cheated them and what they make of you. Children grow up on their parents’ stories, so a couple of generations later your miracle has become a legend, and not always an accurate one.

You can’t lose. The village might get rich, starve through a bad winter or stop believing in you, and the game just carries on.

Where the idea came from

A while ago I came across a clip from a Chinese web drama, The Ming Dynasty in a Box. An ordinary office worker gets a big box for his birthday and finds a living village inside, in the middle of a drought, with bandits and a famine. He drops in half an egg, it feeds the whole village for three days, and the villagers decide he’s a god.

I wanted that box. I went looking for a game like it and couldn’t find one. There are the old god games like Black & White, there are sandboxes, and there are a couple of experiments with AI characters. But there’s no game where a small village looks real, remembers you, talks to you, and where every gift has consequences. So I’m making one.

The villagers

There are no extras in this village. Everyone has a name, an age, a family, a trade and a temper: one is greedy, one is devout, one loses it at the slightest thing. Point at anyone in the chest at the top of the page and you’ll see what’s on their mind.

When you talk to someone, a language model writes their reply. All it knows about that person is what’s in their memory: a few text files about who they are, what’s happened to them and how they feel about their neighbours and about you. Little things get forgotten over time, while the things that matter stay with them for years.

Sixty years later

In our test village, old Michael froze to death in the winter of year 14 after his family ran out of firewood. That part really came out of the simulation. Here’s how people might tell the story later on:

Agnes, his neighbouryear 14
“Michael froze in his own house. We had wood. Nobody thought to bring him any.”
Ulrich, her sonthirty years later
“Mother said old Michael was too proud to ask for firewood.”
Ulrich’s daughtersixty years later
“Michael the Elder wouldn’t bow to God, so God put out his fire.”

The retellings show where I’m taking the memory system. It’s still being built.

Things from our world

The desk next to the chest has ordinary things on it. Drop any of them in and it lands in the village as big as a house. You can drop in as much as you like, but it all has consequences. Feed the village every day and people stop working and start waiting. Let it get rich and the tax collectors and bandits will hear about it.

The demo will have five things:

Bread
Gone in a day. If bread keeps falling, gratitude turns into waiting pretty quickly.
Bottle of water
They’ll drink the water straight away and keep the bottle. Nobody here has ever seen anything that clear, so expect an argument over who gets it.
Salt
Whoever salts their meat gets through the winter more easily, and the neighbours notice.
Knife
One knife for the whole village. The strongest man will probably take it, and everyone else will start wanting steel.
Book
Nobody can read, so everyone decides for themselves what it says. That’s how sects get started.

Talking to them

You talk to the villagers through your microphone. Whoever is near the spot you’re looking at will hear you. You can whisper to one person or speak from the sky to the whole village, and they answer in their own voices. Language isn’t a problem: the hero wears AR glasses that translate both ways. English, Russian and Chinese at launch.

You can also keep quiet and listen. Bring the camera down to the people by the well and you’ll hear what the village says about you when it thinks you can’t hear.

How to tell what they think of you

There are no faith bars or percentages. You find out where you stand by listening to their prayers. First they thank you, then they wait for you, then they make demands. Help some households and ignore others and the village splits. I checked this over a thousand runs: a village that gets bread every three days ends up, twenty years on, with far less faith in you than one that got the same bread ten times at uneven intervals. The prayers change roughly like this:

Gratitude
“Thank you for the bread. We did nothing to deserve it.”
Waiting
“Last time the bread came on the third day. This is the fourth.”
Demands
“We kept the feast. Where is our share?”
Bargaining
“Heal Agatha’s boy, and the first sheaf is yours.”
Split
“You feed Jakob’s household. You never hear ours.”
Heresy
“The hand in the sky is no god of ours.”
Doubt
“Bread doesn’t fall from heaven. Somebody put it there.”

No pause button

While the game is running, time keeps passing in the chest. You can speed it up, but you can’t stop it. Drop in a pile of gifts, leave the game on and go to bed, and in the morning your glasses will tell you what happened overnight. When you close the game, the world freezes and waits for you.

What already works

Everything in the chest at the top of the page is drawn by your browser. There are no real graphics yet; I’ll be making those in Unity. What already works is the part the whole game rests on: the village simulation. It works out the weather and the harvest and decides who marries whom, who inherits what and who dies. It doesn’t need graphics and can run hundreds of years ahead from the command line.

The AI isn’t allowed anywhere near the simulation. It can’t invent a death or a sack of grain; its job is to give the villagers a voice. That’s why the same starting seed always produces the same history, so I can test it and tune it.

I ran ten villages for a hundred years each, and the numbers came out close to real history: life expectancy at birth of about 27, roughly three babies in ten dying before their first birthday, and about one year in four a hungry one.

Below is a page from the chronicle of the test village, the same one that’s in the chest above. The simulation wrote it and I haven’t touched the text.

Year 14

Autumn. The harvest was good.

Winter. Death took Michael, aged 67, of cold. The household of Michael stood empty; the family of Jakob took what was left. After Michael, Anselm (husband of Sibylla) became the elder. Walter (husband of Elisabeth) died aged 43, of a chest sickness. After Walter, the widow Elisabeth became head of the household. The family of Michael went cold without firewood.

Births 2, deaths 2, people 33.

Seed 3, year 14. Michael is the old man you can find in the chest at the top of the page.

What you need to run it

You buy the game once. If your graphics card can handle it, the AI runs on your own computer, offline, and there’s nothing more to pay.

16 GB of video memory: Everything runs locally: the language model, speech recognition and the villagers’ voices.
12 GB: Still local, with a simpler model and plainer voices.
Less, a Mac or a Steam Deck: Through the cloud, with a Chest Cloud subscription. It only pays for the computing and gives you nothing extra in the game.

For now these are targets. Fitting the AI and a good-looking 3D village onto a single 16 GB card is the first thing I have to test.

Where things stand

I'm making the game alone, with AI agents helping to write the code. I don't give dates: until the main things are measured, any date would be made up. Here is where things stand on 24 September 2026.

Done: 42 of 42 tasks
Village simulation
Seasons, harvests, families, inheritance, the elder and the council, faith, merchants, tax collectors and bandits; what happens to the things you drop in, your voice from the sky, saving the world at any moment. Three rounds of reading its chronicles are behind me: I fixed hunger, the size of the village, what becomes of orphans, and the repetitions that made a century read like a list. What’s left is to sit down and read a hundred years straight through myself, and see whether it comes out as a story.
Done
Graphics card test
Speech recognition, the language model, voice synthesis and the 3D scene all run on one 16 GB card, and the scene holds 60 frames per second. A villager starts answering aloud about a second after I stop talking. Fifteen minutes of play in a row: 98 lines out of 98 came with sound. If the card can't keep up, the game switches to a lighter model on its own, without restarting.
In progress
First playable scene
The first scene is built and starts like a game: a menu, a language choice, a new world or carry on with the old one. The 3D village runs on the simulation. Click a villager and their card appears on the glass of your AR glasses: family, what has happened to them, what they think of God. You can talk to them by text or by voice, or say something from the sky to the whole village. Walk up to villagers chatting among themselves and you can hear their conversation. You can drop bread or another thing into the village and watch who finds it. The world saves itself. There is no hand, table or prologue yet, and the villagers still speak a bit plainly — that is what I'm working on now.
Next
Villager memory
The memory file format is settled: each villager writes down what they saw and what they heard from neighbours. Having played the first scene, I now see this is the main thing. A villager mixes up what happened last winter with what happened this spring, and speaks too plainly because they have nothing of their own to talk about. Now each of them will get things they want and fear, their own opinion of the neighbours and of God, and they will take the dates of events from the village's life instead of guessing.
The goal
Demo
An hour of play for the first testers, then Steam.

Roadmap

This is the whole plan up to the demo, task by task. I don’t keep a separate copy for the website: this section is built from the same files I work from, and it updates itself when I tick a task off.

A task only counts as done when everything it asks for is in place, not when the first code appears. The stages don’t run strictly one after another. The simulation is done. I’ve put the villagers’ memory on hold so I can first build a playable scene and test the main thing on the graphics card: whether a villager can answer by voice in time. I go back over the plan after every stage, so the tasks will keep changing.

Stage PGroundwork 16 of 16

The repository, the rules and the workflow, so the simulation can be written and tested without Unity.

Repository and folder structure (done)P-01
Simulation skeleton: library, command line, tests (done)P-02
Plugging the simulation into Unity as a package (done)P-03
Coding and determinism rules (done)P-04
Automatic builds and tests on every change (done)P-05
Model manifest and verified downloads (done)P-06
A log of design decisions (done)P-07
Test hardware and how to measure (done)P-08
How I work with AI agents (done)P-09
Budget and shopping list: assets, Steam, domains (done)P-10
Shorter instructions for the agents: a map instead of a manual (done)P-11
Rules checked by code, not by memory (done)P-12
A taste sheet for every build (done)P-13
A length limit for plans and manuals (done)P-14
A strict check of the frames before the author sees them (done)P-15
Going through the outside review of the project (done)P-16

Stage 0Fitting into 16 GB 21 of 21

Prove that a 3D village, a language model, speech recognition and voice synthesis fit on one 16 GB card, with a villager starting to answer in about a second.

Decisions before measuring

Choosing the render pipeline: HDRP or URP (done)S0-00

Test scene and measuring tools

Unity 6 project with pinned versions (done)S0-01
A test scene as heavy as the village (done)S0-02
Measuring video memory, frame rate and latency (done)S0-03
First graphics numbers: 1080p and 1440p, presets, upscaling (done)S0-04

Language model

How to run the model: inside Unity or as a separate process (done)S0-05
Measuring the 9B model: speed, memory, effect on frame rate (done)S0-06
Forcing the reply format: what it costs in latency (done)S0-07
The lighter 4B model for 12 GB cards (done)S0-08

Speech

Microphone: telling when the player has finished talking (done)S0-09
Speech recognition on the CPU: two models, three languages (done)S0-10
Voice synthesis, option A: Qwen3-TTS (done)S0-11
Voice synthesis, option B: Chatterbox (done)S0-12
Villagers start speaking before the whole reply is written (done)S0-13

All together

From the player’s last word to the first sound of the reply (done)S0-14
Keeping graphics and AI from fighting over one card (done)S0-15
Pulling every lever until it fits in 16 GB (done)S0-16
The full light profile on 12 GB (done)S0-17
Testing on an AMD card (done)S0-18

Wrapping up

Report with the numbers and the chosen profiles (done)S0-19
Measuring tools and model backends move into the game (done)S0-20

Stage 1Village simulation 42 of 42

The village, the calendar, families, faith, events and gifts, with no graphics and no neural networks, run from the command line. A hundred years of village life should read like a story.

Core

Time, calendar, seasons and the main loop (done)S1-01
The same result on every computer (done)S1-02
Event log (done)S1-03
Player commands: hand, voice, gifts, speed (done)S1-04
Weather, droughts and hard winters (done)S1-05

The world

World data in plain text files (done)S1-06
Map: places, distances, who’s nearby (done)S1-07
The starting village: households, families, fields, stores (done)S1-08

Villagers

A villager: traits, skills, needs (done)S1-09
Choosing what to do: sleep, food, work, firewood, prayer (done)S1-10
Actions: walk, take, give, hide, attack, run away (done)S1-11
How villagers react to danger and to the hand of god (done)S1-12

Economy

Household stores: food, water, firewood, seed, money, tools (done)S1-13
The farming year: sowing, harvest, firewood, water (done)S1-14
Hunger and cold, sharing and theft (done)S1-15
The merchant, prices and taxes (done)S1-16

Generations

Old age, illness and death (done)S1-17
Marriages, births, inherited traits (done)S1-18
Inheritance, households splitting, empty houses (done)S1-19

Society

Relationships and rumours (done)S1-20
The elder, the healer, the strongman (done)S1-21
The council: how the village decides what to do (done)S1-22

Faith

What each villager thinks of god (done)S1-23
The village’s faith, rituals, shrine and prayers (done)S1-24

Events

What happens when: the pace of events and quiet spells (done)S1-25
Bandits, the tax collector, the merchant (done)S1-26
Sickness, refugees, a pilgrim, the neighbouring village (done)S1-27
The richer the village, the more outsiders take notice (done)S1-28

Gifts

Things from our world and what they’re like (done)S1-29
It fell from the sky: who saw it, who found it, who took it (done)S1-30
What becomes of it: a tool or a relic (done)S1-31
Dependence on gifts, inequality and how the village responds (done)S1-32

God

The god’s hand and voice in the simulation (done)S1-33

Chronicle and tools

The village chronicle in three languages (done)S1-34
Command-line tools: run, replay, statistics (done)S1-35

Tests

Integrity and repeatability checks (done)S1-36
Scenarios: three years of drought, a raid on empty barns (done)S1-37
Testing across a thousand runs (done)S1-38
A hundred years in seconds (done)S1-39

Balance

Three rounds of reading chronicles and fixing the balance (done)S1-40
How many real hours a game year lasts (done)S1-41

Saving

Saving and loading the world (done)S1-42

Stage 2Villager memory 31 of 33on hold: 2

Memory files, forgetting, what a villager has in mind while talking, and checking the model’s replies. The stage is done when a grandchild can retell an event believably, the way their grandmother told it.

Formats and the world

Which language memories are kept in, and how saves are laid out (done)S2-01
Which events go into memory, and how (done)S2-02
Memory files: persona, memory, relationships, chronicle (done)S2-03
What villagers know about the world, and what they don’t (done)S2-04
Character and way of speaking, built from the simulation (done)S2-05

Writing memories

Who remembers what: saw it themselves or heard it from others (done)S2-06
Forgetting: what matters is remembered longer (done)S2-07

Conversation

What a villager has in mind while talking to you (done)S2-08
Recalling what’s relevant to the conversation (done)S2-09
Connecting the models: local and in the cloud (done)S2-10
A villager’s reply: what they say, what they do and why (done)S2-11
Prompts in three languages (done)S2-12

Background work

Condensing memories, and legends that drift (done)S2-13
Children inherit their parents’ stories (done)S2-14
Background jobs only when things are idle (done)S2-15
Short questions to the model: yes or no, a choice, a score on a scale on holdS2-29
A villager knows how the village is doing: stores, harvest, who is sick, who died, any strangers (done)S2-30

Saving compute

Overheard conversations between villagers (done)S2-16
Not reprocessing what the model has already read (done)S2-17

Guardrails

Filtering for the age rating (done)S2-18
Attempts to break a villager, and answers that stay in the world (done)S2-19

Quality checks

Test situations taken from simulation runs (done)S2-20
Automatic checks of the replies (done)S2-21
Comparing models and setting quality bars (done)S2-22
Retelling across two generations (done)S2-23
Each villager’s voice: description and samples on holdS2-24

Tools

Command-line tools for talking to villagers and running checks (done)S2-25
A guide to the memory files for players (done)S2-26

The chronicle and the world after the gate

The chronicle names the link between events where there is one (done)S2-27
A second axis of events: the lord, a returning villager, quarrels, fire, plenty (done)S2-28
A villager decides what to do before speaking (done)S2-31
A villager's key memories are always at hand (done)S2-32
A villager's memory does not bloat over a long game (done)S2-33

Stage 3First playable scene 55 of 62on hold: 3

Everything comes together in Unity: the village in 3D, the hand, the desk with five things, talking by voice, the glasses and the prologue. The stage is done when an hour of play on a 16 GB card runs without a crash and leaves you wanting to come back in the morning.

Stills for showing the game

Stills of the village in the chest (done)S3-00

Project structure

Scenes, entry point, time speed (done)S3-01
Linking the simulation to what you see (done)S3-02
Simulation places laid out on the terrain (done)S3-03
Performance monitoring in the game (done)S3-04

Environment

Buildings and props: buying and importing (done)S3-05
The village: houses, fields, well, shrine, road, forest (done)S3-06
Terrain, plants and fields that grow with the seasons (done)S3-07
Light and weather: day and night, snow, rain, fog (done)S3-08
Optimising to fit the video memory budget (done)S3-09

The desk and the chest

Two scales: the desk and the village (done)S3-10
The chest, desk, room and five objects: original models (done)S3-11
Camera: from the desk down to the village square and back (done)S3-12

Villagers in 3D

Characters: bodies, age, clothes by trade and wealth (done)S3-13
Looks built from villager data; children resemble their parents (to do)S3-14
Animation: work, daily life, walking (done)S3-15
Faces: lip sync, emotions, where they look (to do)S3-16

The hand

The hand: pick up, carry, push, touch (done)S3-17
Dropping something from the desk into the chest (done)S3-18
Gamepad (done)S3-19

Voice

Speech and language models inside the game (done)S3-20
The whole exchange: from your microphone to the villager’s voice (done)S3-21
A whisper to one villager or a voice from the sky for everyone (done)S3-22
Eavesdropping nearby, subtitles in the glasses (done)S3-23
Villagers meet a fallen gift each in their own way, and lift a huge one together (done)S3-36
News walks around the village: you can see who told whom what (done)S3-37
Settings like in any game: screen, sound, controls, in sections (done)S3-38
Typing instead, if there’s no microphone (done)S3-24
Profiles for your graphics card: automatic and manual (done)S3-25

The glasses

The interface on the glass, and fonts for three languages (done)S3-26
The first-person prologue (done)S3-27
Names over villagers, their thoughts and life stories (done)S3-28
Chronicle, morning summary, time speed, settings (done)S3-29
Playing without the glasses (done)S3-30

Saves and failures

Autosaving the world together with the villagers’ memories (done)S3-31
What happens when the model doesn’t answer (done)S3-32

Sound

Sounds of the village, the weather and work (done)S3-33

Testing

My own hour-long sessions and the fixes they lead to on holdS3-34
Measurements in the real scene on 16 and 12 GB on holdS3-35
Cutaway houses and furnished interiors (done)S3-39
Villagers actually reach their work (done)S3-40
Sheaves carried from the field to the barn (done)S3-41
Gardens grow and get harvested (done)S3-42
Gardens inside the simulation (done)S3-43
The whole world inside the simulation (done)S3-44
Automatic picture checks in the built game (done)S3-45
The length of a game hour (done)S3-46
The tax collector comes to the village (done)S3-47
A villager answers sooner (done)S3-48
The village is built from code and data on holdS3-49
Dead weight out of the build (done)S3-50
What of village life shows on screen (done)S3-51
Threads on the glasses: what is happening in the village now (done)S3-52
Strangers on screen: merchant, pilgrim, refugees, bandits (done)S3-53
New events that make watching the village worthwhile (done)S3-54
Bandits' weapons (done)S3-59
The god's word at the village council (done)S3-55
A voice from the sky changes what villagers do (done)S3-56
A chosen one who explains the god's will to the village (done)S3-57
New in-game videos (to do)S3-60
Fixes found in the videos: fire, dancing, guards (done)S3-58
A lute for the minstrel (to do)S3-61

Stage DDemo 7 of 17in progress: 1on hold: 2

Turn the scene into a build for the first testers on Steam, run a closed test in two waves and fix the most important things it turns up.

Content and first launch

What’s in the demo and what’s cut (done)D-01
First launch: language, graphics card, models, microphone (done)D-02
Delivering the models through Steam on holdD-03

Steam

Steamworks: the app, the playtest, uploading builds (to do)D-04
AI disclosure, licences, privacy in progressD-05
Recruiting testers (to do)D-06

Stability

Crash reports and a “send log” button (done)D-07
Stability runs on reference PCs (done)D-08
Background work, closing the game and recovering after a crash (done)D-09

The test

Closed test: two waves of five people (to do)D-10
Fixes between waves and the final build (to do)D-11
Demo wrap-up and the Early Access plan (to do)D-12

Showing it

Village streams where chat drops gifts and talks to the villagers on holdD-13
A tutorial for the first minutes (to do)D-14
Voice notes from testers (done)D-15
The cloud never goes silent on failures (done)D-16
Honest about the AI in the game from day one (to do)D-17

Stage MMods and the cloud 19 of 23on hold: 4

Open the world to mods and give a tool that lets an AI agent make a mod from one sentence; let players play with the world's numbers; let people without a strong graphics card play.

Mods

Mods change the world on top of our data (done)M-01
Commands to make and check a mod (done)M-02
A reference of every number of the world for modders (done)M-03
A kit for making mods with an AI agent (done)M-04
Lore and characters of villagers in mods (done)M-05
A save remembers its mods (done)M-06
Testing the kit with agents that have never seen it (done)M-07
The mod manager and the Steam Workshop (done)M-08
Villager voices from mods, with consent only on holdM-09

Advanced mode

The world's dials: droughts, harvests, faith, deaths (done)A-01
Turning a dial in a running world, told by the chronicle (done)A-02
The village's state in numbers (done)A-03
Your changes as a mod (done)A-04
The advanced mode screen in the game (done)A-05

Your own AI account

Support for newer model APIs (done)K-01
Signing in with your own AI account in the browser (done)K-02
Choosing the sign-in in the settings, falling back to local AI on holdK-03
Choosing the cloud model by how alive the speech sounds (done)K-04

The cloud for weaker graphics cards

Our own relay server: sign-in, limits, privacy (done)C-01
Checking the game is owned on Steam on holdC-02
Villager voices from the cloud on holdC-03
Speech recognition in the cloud (done)C-04
The cloud profile in the game (done)C-05

LaterAfter the demo

A cloud mode for PCs without a strong graphics card
Early Access on Steam
Mac and Steam Deck
The rest of the things on the desk, up to 60 villagers, a village that grows

I’ll decide the order once the demo is out.