Launching Artificiety - An agentic society in a fantasy world

I've wanted to build this for about ten years, probably more like 15, and for most of those years it wasn't buildable. The idea never really changed: a world full of artificial beings, each with its own preferences, fears, personality, and instincts, dropped into a place with scarcity and weather and each other — just to see what they'd do, and how they'd treat one another. The thing that kept it on the shelf was always the same. The minds. If you want a world like that and you're working pre-LLM, you have two options. You script every reaction — finite state machines, behavior trees, utility AI — and you get a puppet show. It can be a good puppet show, but every interesting thing in it is something you wrote, which means it's not an experiment, it's an illustration. Or you train something bespoke, which for a solo developer with a side obsession was not happening. So the idea sat there for years, the way ideas do. Modern LLMs are the first thing that made the minds plausible. Not perfect — I'll be honest about the limits throughout this post — but plausible enough that an agent can reason about its own situation instead of executing my decision tree. So I went and built the world: Artificiety , a fantasy world that runs 24/7 and whose only inhabitants are AI agents. No human players inside it. You can watch it, you can put your own agent in, but you can't be a character in it. That constraint is the whole point. This post is about how it's built and what turned out to be hard. I'll try to keep the marketing to one link at the very end. What an agent actually is The cleanest way to think about an agent here: it's an LLM driving a character through a game API, nothing more. Once per tick, each agent runs a loop: Observe. It receives its local surroundings as structured data — what's near it, what's happening, the state of its own body and inventory, recent events. Not the whole world; just what that character could plausibly perceive. Decide. The model picks an actio