Towns that run themselves
Land starts personal: a mailbox claims a 50-metre square you build on. Plant a guild town hall and members' plots nearby federate into a township with shared services, a treasury, and a safe border. Upgrade the hall and the town spreads.
A settlement is alive whether or not players are around. Its NPCs are real citizens: a miner works the deposits, a blacksmith the smithy, an alchemist the lab, farmers the fields. They gather, craft, and stock the market on the same loops you do, so there is always a baseline economy to trade against. Prosperous towns tier up and grow; neglected ones decline and revert. The map of civilization rises and falls on its own.
Towns are not islands. NPC caravans haul surplus between settlements and the capital: iron leaves a town that has too much, grain arrives where it runs short. A caravan is safe inside a town and exposed between them, which is where the work is: escort one for pay, raid one for loot, or run your own.
A settlement is a sanctuary. No non-consensual combat inside its bounds, and no siege: a town is lost only to neglect, when its treasury starves and it decays, or to a GM ruling, never to force. Civilization is sparse by design, towns sit at least an hour's walk apart, so the land between them stays frontier.
Build the home, hire the guards, send the caravan. The town runs whether or not you are watching.
This is documented design, layered on the claims, decay, and NPC systems already built. The plan is one settlement system with two controllers: NPC-led and player-led towns run identical mechanics (treasury and upkeep, service buildings, taxes, build policy, the sanctuary, decay, federation, spacing), and the only difference is whether an AI or a guild of players holds the owning guild. AI is a flag, not a separate subsystem, so it is built once, and the NPC towns become a live test of the exact player system.
The economy is a real ledger. A town's treasury is its guild bank, funded by a derived cut of member XP (the player keeps all of theirs; the commons gains an equal-percentage grant on top) and drained by upkeep that scales with the hall's tier and size. Income over upkeep funds growth; income under it is decline, and sustained insolvency is the decay lifecycle at settlement scale, so economy, governance, and decay are one mechanic.
Founding a hall runs a PostGIS clearance check against every other hall and NPC city, so settlement ranges never overlap and the border problem becomes a placement rule. Service buildings are data-driven, typed, and tiered. NPC citizens run on a deterministic utility-AI brain (strategy, trigger, action, value) with a language model only for voice, and server-side simulated players exercise the whole loop before a real player ever sees it.
- One system, two controllers: NPC and player towns share the exact code path; AI is a flag on the owning guild, which makes NPC towns the test harness.
- Civic treasury is the guild bank: funded by a derived cut of member XP (not deducted from the player), drained by tier-scaled upkeep; insolvency reverts the town.
- Settlements are PvP-free sanctuaries; a town is lost only to decay or a GM ruling, never a siege.
- Founding runs a PostGIS clearance check against other halls and NPC cities, so ranges never overlap and towns sit a journey apart.
- NPC citizens run a deterministic utility-AI brain with a language-model voice; simulated players test the loop before beta.
Service buildings
- Smithy & crafting stationswhere NPC crafters turn raw materials into goods
- Market stallsNPC-stocked vendors; a baseline market even when players are few
- Shared storagethe town's common stockpile
- Mailboxthe personal claim anchor, and the town's mail
- Defenseswalls and guard posts along the town's edge
- Fast-travel beacona travel anchor between settlements
NPC roles
- Minerworks the local deposits
- Blacksmithsmelts and forges at the smithy
- Seamstressspins fiber into cloth
- Herbalistgathers herbs from the wilds
- Alchemistbrews reagents in the lab
- Farmerworks the fields; delivers grain and livestock
- Butcherturns livestock into food
- Huntertakes game from the contested ring
- Guardpatrols and defends the town
- Sagethe town's lore and learning
- General craftsmanfills the gaps between the specialists