Hameau Vivant
SIG-02 · SOCIAL EXPERIENCE · AI
A persistent social experience in which a community emerges, forms bonds, faces conflicts and builds its own collective memory. An LLM drives the minds and decisions of the villagers; stories arise from real consequences, with no predefined script.
- CATEGORY
- AI
- STACK
- TypeScriptNode.jsSQLiteThree.jsSSELLM
- STATUS
- ● Live
Ten people, a river, and nobody telling them what to do
Hameau Vivant is a 3D life simulation. Ten founders settle on a riverbank, and from then on nothing is scripted. They farm, hunt, marry, fall out, elect a leader, build a school, grow old and die, and their children carry on.
The aim was never a game with objectives. We wanted to see what emerges when a small society is given needs, personalities and rules, and then left alone.
A world that wears out and recovers
A year has four seasons of six days. Water, soil fertility, forest, game and fish are used up and grow back, some faster than others. Droughts, floods and epidemics arrive without warning, rats get into the grain sacks, a storm flattens the wheat. The population can reach 333.
Every villager inherits six character traits and builds up skills over time. They have memories, dreams and a purpose in life, and they choose what to do among roughly a hundred options. The village has nineteen trades, from miller to midwife, and votes on its public buildings in assembly, unless a tyrant simply decrees them.
Where the AI comes in
The simulation itself runs on conventional rules, which are fast and predictable. A language model handles what no formula does well: inventing the founders and every newcomer, writing morning intentions and evening reflections, dialogue, dreams and the annals of each year.
Those calls go through the server, under an adjustable cap per minute. When the cap is reached or the AI is paused, local formulas take over and the village keeps living. We apply that principle to every AI project we build: a tool should never stop just because an outside service slows down.
From prototype to platform
The first version fitted in a single HTML file, with Three.js rendering, the interface and saves stored in the browser. A deliberate prototype, good for testing ideas quickly. The current version runs on a TypeScript and Node.js server with an SQLite database, streaming to spectators in real time.
The project is live. Visitors can follow the family trees, the thread of conversations, a log of every decision with its reason, and the full chronicle of the hamlet.