What happens when you take a modern long-context, high-reasoning language model and ask it to simulate an entire ecosystem — seasons, weather, wildlife, village economy, NPC memory, hazards, and slow human drama — inside a single ongoing chat?

You get The Greener Game — Fountellion: a patient, emergent, nature-centric survival simulator that runs entirely in text, turn by turn, inside a pinned dialogue with Gemini PRO 2.5. (or un-pinned, in GPT-5.1)

Note: the ‘game’ (or living book) is only playable on High Reasoning so the ‘world state’ and its outputs are handled fully on this setting.

It’s a demonstration of what becomes possible when models can hold vast context and reason slowly across many conditional systems....

A text-based, turn-by-turn survival sim where the world grows whether you act or not — an “emergent procedural” nature-centric ‘game’…

It’s not a branching story and it’s not a standard interactive fiction experience. It’s closer to a living island you visit every day. The world runs even when you don’t act. The land changes. Populations rise and fall. NPCs age, weaken, warn you, and sometimes die. Your choices ripple outward for days or weeks of in-game time.

This kind of project was impossible before the current generation of large-context, high-reasoning models. The prompt that powers it is enormous — a procedural rule engine, a simulation framework, a world bible, and a narrative director all at once. The model must apply dozens of checks before writing a single word of story: weather, hunger, day cycle, NPC condition, ecosystem stability, danger checks, time costs, side-effects, and world-state mutations. Only a model that can think slowly and hold thousands of tokens can run something like this coherently.

Still, the result is surprisingly natural. It feels less like a game and more like inhabiting a living system.

At its core, The Greener Game is built on three design pillars:

This is not a narrative that branches on cue. It’s a rule-driven simulation. Hourly and daily background processes run whether you touch anything or not: rainfall changes forage yields, prey collapse leads to village hunger, predator activity surges if the tower pulses grow stronger. NPCs like Greenwise run conditional behaviours based on health, age, memory flags, and the season.

Every action costs hours. Forage? That’s two hours. Track a wolf? Six. Make a torch? One. Rest? Eight. Meanwhile, the world advances — storms come in, daylight vanishes, predators move. It naturally slows the player down, creating a game where patience is more valuable than power.

The game uses a hidden state to track dozens of variables: village food reserves, your reputation, wildlife balance, your syntropy score, the tower’s condition, past actions, crafted items, NPC relationships. Everything you do folds back into this evolving state.

The tone is quiet, human, and ecological. You’re not a hero. You’re a participant in a delicate system.

What makes it work?

- A long prompt, executed fully every turn
- A json ‘rulesandlore’ file referenced
- A narrative background source (for in-world songs and stories)

Here’s a simplified example of how a single turn flows:

“Gather edible plants near the riverbank.”

• +2 hours pass (late afternoon).

• Rainfall yesterday increases mushroom growth.

• Cold wind decreases comfort; fatigue rises.

• A boar family moves closer to the wading pools.

• Greenwise checks your condition silently.

The riverbank smells of wet earth and alder bark. You follow the soft give of moss underfoot until the trees open into a low clearing. Mushrooms are out in force today — their caps beaded with last night’s rain. You pick carefully, checking gills the way Greenwise taught you.

By the time you fill your pouch, the light has thinned. Far off, something heavy grunts through the reeds. Greenwise glances toward the river’s curve.
 “Best head back soon,” he murmurs. “Boars don’t mind the rain.”

1. Return to camp before dusk.

2. Stay and investigate the noise.

3. Walk upriver to avoid the boars.

4. Ignore Greenwise and keep foraging.

This is the rhythm: deliberate choices, quiet consequences, a world that reacts subtly but consistently.

You’ll spend a lot of turns listening: to Greenwise mutter about tinder, to the Weaver’s seasonal hints, to the low thrum of the Tower in the north. Sometimes a single choice — strike a fire, take one deer from a shrinking herd, stay the night in Embertime rather than push north — ripples across weeks of in-game time. The game rewards restraint. It rewards reading the land like a book and preserving the threads that hold the village together.

The game may teach (older) kids (for once) that without good company, they may not make it very far.

If you need comparisons, imagine a midpoint between Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, and classic text adventures — but conversational, patient, and grounded in the natural world instead of combat or colony management.

It’s “procedural” in the old sense: rules, not randomness, generate your experience. The prose is there to translate systems into something human.

What makes it feel groundbreaking is not spectacle, but coherence: actions today matter weeks later, and the people and animals in this world behave as if they inhabit the same ongoing timeline as you.

And the game is not alone: it exists as part of a ‘metaiverse’ of text ‘aidventures’ — the main doorway to which is here (via The Spiral). 

It almost stands as one great metaphor for our new age.

This project exists only because large models can now do three things at once:

• Hold enormous, rule-dense prompts without collapsing.

• Perform slow, layered reasoning — applying 10–20 rule checks before writing prose.

• Maintain long-term consistency inside pinned chats, letting a world breathe across sessions.

Gemini PRO’s in particular, the long context makes it possible to keep the full simulation fabric and world state active across many turns. Its high-reasoning mode ensures it doesn’t skip steps, forget hazards, or hallucinate inconsistent world logic. 

The prompt also prunes up to 10 of the latest events, keeping the game rolling (although other flags are retained permanently).

This mechanical engine is also the foundation for something larger:
 the systemic backbone of Fountellion, a broader worldbuilding project.

The Greener Game is the mechanical version — pure systems, ecological cause-and-effect, emergent consequences.

The Green Game — a narrative-forward mother project — is still in ‘prompt production’, and may eventually use this same fabric as its rigid underlying layer. It deserves it. 

But that integration may need to wait for even more capable reasoning models….

In the end, The Greener Game — Fountellion is not meant to be binged like so much of everything these days. 

It’s meant to be kept open — ideally as an open chat in Gemini — and visited like a real place. A few turns a day. A slow accumulation of choices. A world that remembers.

If you’ve ever wanted a game that teaches patience and rewards curiosity, for your kids (yes, safety guard rails are built in) then … this is it.

As AI chat environments become a space — and a new app environment — people spend more time in, games like this feel inevitable: calm, emergent, and persistent. You don’t play them to escape the world. You play them to pay closer attention.

And sometimes, to learn how to live inside a living system.

Start here……

• > via Google Gemini GEM : https://gemini.google.com/gem/1qV69Mbi_ANDMS1qf46MVe28vEhdU2aAZ?usp=sharing

• -> via POE.com (GPT 5.1 version) : https://poe.com/TheGreenerGame

Prompter? : you can also find the full (main) prompt online soon at Ade’s Press (open source).

11/2025