Frontier
Please read before playing
A game about ten people on a coast who have to vote for everything. This handbook covers installation, connecting a language model, the two things you are able to do, and what to check when the settlement has five kilns.
Sixth printing · supersedes nothing · the previous five were advertisements
You need a browser and Node. Nothing else is required and nothing is downloaded at runtime — every tree, sprite and shadow in this game is drawn from primitives, and there are no image files anywhere in it.
git clone <the folder> npm install npm run dev
The game opens on a bare coast with two people, a boat, four planks and a week of food. They can raise a house. That is the only thing the settlement knows how to build. Everything else it will have to decide it wants.
There is no save button. The world is written down continuously and comes back as you left it, including the parts you would rather it forgot.
This is optional and the game is complete without it. With no model the settlers think with the game’s own catalogue: they work, vote, trade, argue, walk out and found claims down the coast. A model does exactly one thing the catalogue cannot — it lets a settler want something nobody wrote down.
# copy the example and edit it cp .env.example .env # then, in another window ollama pull qwen3:30b-a3b
Start the game and read the banner. A line saying brain: <model> warm in
0.4s means a model is answering. Anything else names what went wrong and what to do
about it, and the settlers carry on with the catalogue in the meantime.
.env| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| OLLAMA_HOST | Where the model lives. Defaults to this machine. Anything speaking Ollama’s /api/chat will do, here or on another box. |
| FRONTIER_MODEL | Which model. It has to follow a JSON schema. A small instruct model is plenty. |
| FRONTIER_NUM_CTX | How much context. The default for most models allocates a cache larger than the card and pushes half the weights onto the CPU. Measured on one machine, capping this took a decision from 123 seconds to 0.24. |
| FRONTIER_WISH_EVERY | Decisions between “and what is this valley missing?” |
| FRONTIER_BRAIN=off | No model at all. Also what you want when measuring anything, because a model turns two runs of the same test into two different valleys. |
Two things. You may watch, and you may hand one settler to a model. That is the entire control surface.
You cannot place a building, direct a settler, give anybody food, or decide what gets built. Those are the settlement’s and it votes on them. A proposal carries by ranked ballot, counted by single transferable vote, and carrying it means the settlement has resolved to build the thing — which is not the same as the thing existing, and usually the distance between the two is four boards nobody has cut.
Earlier builds let you drop a flag on the ground and settlers would go to it. Nearly half of everyone’s idle time became going to see what you wanted. It was removed: a valley with a god in it is not a place where anybody else’s decisions mean anything. The flag remained on screen for some time afterwards, doing nothing, until a player asked what it was for.
Settlers who are unhappy enough will leave — down the coast to another settlement, if somebody there has the food to take them in, or out to found a claim of their own. Neither is something you can ask for.
| Symptom | Cause and action |
|---|---|
| The settlement has five kilns and nothing else. | Expected in builds before this printing. A model was asked what to build next and answered a kiln — a good answer in a valley with no charcoal — and nothing on that path checked whether one was already standing. There is a ceiling now. No action required; the existing kilns will remain. |
| Everybody is starving and there is food within thirty tiles of them. | Their arms are full. A settler at carrying capacity strips a bush and receives nothing from it, and the branch that sends a hungry person foraging returned a hundred and seventeen lines above the branch that says put your load down. Fixed. If it recurs, check whether the stores are also full, in which case see below. |
| Goods are stacked on the ground outside the store. | Correct behaviour. There is nowhere to put them. They are still there and anybody hauling past will bring them in on the day there is room; the weather is working on them until somebody does. Build somewhere to put things. This requires a vote. |
| A settler is living alone on an island. | He walked out and founded a claim, and the check for where a claim may stand asked whether the ground was dry, level and unclaimed. It did not ask whether it was attached to anything. Later claims cannot do this. The existing settler cannot be moved and will remain there. |
| The settlement voted for a furnace and received a charcoal kiln. | Working as intended. The proposal was misfiled when it was made and the vote was held on the misfiling. This game does not go back and change what a settlement was given. The vote stands. It will always stand. |
| A settler has requested a burial ground. | There is no death in this game. No line anywhere removes a settler from the valley. The request is reasonable and cannot be granted. No action required, in perpetuity. |
| A settler asked for a salmon trap and was granted a well. | The only word the catalogue recognised was water, in a clause explaining that he did not wish to be in it. See above regarding votes standing. There are no fish. |
There is none.
It is a folder, on a machine that does not move, in a house. The entire development process is one prompt, which has never been typed the same way twice, and which deliberately omits the line make no mistakes, on the grounds that the mistakes are where the work comes from.
Everything in section 4 was found by somebody watching the game and saying what they saw. Not one item on that list was found by reading the code. If you find another, that is the process working.