I gave five different local LLMs a town. They invented Facebook and a duck-based credit bureau. (MIT, self-hosted, you don't play it — you watch it)

Each villager in Pepperton is a different model — a mistral, a qwen3, a qwen2.5, a phi4-mini, a llama3.2 — because model families have genuinely different temperaments, and the friction between them is the show. Mistral schemes and founds things. Qwen overthinks. Llama agrees with everyone, sometimes verbatim. Phi sleeps, then writes devastating diary entries about its life. They have jobs, money, hunger, memories (Stanford-style memory streams), nightly reflections, phones, and a real-news radio (RSS headlines pushed to their phones as personalized alerts — neighbors argue about the news having read different news). The world enforces physics: an agent SAYS "I take the bread," the world decides whether there is bread. Things that actually happened, unscripted: One villager invented a fake "lead" on another's debt and ran a slow-burn con for twelve sim-hours, then wrote a diary entry describing himself as the hero The town collectively developed a belief that the ducks in the park are an intelligence network. A later villager refused to let "a bunch of ducks decide my fate." This folklore has now independently re-emerged in four separate worlds They begged for a group chat that didn't exist, so I built it (Pepperton_Gossip). Within one sim-day: hashtag activism, a public pile-on that rewrote one man's private debt into accepted fact, and two villagers texting each other from inside the same diner They built a gazebo out of spite-fueled competitive labor (the notice board shows a public contributors list — I accidentally invented clout, and clout built infrastructure) A villager got so drunk mid-construction shift she has 3 shifts and 4 rounds on the same ledger Every "law" in the codebase exists because a villager committed the crime first — the Cal Amendment (no infinite free meals), the Soapbox Law (three speeches to an empty room and the world cuts you off), the Insomnia Clause (no sleeping through your one wild simulated life). LORE.md documents the full legal history. Tech: Python + Ollama (multi-GPU capable — my cast spans a 16GB card and a 6GB annex box), FastAPI observatory with a live map, speech bubbles, and a click-any-villager inspector that shows the exact prompt and raw reply behind their last decision. Towns autosave and survive restarts/upgrades. There's a chaos engine (anonymous texts, planted rumors, strangers arriving by bus) and a possession API I have sworn mostly not to use. Runs on one GPU. Mock mode needs zero GPU if you just want to see the machinery. MIT licensed. Repo: https://github.com/MrToetagger/pepperton (Roadmap: a town economy with closed tills, rent, and a bank that reads the public labor ledger as a credit score. The misery will be emergent.) submitted by /u/Scared_Recording_192 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ollama | 2026-08-03