Confluence is the principle that no Tapestry is woven in isolation. It is the recognition that every story, every world, and every creator is part of a greater, shared weave—a river of narrative into which all Threads eventually flow.

If Anamnesis is the act of living a story and Eidolon is the act of authoring one, Confluence is the act of contributing that story to the universal current, and in turn, drawing from its endless, flowing potential. It is the bridge between the personal narrative and the collective mythos.

The Philosophy of Confluence - The Great Weave

The core of ATET is about the power of stories. Confluence extends this philosophy beyond the single-player experience. It transforms the game from a personal journey into a living ecosystem, a delta where countless streams of creativity merge to form a vast, emergent ocean of narrative.

The Confluence systems are a diegetic part of the world’s metaphysics. When a player uploads a Tapestry they’ve woven or a unique Incarnation they’ve guided, they are not simply sharing a file. They are releasing a new tributary into the Great Weave. This story becomes a current that other Eidolons can navigate, draw from, or be swept up in. This makes the act of “modding” a narrative and philosophical act in itself—a contribution to the great and flowing Confluence.

The Ribbon Engine & The Open Loom

The potential for deep player authorship is made possible by the game’s foundational technology: the Ribbon Engine, built entirely in our custom programming language, Ribbon.

Ribbon is not just a language we use; it is a core feature of the game’s design. It is a high-performance systems language with an embedded, just-in-time (JIT) compiled scripting layer. Critically, its use of algebraic effects allows for a level of safe, deep moddability that is impossible in most engines. It allows a modder to “intercept” and “re-frame” core game logic without having to rewrite or replace entire systems.

We will ship the game with the same tools we use to build it. This “Open Loom” philosophy provides players with a spectrum of creative agency:

• Tier 1: Content Authorship (The Storyteller) This is the most accessible layer, allowing players to hand-craft narrative content. This includes creating:

  • Unique Incarnations: Define a character with a specific history, starting Beliefs, and Eidos.
  • Authored Quests: Design complex, branching quest lines with unique triggers and narrative consequences.
  • Lore & Factions: Write your own Lore Primers or design new Factions with their own core Faith and social structures.

• Tier 2: Systemic Weaving (The Worldsmith) This layer allows players to create new rules for the simulation. Using Ribbon’s scripting layer, a player can design and inject new systemic content, such as:

  • New Symbol Tags and Pattern Matching Rules: Create new thematic motifs and define how the game recognizes and reacts to them.
  • New Rituals and Needs: Design entirely new forms of “magic” or new survival challenges for agents to contend with.
  • New Agent Archetypes: Define the base logic for a new species or robot, complete with unique needs and behaviors.

• Tier 3: Core Logic Modification (The Metaphysician) This is the deepest level of connection, enabled by Ribbon’s unique architecture. A skilled author can write scripts that directly modify the behavior of the base game’s systems. For example, a mod could:

  • Intercept the ActionAppraisalSystem: Add a new “moral” evaluator that causes all agents to weigh the ethical implications of their actions.
  • Re-frame the MemoryRecordingSystem: Create a mod where agents have perfect, eidetic memory, fundamentally changing how learning and belief work.
  • Alter the Subjective Interface: Design a completely new perceptual filter for a specific Faith or Incarnation type.

This open architecture ensures that the game can be a perpetually evolving platform for narrative experimentation, driven by the community’s collective creativity.

Navigating the Confluence - The Player-Driven Cosmos

The Confluence Hub is the in-game, integrated interface for sharing and discovering player-created content. It is the diegetic “astrolabe” used by Eidolons to navigate the cosmic currents.

• Releasing a Tributary: Players can release their creations into the Confluence—from individual Incarnation templates and Quest modules to entire, fully-realized Tapestries. Each upload is tagged with its core symbolic and thematic Eidos, defining its “narrative flavor.”
• Drawing from a Current: Players can browse the Hub and “draw from” a specific tributary, downloading a specific Tapestry to experience it directly. You can play through a friend’s masterpiece or try a highly-rated “horror” Tapestry designed by a popular creator.
• Symbolic Attunement (Subscription): This is a more profound form of engagement. Instead of drawing from a single tributary, a player can “attune” their game to a broader current—a specific creator or a thematic collection (e.g., “The Mythos of the Gutter-Forged Seam”). When they then create their own procedurally generated worlds, the game will procedurally seed content from their attuned current. A legendary weapon you’ve attuned to might appear in a dragon’s hoard; a Faction designed by another player might be the dominant power in your new Tapestry. This allows players to organically encounter each other’s work as echoes and legends within their own unique playthroughs.

The Shared Dream - Speculations on Multiplayer

While a stretch goal, the deterministic architecture outlined in Determinism & Performance Considerations provides the necessary foundation for true multiplayer. Confluence could, in the future, evolve to include modes where players inhabit the same Tapestry simultaneously.

• Asynchronous Echoes: The simplest form of multiplayer. Significant actions or deaths of a player in their world could leave a “ghost” or “scar” in a friend’s Tapestry—a gravestone, a named ruin, or a fleeting psychic echo.

• The Tandem Thread (Co-op): Two or more players Awaken as different Incarnations within the same Tapestry. This introduces fascinating design challenges: How does the Subjective Interface render a world for two people who believe contradictory things? Can two players with opposing Faiths cooperate to survive? This mode would be a deep exploration of shared and conflicting realities.

• The War of Narratives (God versus God): The ultimate expression of the game’s philosophy. Multiple players take on the role of competing Eidolons. They do not control Incarnations directly. Instead, they attempt to alter the course of the Confluence itself by weaving Facts, Fictions, and Faiths into a shared, contested Tapestry. It is a grand strategy game where the weapons are ideas and the victory condition is narrative dominance.

Design Intent

Why Confluence exists:

• To transform the game into an endless, living ecosystem of stories.
• To empower players with genuine creative agency, blurring the line between player and designer.
• To fulfill the game’s core themes by making the sharing and interpretation of narratives a central, mechanically supported feature.
• To build a community not just around playing the game, but around the shared act of creating its universe.