Confluence is the principle that no story is woven in isolation. It is the recognition that every Tapestry, every Thread, and every creator is part of a greater, shared weave. But this is a weave of history and memory, not of shared space. It is a library, not a common room; a river delta where countless streams of creativity merge to form a vast, emergent ocean of narrative history.

If Anamnesis is the act of living a story and Eidolon is the act of authoring one in a solitary workshop, Confluence is the sacred and deliberate act of placing that finished story on a shelf for others to study, and in turn, drawing inspiration from the works of other lonely gods. It is the bridge between the personal and the universal, a dialogue conducted across the silence between worlds.

The Philosophy of Confluence - The Sacred Solitude

The core of ATET is the psychological freedom afforded by what we call the Sacred Solitude. The player’s creative space, their “Cathedral-Forge,” is inviolable. There is no external audience to perform for, no shared canon to conform to, no societal pressure to shape an emergent identity. This solitude is the necessary condition for genuine self-authorship.

Confluence is designed to protect this principle above all else. It is not a system for building a shared universe, but a system for creating a shared mythos. It is a testament to the idea that a story’s power is not just in its living, but in its telling and its remembrance. The act of sharing a creation is an act of legacy, not of real-time interaction.

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 to use within their solitary forges:

• 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 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 Action Appraisal: 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.

Navigating the Confluence - A Dialogue Between Solitudes

The Confluence Hub is the in-game, integrated interface for sharing and discovering player-created content. It is the diegetic “Library of Alexandria,” an astrolabe used by Eidolons to navigate the echoes of other worlds. Interaction is always a conscious, deliberate, and asynchronous act.

The Library of Worlds (The Hub)

When a player uploads a creation, they are placing a finished, bound volume on a shelf in the great library. Other players can visit this library.

• The Act of Scholarship: When a player “downloads” a Tapestry from the Confluence, they are not importing it into their game. They are checking out a book. They can open it in a “Simulation Viewer,” allowing them to explore that world as a visitor, perhaps even play through its Thread. But it remains a self-contained artifact, separate from their own personal canon. It is an act of study, not of integration.

Inspiration, Not Contamination (The Narrative Echo)

A player can find inspiration in another’s work, but they cannot simply take it. The integrity of their personal universe is paramount.

• The Mechanic: Let’s say a player, while exploring another’s Tapestry in the viewer, discovers a legendary Artifact. They cannot take it. But the act of studying it, of understanding its story and its Eidos, might grant their own Eidolon a new “Narrative Echo”—a half-formed idea, a blueprint fragment. To make that artifact real in their own universe, they must take that echo back to their solitary forge and weave it with their own Eidos. The final creation is theirs alone, inspired by another’s work but fundamentally a product of their own journey. This preserves the sanctity of their creative process.

The Asynchronous Echo (The Message in a Bottle)

This is a more subtle, mysterious form of connection that respects the fundamental loneliness of the gods.

• Seeding an Echo: When an Eidolon creates a new Tapestry, they could have a rare, costly option to [Seed an Echo into the Void]. This would not send their entire world, but a single, enigmatic fragment—the ghostly image of a key Artifact, the cryptic text of a core Belief, a single line from a character’s final moments.
• The Discovery: This “Echo” is then released. A completely different player, in their own solitary Tapestry, might then stumble upon it as a profound mystery. They might find a strange inscription on a cave wall that is a direct quote from another player’s Incarnation, or a ghostly vision of an Artifact they’ve never seen.
• The Effect: This discovery does not change their world’s mechanics. It is purely narrative, purely evocative. It is a hint that other lonely gods exist, that other stories are being woven. It creates a sense of a shared, mysterious cosmos without ever forcing a direct interaction or contaminating the player’s personal canon.

The Shared Dream - A Speculative Note on Multiplayer

Given the core principle of Sacred Solitude, session-based multiplayer in a shared Tapestry is a profound philosophical and technical challenge. Any implementation must respect the inviolable nature of the subjective experience.

• Asynchronous Echoes: This remains the most thematically coherent form of “multiplayer.”
• The Tandem Thread (Co-op): This would introduce 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 is not a planned feature, but a deep philosophical problem to be contemplated.
• The War of Narratives (God versus God): The ultimate expression of the game’s philosophy, but a distant one. A grand strategy game where competing Eidolons weave Facts, Fictions, and Faiths into a shared, contested Tapestry. This would require a fundamental re-architecting of the core solitary experience.

Design Intent

Why Confluence exists:

• To create an endless, living archive of stories.
• To empower players with genuine creative agency within their solitary workshop.
• To build a community not around shared play, but around the shared scholarship and appreciation of each other’s finished creations.
• To fulfill the game’s core themes by making the act of creating a legacy and discovering the echoes of others a central, mechanically supported feature.