Where RimWorld & Colony Sims generate the story of a group’s external, physical survival against a hostile world, ATET is designed to generate the story of an individual’s internal, philosophical survival against a reality at war with itself. The player’s role is fundamentally inverted: in a colony sim, the player is a detached, god-like overseer of pawns. In ATET, the player begins as the pawn; an Incarnation trapped within the biased, fallible lens of the Subjective Interface. They may only earn the right to become a god after a life is lived.

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Comparative Analysis: A Tale of Two Simulations

The following table contrasts the core design philosophies of traditional colony sims with the unique approach of ATET, highlighting how ATET evolves the genre’s foundational mechanics to serve a more introspective and metaphysical goal.

Learning from an Evolving Design: Lessons from the RimWorld DLCs

The evolution of RimWorld through its DLCs provides a powerful case study in the challenges and opportunities of expanding a story generator. ATET’s design anticipates and offers systemic solutions to many of the “hard edges” that emerged from these expansions.

Ideology & Biotech (The Eidolon’s Loom)

• The Lesson from RimWorld: The Ideology and Biotech DLCs were brilliant for encoding and legitimizing player behaviors that already existed in the community. However, their implementation as separate, pre-game editors can feel “gameified” and disconnected. The xenotype editor, in particular, feels more like a dev tool than an integrated player experience.
• ATET’s Evolution: ATET internalizes this creation process as a core, diegetic part of the gameplay loop. The Eidolon phase is the reward for a completed life, and The Loom is its integrated workshop. The player doesn’t use a menu to design a new species or faith; they weave it from the Eidos they have harvested. This reframes the act of creation from a setup phase into a meaningful narrative beat. Furthermore, ATET’s Symbol Tags system avoids the “hard edges” problem (e.g., the lack of a “no marriage” precept). A culture’s nature is defined by the presence of certain tags in its core Faith, not by a rigid checklist of rules. This allows for far more nuance, ambiguity, and player interpretation.

Royalty (The Tyranny of the Rule)

• The Lesson from RimWorld: Mechanics like a noble being “incapable of work” can feel arbitrary and frustrating to players because they are absolute, unexplained rules. It creates friction that feels punitive rather than narrative.
• ATET’s Evolution: The Subjective Interface provides a more elegant and immersive solution. An Incarnation with a powerful Faith in their own nobility is not mechanically forbidden from labor. Instead, attempting to perform a “menial” task would trigger a severe Narrative Dissonance event. The UI could become cluttered with intrusive thoughts of disgust and shame, and the character could suffer a tangible “Spiritual Contamination” debuff. The player can force the action, but the game makes them feel the character’s intense psychological resistance. This transforms a frustrating hard-coded restriction into a deep role-playing choice.

Anomaly (The Nature of Horror)

• The Lesson from RimWorld: Anomaly’s approach, heavily inspired by the SCP Foundation, frames cosmic horror as a problem to be studied, contained, and ultimately overcome with technology. This “study and conquer” ethos can domesticate the horror, making the unknowable a manageable puzzle.
• ATET’s Evolution: Fallow is designed with a more Lovecraftian ethos. The horror is impersonal, existential, and fundamentally beyond conquest. It is a set of broken cosmic laws to be survived, not a monster to be put in a box. An Incarnation trapped in this reality doesn’t seek to build a better containment cell; they seek to find a “glitch” in the fabric of their prison to escape, or they adopt the Lacuna’s path of narrative stealth, trying to become so unremarkable that the universe forgets they exist. The goal is to preserve the sense of awe and dread, not to reduce it to a resource to be managed.

Odyssey (The World as a Character)

• The Lesson from RimWorld: The Odyssey expansion, with its introduction of unique geographical landmarks and artifacts, validates a core design principle: the world itself is a narrative character.
• ATET’s Evolution: This principle is woven into the very foundation of ATET’s design. We formalize this concept through two key terms:
  • Symbolic Loci: These are locations in a Tapestry that are saturated with Eidos from past events. They have their own history, atmosphere, and can exert tangible mechanical effects on agents within them. The shrine from The Nameless Ritual is a prototype for this system.
  • Living Histories: Artifacts in ATET are not static items with fixed stats. They are mobile Symbolic Loci, accumulating new layers of Eidos as they are used, passed down, or involved in significant events. Their stories evolve, and so do their powers.

In conclusion, while ATET owes a significant intellectual debt to the colony simulation genre, it uses the mechanics of simulation to explore the metaphysics of identity. It takes the focus from what characters do and places it squarely on how they perceive, believe, and remember, creating a story generator aimed not at the colony’s ledger, but at the soul of the colonist.