A medieval village lives inside a chest on your desk.
And yes, you can reach into the world inside:
talk to the villagers, bring them gifts
or help them fight off bandits.
A medieval village lives inside a chest on your desk. And yes, you can reach into the world inside: talk to the villagers, bring them gifts or help them fight off bandits.
Become a beta tester Watch the village For publishers and investorsThe village
Twenty to sixty people live in it. They sow and harvest, carry water, quarrel, marry, fall ill and grow old. Day follows night whether you are watching or not.
There is no pause, and there is no losing. A village can grow rich, starve or turn away from you — that is a story too.
Voice
Hold a key and speak into your microphone. The villager hears you and answers in their own voice and their own words — about the harvest, the tax, their family, or you.
English, Russian and Chinese from the start.
You: “What happened in the village last winter?”
Peter
Last winter the tax collector took our pence, and we prayed to the Lord above for bread that did not come.
Memory
Every villager keeps a memory of their own: what they saw, what they were told, what they only heard from a neighbour. Small things fade. Big ones stay for a lifetime and are passed on to their children.
A page from the memory of Isabella, 20, at the end of year 48 of a test run. Nothing on it was written by hand.
Gifts
Take something off your desk and drop it into the chest: a loaf, a knife, a candle, a coin. Bread can be shared or hidden. One knife in a village of sixty can start a quarrel that lasts a generation.
The game never tells you how often you may help. It answers with consequences.
How it is made
Under the voices is a working village: the simulation counts every loaf, every coin and every grudge. The AI only gives the villagers their words.
Harvests, taxes, sickness, births and deaths come from fixed rules, the same on every run. No language model decides who lives.
Each villager keeps files: who they are, what they remember, whom they love or blame. Small things fade by weight; big ones pass to their children.
With a 16 GB graphics card everything runs on your computer, voice included. Otherwise the villagers speak through our cloud, by subscription — with no advantage in the game.
20–60 villagers · voice both ways · 1.2 s to the first word (median, RTX 4080, in the built game)
Advanced mode
For those who want to play with the simulation itself. Switch it on in the settings and press F2: droughts, harvests, sickness, how fast faith grows and how long a grudge lasts — the laws of the village are sliders.
Only here the village shows itself in numbers: the faith of every villager, how much they depend on your gifts, how unequal the households are. Every change goes into the world’s journal; one button puts everything back.
The window of the game in a new world, before the first gift.
Mods
The world of The Chest is plain text: gifts, events, characters, the lore the villagers know, the words of the chronicle. Every new mod comes with instructions written for an AI agent.
Tell your agent — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor — what you want. It writes the mod, checks it and lets the village live a few years with it, without opening the game. Steam Workshop is planned for Early Access.
You: “Add a gift — a compass. The village should not understand it.”
$ thechest-sim mod new --id compass
compass/data/items.yaml
compass:
names: {en: "compass", ru: "компас", zh: "指南针"}
axes: {understanding: blackbox, fate: relic}
physical: {mass_g: 90, size_cm: 6}
claim_bias: {priest: 30, finder: 50}
$ thechest-sim mod check --mod compass
$ thechest-sim mod compare --mod compass --years 10
$ thechest-sim mod pack --mod compass --out workshop/
The compass is one of the examples in the modding kit. You upload to the Workshop yourself, from the game.
Beta
The Chest is playable. We are looking for players who will live with the village for a few evenings and tell us what they felt: who they talked to, what they gave, what the village did with it.
Windows PC. With a 12–16 GB graphics card the villagers think and speak on your computer; with a weaker one they speak through our cloud.
For publishers and investors
The Chest is in development and playable. If you publish games, invest in them or want to build something with us, write to the developer — we are glad to show the village and talk.