THRUM: Colony Civilisation Simulation

[mjsyn]

The architects of THRUM built the soul of the world first. Before the first stroke of ink was ever laid, they forged the invisible clockwork that governs how a kingdom breathes, how resources flow, and how iron meets shield. By focusing on the core simulation from the start, they ensured that every action has a real consequence, creating a true sandbox where the world reacts to your choices rather than a script.

Once this foundation was solid, the world took its shape: a rugged, medieval era etched in ink and shadow. While your journey begins among knights and castles, the simulation is designed to be a vast vessel—built with the potential to eventually welcome other civilizations or strange, ancient races from beyond the mists.

Your saga starts with just two lone souls standing upon an untamed region of the planet. From these two pioneers, you will sow the seeds of a colony, nurturing it through the seasons until your banners are carried by massive legions of warriors.

The world scales seamlessly with your ambition. You have the freedom to walk beside a single scout on a path of stealth or command a sea of steel through complex formations and tactical maneuvers. Whether you are managing the needs of a single hearth or the logistics of a global army, the simulation remembers every strike, every harvest, and every triumph.

THRUM is more than just a game of numbers; it is a living history waiting for your first move. How will your two pioneers be remembered?

in short..

I am developing a 3D colony and civilization-building game with a heavy emphasis on city management and large-scale warfare. The game features a unique, persistent planet that players can eventually conquer in its entirety.

Currently, my focus is on refining core gameplay systems. While the final art style is still being explored, the environment is fully 3D and built in the Godot engine. Although this is my first project using Godot, I have already successfully implemented a basic simulation covering solar system, colony growth and army command with complex formation management.

The game will meticulously track and archive an extensive array of player statistics, performance metrics, and real-time situational data, all while utilizing a streamlined, modular architecture designed for maximum simplicity and effortless modding.

Every unit is a persistent individual with procedural personality, social standing, and a contextual honor system, grounding their unique psychological responses and battlefield reactions in physics-driven weight and locomotion.

Targeting a 10k unit cap, the simulation remains fluid and responsive even at high time-scales

THRUM is inspired by games I really like, such as Jagged Alliance, Songs of Syx, Dwarf Fortress, and Medieval: Total War

Ideas and Feedback are welcome. More devlogs will follow here or in discord.

[phoenixdk]

@mjsyn

The game will meticulously track and archive an extensive array of player statistics, performance metrics, and real-time situational data

@mjsyn

Every unit is a persistent individual with procedural personality, social standing, and a contextual honor system, grounding their unique psychological responses and battlefield reactions in physics-driven weight and locomotion.

I personally love games where even individual little units / citizens /… have a name and some form of ‘personality’, but higher complexity doesn’t necessarily mean better.
I think your main challenge is going to be expressing the complex systems through individual units. It’s not hard to track them and do complex calculations - communicating it to the player in a meaningful way is.

Say one of 5000 units on screen is a combat veteran with personality X+Y/Z, some special flags, social standing level 7 with honor system value 19… how will that come across to the player? If the player doesn’t notice or understand these systems, they are essentially just adding perceived randomness (ie similar units behave dissimilarly for no discernable reason).

[mjsyn]

Thank you for the feedback. I totally agree that communicating complexity is a big hurdle. However, this philosophy is exactly why I want these deep systems. In classic tactical sims, you don’t care that much about a unit just because of a “Marksmanship” stat, you care because they complained about the heat, made a sarcastic comment, or barely survived a shootout.

My goal isn’t to make the player memorize 5,000 stat sheets, but to create “Hero” units organically. If a unit with a specific honor trait holds a bridge solo while others flee, that “perceived randomness” becomes a legendary story. The systems are there to provide the potential for those moments to happen naturally.

[OleNic]

Do you have stored DNA or embryos when you start? 2 colonists building a new world is far from the 200 souls bare minimum for genetic diversity.

Seriously, ambitious project but the kind of niche project that can find a loyal, paying public for years to come if you keep on developing after release and can build a community.

Break a leg, keep on space gamedevin’!

[mjsyn]

Once they ready and start the party they grow fast they also grow from small to tall.

i really like godot so far and it will be a long run, so i will try to keep the core game flexible and adaptive.

[mjsyn]

THRUM — Devlog #1

The clockwork is running. The first post spoke of what THRUM was built to become — a living world that breathes, remembers, and fights back. This is a report on what that world is actually doing right now, beneath the surface, in the parts that don’t make for pretty screenshots.

Time simulation crawls, pauses, and screams forward. You can watch two generations live and die in the time it takes to read this sentence, then drop back to real time and watch a single fight unfold blow by blow. The day/night cycle governs sleep schedules, stamina, and the quiet before a raid. Every unit is born with a name, ages, earns experience, gains perks, gets promoted, and eventually dies — sometimes in battle, sometimes in bed. They carry hunger, stamina, and morale. They need food. They need sleep. They have opinions about both.

Units talk to each other. Influence accumulates. Relationships compound into something the simulation didn’t explicitly script. Dynasties form, bloodlines branch, surnames pass to children, and groups fracture when the wrong person dies. The lineage system has already started generating things we didn’t plan. We consider this the point.

Melee and ranged combat are both in. Enemy AI pursues and reacts. Pathfinding works. Factions exist and carry their own grievances. A real skirmish is readable as something happening in the world, not just numbers changing behind a curtain. Buildings can be placed and rendered. What they produce, haul, and supply is the next chapter — that work is underway.

The world runs whether you are watching or not. What happens next is still being written.

[mjsyn]

THRUM — Devlog #2: The Weight of the World

The gears are grinding, and for the first time, they are beginning to hum in unison.

The dream of a world that remembers triumphs and mourns losses has crossed the threshold into a functional reality. The abstract logic of how a simulation should work has given way to the concrete architecture of how a world stays alive.

The simulation is no longer a collection of floating variables; it is a networked heartbeat. A stable, deterministic clockwork engine now governs the passage of time, ensuring that as the world scales from two pioneers to two thousand, the performance remains smooth. With the multiplayer foundation now active, the same living history can be shared, allowing multiple travelers to shape the same realm simultaneously.

The gameplay systems have matured into a cohesive, breathing loop:

• World Generation: The journey begins in the 3D planet viewer, where seeded noise generates unique worlds. Navigating these globes to select a landing site allows for a distinct start to every saga, with every region offering different biomes and conditions.

• Survival & Society: Units now navigate daily cycles. They manage hunger, energy, and morale, while social interactions and conversations trigger emergent events between neighbors.

• Combat & Command: A fully realized combat system handles both melee and ranged encounters, supported by a tactical AI that forces enemies to react to the battlefield rather than following a script.

• Legacy: The lineage and succession system is active, tracking bloodlines and family trees across generations, while clear management screens provide total visibility over the population.

The architecture is set, and the foundation is firm. This is not just a game, it is the soil in which a kingdom grows. Every unit on the map is now a living piece of a grand history. The simulation is awake, and the weight of the world is finally starting to press down upon it.

Rough Feature Overview

Core Engine

• Deterministic Tick Engine: Fixed-step simulation decoupled from frame rate.

• Multiplayer: Synchronized world state for shared simulation.

• Save/Load: Per-system serialization with backward compatibility.

• Mod Infrastructure: Namespaced modding with 7-phase loading.

• Seeded 3D Noise: Custom permutation tables for procedural world generation.

Gameplay Systems

• Combat System: Melee attack rolls and ranged ballistics.

• AI System: Throttled decision-making for enemy behavior.

• Resource & Needs: Full survival simulation (hunger, energy, morale).

• Social & Speech: Emergent interactions with mood-based speech bubbles.

• Reproduction & Dynasty: Lineage tracking, unit spawning, and succession.

• Landing Site Selection: Interactive planet-surface selection flow.

• Persistent Character Creator

Visuals & UI

• Planet: Seeded 3D globe with advanced biome and atmosphere rendering.

• Unit Renderer: MultiMesh instancing for high-performance population density.

• UI Dashboards: overlays for total realm management.

[mjsyn]

[conz3d]

I like the progress.
Would you tell us how much you used AI (LLMs or genAI) in the process?

[mjsyn]

I use AI as much as I find it useful for the coding side. For me, it’s simply a tool. While I can read and understand code fine, I’m not fluent in writing C# from scratch.
I use DeepSeekFlash4 specifically to translate my own game designs into raw C# code. Since the game is entirely code-driven, this workflow helps me keep the architecture highly modular and adaptive. Im not even at the point to decide what art direction i want to go and what will be possible with godot. In the end it is super fun to prototype and learning on the way.

Some unit control stuff:

There is basic selection and click to move for units (every system is dynamic working with more or less selected units.

Some Waypoint system for more specific routes:

And a pure direct control WASD mode:

Units can be assigned to custom groups and have a commander:

With the commander it is possible to choose various formation presets and also adjust spacing on them and such, including creating/save custom ones:

Some tests with abilities and slowmo (as of now there is pause, slowmo, 1x, 2x,4x,10x - 100000x) time control wise:

[phoenixdk]

The controls look great! And very natural movement, for being blocks. I feel like they have character already

[mjsyn]

Due to that every unit has different size weight fitness age and also what they wear has impact on speed agility due to the physics and I don’t need to script it as it happens like you say in a natural way.