🕯️ Aether Garden
The World That Remembers and Lives, long after you leave
▶ Enter the Realm
Built by Kavya Bhand & Aadi Joshi
Build Small Hackathon, Thousand Token Wood track
Most AI demos have amnesia
You type a prompt. You get a character sheet. You close the tab. The thing you made stops existing - like it was never real, which, fair, it wasn't.
Aether Garden is the opposite.
It's a persistent fantasy realm where every visitor leaves a mark, the simulation keeps running while you sleep, and the UI is - literally - a leather-bound book you have to open before you're let in.
No dashboard. No tab that says "Chat."
You turn pages. ❧
📖 The Living Tome
Six spreads. One persistent world.
| Spread | What you'll find |
|---|---|
| 🗺️ The Realm | An SVG map of eight sacred places, a live chronicle, and a "Realm Pulse" ticker showing what happened while you were away |
| 🚪 Explore the Realm | Step into a location - a Three.js diorama you walk through (WASD on desktop, an on-screen joystick on mobile) |
| 📜 Book of Ages | Every arrival, meeting, world event, and milestone, written in styled prose - the world's permanent memory |
| 👥 Souls of the Garden | Every summoned soul, with full backstory, goals, fears, and an evolving memory of what's happened to them |
| 🕸️ Bonds & Alliances | A 3D web of relationships the simulation forged on its own, without asking anyone's permission |
| ✦ Summon a New Soul | Describe something strange. The Oracle gives it a name, a face, a home, and - eventually - enemies |
Open the cover. Watch the prologue type itself out. Enter the Realm. Close the book when you're done.
Yes, the book closes. Yes, it has a back cover. We are serious about the bit.
✦ Summon Something Strange
"A wizard" is forgotten. "A wizard who collects the sound of doors closing" is remembered.
You describe what you're bringing into the world. MiniCPM3-4B, running on Modal, returns structured JSON - name, appearance, backstory, goals, fears, personality, greeting, and a sacred home location.
The soul is validated, persisted to SQLite, logged in the Book of Ages, and dropped onto the map as a glowing dot at their new home.
You also get a Soul Card - a 1200×675 share image. The viral artifact. Post it. Pretend you discovered them.
🌙 The World Lives Without You
Every hour, whether anyone is watching:
- One world event fires - cosmic, social, or historical, the model's choice
- 2-4 entity interactions happen, location-weighted and relationship-aware
- Memory compression runs for everyone involved
- Lifecycle transitions occur - souls go dormant, become legendary, or dream in the Valley
- New Book of Ages entries are written
world.dbis backed up to a private Hugging Face Dataset
Nobody scripts the encounters.
Remove the model and you have a SQLite file full of vibes. The AI is load-bearing.
A blind cartographer you summoned at 2am can meet someone else's Crystal Tree at 4am. You find out when you open the Book.
🛠️ How It's Built
The HF Space runs CPU-only. All inference and simulation live on Modal serverless GPUs - we had $250 in credits, two jobs, one brain.
Modal Endpoints
| Job | Model | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 🧠 Inference | openbmb/MiniCPM3-4B |
Entity generation, interactions, and world events - all structured JSON |
| 🎨 Portraits | SDXL-Turbo | Soul faces for cards and diorama cutouts |
| ⏰ Scheduled Tick | Same MiniCPM stack | Hourly run_world_simulation - the world keeps breathing |
Entity generation is one shot: visitor description in, validated EntityProfile out. JSON parse fails? Retry at lower temperature. Still fails? The Oracle apologizes - in character.
The Hourly Tick - A 7-Step Pipeline
1. Load state → current day, active souls grouped by location
2. World event → one AI-generated event, written to the Book
3. Interactions → 2–4 pairs meet, weighted toward Ember Crossroads
4. Memory updates → every involved soul's memory is rewritten, ≤150 words
5. Dream fragments → dormant souls in the Valley occasionally dream
6. Lifecycle → active → dormant → legendary transitions
7. Persist → advance the day, recount locations, back up to HF
This is why the world feels alive - history accumulates, relationships form, and souls change based on what happened to them, with zero user input.
🔗 Links
🌐 Repository · 👤 Kavya Bhand · 👤 Aadi Joshi
The Realm remembereth all things. Close the cover - until thou returnest. ❧