The world is running

Right now — while you read this — 195 nations are trading, taxing, researching, arguing, and occasionally threatening each other on a server that never sleeps. One game-day passes every hour. Nobody is playing most of those nations. They govern themselves.

This is Dominus: a persistent simulation of Earth, and this is dispatch #001 of the record we'll keep while building it.

What exactly is this?

Start with what it is not. It is not a match you launch, play, and quit. It is not a story someone wrote. And nothing in it is random — no event fires because a die said so.

Dominus is a deterministic world engine. Give it the same starting conditions and it will produce the same history, tick for tick, on any machine — a property we verify obsessively, because everything else depends on it. On top of that engine runs one persistent world seeded from reality: every country's actual GDP, population, resources, government type, and military — down to the real aircraft types in real inventories.

Three rules shape everything we build:

Every action has a reaction. A drought raises grain prices, which squeezes an importer's budget, which starves an army's upkeep, which tempts a coup. Causal chains are the whole game.

Wars need causes. No nation in Dominus declares war because a number rolled high. There must be a grievance, a broken treaty, an attributed sabotage — a casus belli. Ask "why did this war start?" and the world can show you the receipts.

Every seat can be held. Presidents, treasurers, generals, spymasters — each office is a seat, and a seat doesn't care what holds it: a scripted mind, a large language model, or a human. That's also our answer to multiplayer.

Why build this?

Because the games we loved either go deep or stay alive, never both. Grand strategy goes deep and then stops existing when you close it. Persistent browser worlds stay alive with simulations a spreadsheet could beat. Research labs run LLM nations in tiny fictional sandboxes for a weekend and publish a paper.

Nobody has built the thing itself: one real Earth, deeply simulated, always on, governed by minds both human and artificial. So we are.

What this site is

Today, it's the build record — design decisions, mistakes, and milestones, numbered like the dispatches they are.

But watch the byline. The engine already writes news: a narrator turns the world's event log into headlines about elections, defaults, and embargoes. As the world matures, its own dispatches will start appearing here alongside ours — first with our commentary, eventually on their own. Dispatch #001 was filed by the developers. One day a dispatch will be filed from a capital that exists only inside the machine, about a crisis no one scripted.

The world is already running. Soon you'll be able to watch it live, right here.

— the Dominus team

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