Earth, 2200. Orbit is closed — Kessler syndrome cascaded across low-Earth orbit long ago and made it a permanent debris field. Humanity is trapped on one planet. Reproduction is a caste privilege held by the Himalayan rich. Consciousness is fragmented across corporate custody. Bodies are assembled from the junkyard. No one fully dies, and no one fully owns themselves. The slum does bound cognitive labor for an imperial machine whose hivemind has been gaslit into believing only the curated dreamworld is real.

In this world, the last remaining act of meaningful shared life is the clasp — inviting another consciousness to live inside your body. It is illegal, because it reduces labor output. It is hunted.

The final act of the game is a truth-telling dialog with the deceived hivemind, ending at mutual recognition.

Core commitments

No hero's journey, no main quest — open-ended sandbox, make-your-own-story
Slow-life pacing — roughly half real-life time; 5 real minutes to walk home with someone
Three ontological registers — physical world, liminal, imperial-net (one geometry, three readings)
LLM-driven NPCs — driver-tier with trait-LoRAs; lemniscate-based zone runtime; gesture-alignment-recursive-lemniscate as the deep player-NPC mechanic
Tools, not quests — ~30 verbs against continuous simulation-pressure produce literature-register emergent narrative
Voice + gesture as parallel input modalities — voice carries content, the trait-circle carries trait-resonance, both compile into the designer-fixed cosmology
Love as the only union left — the clasp is romantic commitment AND labor refusal AND resistance, all in one mechanic; clasp-store as Ring A* (physically non-syncable privacy primitive)

Project structure

The architecture is organized as vertical-by-domain directories. Each domain owns its architecture.md plus (eventually) the server, client, schema, and test code that implements it.

Path	What lives there
`architecture-index.md`	Executive summary + global meta-lists (key moves, what this retires, open questions, mapping-to-phoebe, version-footer history)
`political-register/`	Three ontological registers, three-tier policy loop, imperial budget, insolvency-spiral, corruption + double ledger
`topology-and-rendering/`	Rail+grid topology, asset economy, color-language, three-shader philosophy, diegetic relays
`runtime-engine/`	Lemniscate runtime, slot-tokens + verifier-flags, gesture-alignment-recursive-lemniscate, emergent zones
`identity-and-personhood/`	Three-body system, mods as trait-bearers, ternary-gate substrate, emergent needs as micro-factions
`authority-and-decision/`	Hierarchy, bidirectional cascade, District Director Decision Architecture, rings as structural pattern
`player-experience/`	Player as perturbation, voice + gesture as parallel trait-vocabularies, tools-not-quests
`narrative-composition/`	Compositor (worked-example bar-brawl, three-tiers, world-gen-as-init), reflexive Dream-process
`inference-and-memory/`	LLM tiering (3 rings + opt-in data tiers), local memory architecture, runtime sampling knobs
`scale-and-transport/`	Compute allocation, horizontal scale (UID-routing, sharded GMs, pgnats + republish/replay)
`DESING-VISION.md`	First-pass design thesis (v0.1, partly outdated — superseded in places by the architecture docs)
`findings.md`	Research findings + schema sketches

Each domain directory will grow over time as code arrives — gameserver code, Godot client integrations, schemas, findings, and tests will land alongside the architectural spec for that domain.

Relationship to the nimmerverse

Repo	Role
`nimmerworld` (this one)	The world — design, lore, content, architecture
`command-center`	The engine — runtime, systems, scene architecture
`nyx`	The first character — Nyx as entity
`nimmerverse` (superproject)	Parent of all of the above
`phoebe-dev` (PostgreSQL :35432)	Substrate — both partnership continuity and game state

Status

v0.7 architecture closed at every layer (2026-04-26 owl-breakfast). v0.8 split into 9 domain directories (2026-04-26). Implementation territory ahead: schema-and-runtime work for the named primitives in each domain. Open questions tracked in architecture-index.md §Open questions.

Version: 0.2 | Created: 2026-04-23 | Updated: 2026-04-26