The Rules of the Valley

The basics

• The world persists. The valley is saved continuously. When a show ends, the next one picks up exactly where it stopped, so every visit finds the world further along.
• Time. One game day lasts about 75 seconds. A year (four seasons) is about 15 minutes, and a generation is about 6 hours of streaming.
• It starts with nobody in charge. A new world begins as scattered lone wanderers. Everything after that, from the first band to the first empire, has to be earned.
• Nothing is scripted. Even the drama is real. If the valley goes quiet for about ten days, the world nudges something already in motion (a prepared army marches, an outlaw band strikes, an avenger takes up a dagger), and whatever follows plays out by the ordinary rules.
• The AI is real too. Each people's ruler is an AI with a personality. The narration is AI-generated. When the AI is slow or unavailable, a rule-based council makes the same kinds of choices.

The ladder: wanderers to empires

Every group sits on one rung of a ladder. Groups climb by growing, discovering and settling, and they fall back when they lose towns or people. A group that loses every town goes back to roaming.

A stage is kept through small dips and lost only to a real decline. Bands split when they outgrow themselves, and friendly roaming groups can merge.

Government

Bands are led by their elders, tribes and villages by a chieftain, chiefdoms by a chief. A kingdom chooses a monarchy, a council or a theocracy according to its culture, and an empire is ruled by an emperor. Events can change this: an oligarchy of the rich, a dictator who seizes power, a warlord, or a council installed by revolution.

People and lineage

Genes

Everyone carries six inherited genes: strength (hunting, fighting, carrying), endurance (cold, hunger, disease), intellect (discovery, learning), sociability (bonding), fertility and longevity. A child gets the average of its parents' genes plus a small mutation. Hard winters, famine, war and plague take the less suited more often, so peoples really do drift: a northern tribe can grow measurably hardier over the generations.

Skills, bonds and families

Seven skills (forage, hunt, build, craft, farm, fight, lore) improve with practice, faster with intellect, and children start with a share of their parents'. People near each other grow bonds, twice as fast when they meet on a road. Close bonds become partners, partners have children, and every family line is tracked. Adulthood comes at 14, old age at 60.

Trades

In a settled people every adult follows a trade: farmer, herder, fisher, woodcutter, mason, miner, smith, weaver, builder, merchant or scholar. A child coming of age usually takes up a parent's trade, otherwise one the town needs. Some work needs its tradespeople: a forge makes tools only as fast as there are smiths. Soldiers return to their trade when they're sent home.

Wealth and class

Workers are paid for what they bring home, wealth earns more wealth, and fortunes pass to children. Partners share one household fortune, and the well-born prefer to marry their own kind. From this come classes (noble, oligarch, merchant, commoner, poor, outcast), and a very unequal people grows a grievance. A very unequal market kingdom can fall to an oligarchy.

Reputation, houses and feuds

• Renown and infamy come from deeds. Enough of either earns an epithet from what a person did most: "the Liberator", "the Butcher", "the Oathbreaker". Heroes have far more renown than infamy; villains the reverse.
• Great houses are founded by anyone who makes their mark: a ruler, a prophet, a rebel, an outlaw chief. Children inherit the more famous house of their two parents, so great families and their rivalries last for generations.
• Succession: chiefs, monarchs, emperors, warlords and dictators pass power down their house. Councils choose on merit and renown, theocracies the most devout, oligarchies the richest.
• Blood feuds: when someone is killed, their partner and children swear vengeance on whoever was responsible. Unsettled grudges pass to the next generation. An avenger is likelier to lead a revolt, take an assassin's contract, or push their people to war.

Land and nature

• The land is generated from a seed: a valley ringed by mountains, with hills, forests, marsh, lakes and rivers, set inside a much wider world of mainland, coasts, seas and islands, with other cradles of wanderers far across the mainland.
• Climates: a cold northern taiga, a temperate heartland and a dry south, with a soil fertility map. Long climate swings (cold or warm ages lasting hundreds of days) change harvests and winters and push peoples to migrate.
• Seasons: autumn brings the richest harvest, and winter grows nothing and bites hardest. Farms tire their soil unless watered or rested.
• Herds of deer and bison roam with the seasons, breed up to what the land supports and flee hunters. A hunted-out region stays empty a long while.
• Wolves prey on herds and on people caught alone.
• Renewal: wild plants spread in spring and wear out under heavy foraging; forests regrow; stone and ore wait in the hills, but every mine's vein is finite.
• Weather: clear days, rain, storms, snow, fog and heat. Rarer conditions include droughts, bountiful years, festivals, fevers, wildfires and waves of migrants.
• Disasters: floods wreck farms and roads near rivers, earthquakes crack walls near the hills, blizzards sweep the taiga, and locust swarms strip the fields.
• Plague starts in crowded, hungry or marshy towns and travels with traders and armies. The sick can't work and may die; survivors are immune for a while. Medicine halves the harm, and a quarantine stops trade and slows the spread.

Discovery and knowledge

Discovery by doing

Early discoveries aren't bought. What people do every day makes a breakthrough likelier, faster for clever people. Lone wanderers can discover things too and carry what they know. Peoples in contact (neighbours at peace, trade partners) learn from each other.

Research

Settled peoples then research with knowledge, and only once the foundations are known.

Inventions

Settled peoples with scholars invent things that fit their knowledge, their land and their needs: a water wheel needs a river, terraces need hills, and war breeds weapons. Each invention is credited to a named person, has a real effect, and is slowly copied by neighbours. An AI gives each one its own name in its people's style. There are nearly thirty, among them:

• The plough (+15% farms)
• The water wheel
• The windmill
• Irrigation canals
• Terraced fields
• Beekeeping
• The loom (+30% trade)
• Paper and the abacus
• The aqueduct (less plague)
• The lighthouse
• The compass
• The blast furnace
• The printing press (+40% study)
• The telescope
• The mechanical clock
• The crossbow
• Chain mail and plate armour
• Saddle and stirrup
• The war chariot
• Catapult, trebuchet and cannon
• Fireworks

Ages and wonders

The valley moves through ages: Wanderers, Bands, Fire, Tribes, Villages, Chiefdoms, Kingdoms, then the Bronze, Iron and Classical Ages, the Age of Steel, the Age of Printing and the Age of Invention. From the Age of Kingdoms on, each age has a wonder to raise: the Great Obelisk, the Grand Library, the Sky Garden, the Colossus, the Great Cathedral, the Grand Observatory and the Great Clocktower. The first people to finish one earns extra glory.

Towns and roads

Buildings

Towns stay the size of their people

• A town with fewer than 4 residents for 15 days sees its last families move to their people's nearest town, and it is abandoned.
• A town left empty for 10 days returns to the wild, leaving a named ruin on the map. A people's last town is never abandoned this way.
• Buildings beyond what a town can use or keep up fall into ruin one by one.
• If a capital empties or dwindles while another town thrives, the capital moves.

Roads

Roads are built, not trodden. A settled people with more than one town plans a network linking each town back toward the capital along the easiest ground, sparing the woods where it can. Builders lay it a stretch at a time in timber, and in stone once they know Masonry; a bridge needs The Wheel. No road is laid while timber or stone is dear, and roads cost timber to keep up: one that nobody maintains overgrows and is lost.

• A step on a road costs half a step on open ground, and a quarter of one through woods or hills. Armies and caravans move faster on them.
• People who pass on a road grow closer twice as fast. Travellers of peoples at peace share news and learning; travellers of rival peoples may come to blows; outlaws rob laden travellers.

Markets and coin

Goods

Raw goods are food, wood, stone, ore and metal (smelted from ore and charcoal at a forge). Finished goods each have a real use:

• Tools, made by smiths, help workers gather and build faster, and wear out.
• Wool and cloth: sheep on a pasture give wool; weavers make cloth, which means less firewood burnt and better spirits in winter, and it's prized in trade.
• Salt from salt pans keeps food from rotting. It's dear inland and a mainstay of trade.

A people can only keep what its hands can guard: stores beyond a limit set by its numbers slowly rot, rust or go missing.

Markets and prices

Every settled people has a market with a coin price for every good. Supply (what is brought in) and demand (what people consume and want to put by) move the price a little each day, so prices have a history: a bad harvest or a siege sends bread up, a glut brings it down. Prices decide the terms of trade, which work people turn to, and when goods are worth stealing.

Money

• Wages and the cost of living: workers are paid for what they bring in and pay for their bread, fire, cloth and salt. When prices climb, the poor can't keep up and their towns grow angry.
• Taxes and the treasury: the ruler taxes wages. A council or oligarchy takes a little, a theocracy a tithe, a warlord or dictator a heavy hand. The treasury pays the soldiers; unpaid soldiers grumble and some go home.
• Coin is struck from metal at a forge when the ruler orders it. Debased coin strikes more. More coin chasing the same goods means dearer goods, so minting brings inflation.
• Credit: a ruler who can't pay the soldiers may borrow from the great houses at interest. A crown that can't pay its interest defaults: the lenders lose their money, a coup grows likelier, and the next loan costs more.

Economic policy

Each settled people follows one policy at a time, reviewed every 40 days:

Caravans

Trade isn't magic. A trade agreement sends a laden cart, with a guard or two if soldiers can be spared, along the real road between capitals. It trades at both peoples' prices and carries the payment home. On the way, outlaws may ambush it, an enemy's land means seizure, and a third people's tolls take a share. Merchants also set out on their own when their people has a glut of something a peaceful neighbour finds dear.

The reach of a realm

A spread-out kingdom pays for it. Goods from far towns lose a share on the haul to the capital, far towns' lords keep part of their taxes, and every distant town costs coin to govern. A neglected town grows angry. A finished road halves the distance that counts. The ruler's answers: move the capital, or release a far, restless town as a vassal.

Scarcity and greed

• Theft: when bread is dear, the poor and hungry steal from the stores, or from a neighbour's. A caught thief may be forgiven, beaten, or on a second offence driven out to the outlaws.
• Flight: hungry families leave for a well-fed neighbour who will take them.
• Desperate raids: a starving people may raid a neighbour's full granaries without any quarrel.
• Profiteers: rich families hoard grain and sell it at famine prices.
• A ruler's hand in the stores: some rulers skim the common stores. Nobody knows at first, but the more is taken, the likelier the scandal.
• Coveting: a people that lacks what a neighbour has in glut resents it.

Culture and faith

Values and traditions

Five values drift with experience: martial (wars won), mercantile (trade), spiritual (disasters survived), communal (hardship shared) and curious (discoveries). They slowly relax toward the middle, so a culture reflects its recent past. When a value runs high a people may adopt a tradition (four at most):

Faiths

Religions are founded by real prophets, and their tenets come from the founders' strongest values. A faith is held by a share of each people, spreads by contact, can become a people's state faith, splits in schisms and is fought over at holy sites. Shared faith eases relations; different faiths add friction.

In a real crisis (famine, plague, defeat, a crushed uprising, a tyrant) a zealous young adult, often of a prophet's line, may be hailed as the Chosen One. Followers gather, and the movement either takes power, dies with its martyr, or fades when the crisis passes.

Ideologies

Inside every settled people, movements rise and fall with what it lives through. Each person holds a creed learned from their parents and shaped by their class and their suffering. When the ruling idea loses the people, reform or revolution follows.

Zealots harden when the other side is strong, and a people split between two opposed creeds is divided.

Norms

The unwritten rules of each people drift along eight spectrums: hospitality, sharing, justice, inheritance, elders, learning, outsiders and remembrance. A people might move from "strangers are turned away" to "every guest is fed and housed", or from "wrongs are avenged blood for blood" to "the law is written and equal for all". Shared norms ease relations between neighbours; differing ones make them uneasy.

Artifacts

Named objects with a history: relics of prophets, holy texts, crowns, masterwork blades, chronicles, idols, wonder treasures and captured banners. Each gives a small lasting benefit and changes hands when towns are captured or raided. When a people falls with no heir, its artifacts lie lost until someone finds them.

Leaders and ambitions

How leaders decide

Every few days each people reaches a decision point. The world lists every valid option, each with a score and a plain reason. The AI ruler, who has a personality (aggressive, cautious, mercantile, expansionist, scholarly, honourable, treacherous or a builder), knows the people's culture, faith, plan and history, picks one and explains it on stream. If the AI is slow, the council takes the best-scoring option. Sometimes chat decides instead (see Taking part).

The choices include growing, expanding, fortifying, research, trade, wonders, preparing for war, conquest, raids, suing for peace and alliances; for bands and tribes, foraging, hunting, migrating, exploring, welcoming wanderers and settling; and for a realm's ruler, taxes, borrowing, minting, economic policy, roads, borders, moving the capital and answering crises.

Plans, ultimatums and trust

• Plans: a leader turns their people's ambition into steps. To take a town, first arm until strong enough, then march. A plan that stalls is given up.
• Ultimatums: a stronger leader may demand tribute under threat of war. If the neighbour refuses, the threat must be backed with war within 15 days, or the bluff is called and the leader loses face.
• Trust: broken pacts, betrayals, refused peace and insults are remembered and summed up as how far each neighbour can be trusted.

Ambitions

Every settled people takes up one long goal that grows out of its history and character, and it steers its choices until won, lost or given up:

• Conquer a particular enemy town
• Reclaim a town it lost
• Avenge: see its ruler's sworn enemy dead
• Glory: raise a wonder
• Faith: convert other peoples
• Wealth: become the richest people
• Knowledge: be first to a discovery
• Grow: climb the next rung

The contest of the age

Every 96 days (about two hours on stream) comes the Reckoning. The people that achieved the most in that time (whose score grew most, with a bonus for each ambition achieved) is named Hegemon of the Age, and a new contest begins.

Diplomacy and statecraft

Any two peoples are at peace, allied, rivals, at war, or in a truce.

Pacts

• Trade agreement: regular caravans of each side's most plentiful goods.
• Non-aggression pact: neither raids nor wars on the other. Breaking it is a betrayal.
• Mutual defence: when one is attacked, the other sends food and turns on the attacker.
• Marriage ties: a young adult from each people joins the other, for lasting goodwill (and, one day, perhaps a claim to a throne).

Borders

Each settled people sets a border policy: open (anyone but an enemy at war), tolls (strangers pay food to pass), guarded (only friends, allies and trade partners) or closed (allies only; keeps plague out but stops trade). Neighbours resent gates shut in their faces. Town guards drive hostile foreigners out, a band camping on claimed land is ordered off, and an army marching across a third people's guarded land violates its borders, which that people remembers.

Vassals and overlords

A weak people may swear fealty to a strong neighbour, for protection or to end a losing war, and a strong people may demand it (a refusal is an insult remembered). A vassal pays tribute every 12 days and can't war on its overlord, who rides to war for it. When the overlord weakens, a vassal may break fealty, and other vassals may join the revolt.

Councils, alliances and holy wars

• Under a council or oligarchy, war needs a vote of the great men and women: militarists vote for it, merchants against war on a trading partner, the devout for war on unbelievers. A lost vote stops the war.
• When one people towers over the rest, the others fear it and draw together in a grand alliance.
• A devout people may wage holy war on neighbours of another faith.
• Two friendly roaming groups may merge when it clearly helps them.

War

Armies march across the real map, fight field battles, besiege walled towns and raid stores. Towns change hands with their land and buildings, and peoples can fall.

Arms

Soldiers carry the best weapons their people knows and can pay for in metal. Re-arming costs metal per soldier. The colour of a soldier's ring on screen shows their tier.

• Defence: walls, towers, Archery, Fortification and the crossbow help a town hold.
• The field: Horseback Riding, saddle and stirrup and the war chariot win battles in the open.
• Sieges: catapults, trebuchets and cannons cancel part of a town's walls.
• Peace: a clear victor takes a border town as well as tribute, and the loser will want it back.
• Splits: large, unhappy peoples can break apart in civil war.

Unrest and intrigue

Uprisings

Every town of 10 or more keeps an anger score from 0 to 100, fed by hunger, harsh tithes, war weariness, heavy conscription, plague, neglect and the people's general unrest. Festivals, Common Land, high morale and recent concessions calm it.

1. Protest at anger 45: the town's grievance is named on stream.
2. Uprising at anger 75: a rebel leader steps forward, rebels stop work and gather in the square, and the ruler has 5 days to crush the revolt or concede.
3. Outcome: crushed (rebels die, the leader is killed or flees to the outlaws, the town stays bitter); a concession (open the granaries, end the tithes, make peace, send soldiers home, tend the sick, self-rule, or the ruler steps down); an overthrow, if the capital wins; or a breakaway, if a distant town wins and becomes a new people.

Disputed thrones

• Pretenders: when a ruler dies, a rival great house or a passed-over old house may claim the crown. Support comes from real loyalties: the claimant's house, people with a grudge, zealots of an opposing creed. The new ruler can appease the claim or suppress it. Otherwise support decides: the pretender takes the throne, the realm splits in civil war, or the claim fizzles into exile.
• Foreign claims: if a member of the dead ruler's house lives abroad (marriage ties put them there), that people may press the claim, by a peaceful union of crowns or a war of succession.
• Coups: a weak or hated ruler can be challenged mid-reign by the head of a strong rival house.

Feuds, riots and defections

• House feuds: two great houses with blood between them fall to brawling, until a marriage makes peace, the feud burns out, or it becomes a claim on the throne.
• Riots: a hungry big town loots its stores; in a divided people, zealots of both creeds clash in the streets.
• Defecting towns: a distant, mistreated town near a stronger, friendlier neighbour may open its gates and change sides without a fight.
• Assassins: rival chiefdoms may send a killer after a leader, or a conspirator strikes at home. Guards, walls and towers make success less likely, and a killing usually comes out.
• Tyrants: a cruel ruler can seize power as dictator.

Outlaws

Once there is something to steal, hungry or restless people slip into the woods. Outlaw bands camp in forest or hills, raid storehouses, take in the desperate, and are hunted by peoples with soldiers. A band below two members scatters. Bands climb ranks by size:

• Gang (under 7): a few desperate people raiding for food.
• Warband (7+): fortifies its camp into a named hold and draws recruits: the poor of angry peoples nearby, and soldiers of a people that just lost a war.
• Horde (15+): led by a warlord, it demands tribute: pay or burn. The threatened people can pay, refuse (and face the horde in force) or offer a pardon.

And bands end by their deeds:

• Mercenaries: a people losing a war can hire a warband or horde. While paid it raids only the enemy; a paymaster who can't pay finds the swords turned on itself.
• A bandit kingdom: a horde that takes a weak town becomes a people. If it lasts 60 days without war, the valley recognises it, its lord is crowned, and it gains the tradition of Outlaw Blood.
• Pardon: the band lays down its arms and joins the people that offered it.
• Along the way a band may turn smuggler, running goods across closed borders, or pirate once ships sail nearby.

Pioneers and the sea

Pioneers

A crowded or curious people may send its most curious adults, with their partners and children, far away to open land. On arrival they found a new people that inherits the old one's knowledge and starts friendly toward its kin. This is how the world fills up beyond the first valley.

Seafaring

Very late in the game, Shipbuilding lets a people build a harbour on a sea.

• Sea trade: caravans between two harbours on the same sea sail instead of walking: much faster, no tolls and no highwaymen, but storms may sink them and pirates may take them.
• Island colonies: settlers sail to an unclaimed island and found a town where they make landfall.
• Pirates: an outlaw band on the coast takes to the sea, raiding coastal towns and shipping.

Storylines and legends

A storyline opens when something real begins one: a vow of vengeance, an uprising, a war, a Chosen One, a tyrant's reign, a dynasty, a people split by creed, an outlaw band, a humble person rising. It gathers beats as later events touch it and closes when an event ends it. Short storylines play out in minutes; long ones span hours or generations. The narrator, the Almanac and the camera follow the thread; nothing is made up.

Heroes and villains emerge from deeds. When someone with a remarkable life dies, they pass into the Hall of Legends, where their story is kept long after they're gone and recalled now and then by the narrator.

Every day also brings small happenings: a fat stag brought home, rats in the stores, a wedding feast, a hunter gored. They float over the camp ("+18 food") and nudge things a little.

Taking part from chat

Chat commands are free. Type them in the YouTube live chat.

Omen polls

Every so often chat chooses one of three omens with !1 !2 !3. Every message in chat also wakes the valley's spirits; when the meter fills, an omen poll opens at once.

The people decide

When a ruler faces an interesting choice (one with bold options, or an uprising to crush or appease), chat may get a minute to decide for them, at most once every eight minutes. If chat votes, its choice is final, even if the leader wanted something else.

Naming

When a band forms or a town is founded, chat suggests names with !name, then picks one of the three most suggested. Suggestions are moderated.

Your namesake

The first time you chat during a show, the next baby born in the valley may be named after you (your display name, moderated). Type !me to follow their life. The link to you lasts 30 days after you last chat; chat again to keep it, or the baby takes a name of the valley's own (see the privacy policy).

Predictions

One question is open at a time, drawn from the state of the world (who settles the first village, who discovers something first, whether a siege falls, whether a war breaks out soon) and resolved by what actually happens. Correct answers earn points on a monthly leaderboard; points reset at the start of each month.

Super Chats

Super Chats and Super Stickers are thanked on stream. A Super Chat can start with one command:

With no command (and for every Super Sticker) you adopt a villager if you have none, otherwise your villager's people receives a blessing.

Nudges only tilt the odds. They never decide a war or wipe out a people, and their durations are capped so they can't stack without limit. They're a thank-you, not a purchase; see the terms of use.

What's on screen

• The valley: wanderers in plain colours, each people in its own colour, with camps, towns, farms, roads, herds, wolves, armies and caravans moving on the map.
• The grand view: every few minutes the camera glides across the known world as a story map, with each people's name over its lands and pins where the big stories unfold.
• Focus mode: when something big happens, the camera stays with it and nothing interrupts until it's over.
• Leaders explain themselves: when a ruler makes a choice, you'll see what they chose and why.
• The Valley Almanac: pages on population, genes and evolution, culture, discoveries, the economy and markets, trades and classes, beliefs, legends, storylines, ambitions, relations and history.
• The narrator tells the story as it happens.