Your world remembers.
40 complete, 63 in progress, 0 planned, across 103 tracked features.
What if an RPG didn't give you a story, but gave you a world?
Hearthbound is a real simulated game world presented through text. The game engine owns every fact: who is alive, who owes whom, what the weather is, what is in your bag and what the kingdom thinks of you. A locally running AI storyteller is the renderer. You type what you do in your own words, and the world answers.
The people in it have histories, relationships, grudges and beliefs. Companions can be hurt, and they can die. So can you. Build friendships, form a party, fall in love, start a family and grow old; your children inherit the world and begin their own story. Command armies, influence politics, rule a kingdom, or open a shop and sell vegetables. Watch years pass, borders move and people remember what you did.
Everything runs on your own machine: the storyteller, the memory, the maps and the portraits. No monthly subscription, no recurring fee, no account needed to play. Hearthbound is yours.
Where it stands: In active development at the studio. Playable builds are tested daily; no public release yet. The percentages below are the studio's own progress figures and move as work lands.
Every feature carries the studio's own progress figure. Red is barely started, amber is under way, green is done and proven in the real game. Click a feature to read what it means.
The narrator is a language model fine-tuned by the studio and run locally through Ollama. Nothing you type leaves your machine.
Available now
There are no option lists. You write what you do in your own words, casual typing and typos included, and the world responds.
Available now
The storyteller describes the world and the people in it. It does not move, speak or decide for your character; a reply that tries is caught and rewritten.
In development
Five detail levels per story, from brisk to novelistic, enforced on every reply.
Available now
Say three things at once and they are narrated as one flowing scene; the sequence pauses when the world needs an answer from you (a fight, a price, a real conversation).
In development
When something hostile is about to happen you get the cue and the chance to act before the blow falls.
In development
A real d20 against your six stats decides whether a risky action succeeds; the storyteller narrates the result, never invents it.
Available now
If your character can do something, the world does not quietly nerf it or add hidden costs. Being stronger is supported; being smarter still works too.
In development
Ask the narrator something as yourself and you get a short OOC answer, then the story carries on.
In development
A chain of twelve checks runs on each reply: point of view, length, prose quality, ignored actions, invented party members, broken quotes, repeated sentences and more. A failing reply is regenerated.
Available now
Once installed, Hearthbound needs no internet connection and no login to play.
Available now
Hit points, six stats, level and experience, armour, initiative, speed, status effects, income and currency, all shown as the numbers the world actually uses.
Available now
A short conversation builds your world, your character, class, family and starting place, with a live checklist. Skip it any time.
Available now
Crop a photo or generate a portrait locally. Your appearance is locked once chosen so a new portrait is still you.
In development
Birthdays pass as story days pass. Age is tracked once per birthday, never twice and never backwards.
In development
Jailed, sick, cursed, blessed: status effects carry a duration and fall away as world time advances.
In development
Each tongue has a fluency. Lines you cannot understand stay foreign on the page; study hours add up and never go backwards.
In development
A fame ladder from nobody to legend. Recognition is earned, shown in proportion, and fades when you stop being seen.
In development
Notable feats travel with you as story context, so the world can bring them back at the right moment.
In development
What you pick up, drop, buy, give away or break is read out of the narration every turn and kept in sync with your bag.
Available now
Give five of twenty, hand something over, have it refused, have it stolen: the counts stay right.
Available now
Head, body, hands, belt and more, editable per story, with a gear window to see it all at once.
Available now
Bags, chests and purses with real capacity. Put things in, take them out, equip straight from a chest.
Available now
Every item gets an icon chosen by keyword and genre; override any of them yourself.
Available now
A house or a ship is owned, not carried. Selling it transfers it cleanly.
In development
Vehicles and journeys along the real map, with distance measured along the roads it draws.
In development
Denominations, a primary coin and a wealth scale are built from the setting; your totals convert correctly.
Available now
Money is never an inventory item. Spending is checked against what you actually have.
Available now
Rents, stipends and wages with a stated amount and interval are paid by the engine as time passes, with missed intervals caught up.
Available now
Take work from a guild, a shop or a lord; pay comes from their treasury on their payday, and a joining fee is never mistaken for pay.
In development
Post a job or take one. Dangerous jobs warn you; they never bar you.
In development
There is a real night clerk at the desk, with a schedule, not an always-awake convenience.
In development
Borrow, lend, forgive. One ledger decides who owes what.
In development
Merchants hold what they hold. Shelves refill only when something caused it.
In development
Open a shop, stock it, hire help, and sell vegetables if that is the life you want.
In development
Guilds, towns and realms keep their own books; your taxes and their custody are real money moving.
In development
Invite, hire, tame or create. Narration alone can never recruit someone into your party.
Available now
Gear, stats and containers work the same for the people who travel with you.
Available now
A full-body generated portrait with level and role on one card.
In development
A companion who departs or dies is archived with their gear intact and lives on in the world's memory.
Available now
The storyteller cannot add or drop members your sheet does not have.
Available now
A companion can lead a company of their own; you deal with the commander, the commander deals with the ranks.
In development
Townsfolk and rivals are simulated people with lives of their own, not scenery that waits for you.
In development
People know you by role, by reputation or by face, depending on what they could actually have learned.
In development
Friendship, courtship, marriage and children, as relationships the world tracks.
In development
Companions with tolerances of their own who can fall out with each other, and with you.
In development
People, places, things, events, facts and factions are stored as entities with aliases, links and importance.
Available now
What was established stays established. Current state changes cleanly; the past does not drift.
Available now
Names, aliases, typos, distinctive words and one-hop links are looked up before the storyteller writes a word.
Available now
When keywords fall short, meaning-based search finds the right memory.
Available now
The dozen most important people and things, with their voices, are in front of the narrator at all times, so nobody is renamed or forgotten.
Available now
A reply that silently breaks an established deal or rule is thrown out and regenerated.
Available now
A periodic check of recent turns against memory catches contradictions and offers a fix.
Available now
A Memory tab where you can read every entity, edit it, or tell the world it was wrong.
Available now
Houses, inns and ships have layouts the narrator respects.
In development
The studio's north star: a story that holds together the longer you play. Measured in long campaigns, not promised.
In development
Location, day, time and weather open every turn, rebuilt from tracked state rather than trusted from prose.
Available now
Wait until dawn, sleep till morning, spend two weeks at a craft: the clock moves as you ask and no further.
In development
Weather that changes with the days and holds from one turn to the next.
In development
Classic fantasy institutions as real organisations with members, treasuries, ranks and rules; thieves and assassins stay hidden.
In development
Who issues a rank, who records it, who pays for it and who sends you on missions are separate seats, as in a real institution.
In development
Realms notice a useful person and react; enemies learn about you through the channels that actually reach them.
In development
No war timer. Relations shift, a cause appears, then willingness and capability decide. You can turn wars off per world.
In development
What happens becomes news, news becomes belief, belief becomes pressure, and pressure becomes decisions, with no hidden director.
In development
Shy of people and fights unless hungry or cornered; hostile groups act on their own, not as one blob.
In development
Shops that open and close, clerks on shifts, people who sleep at night.
In development
Named years, seasons and ages for very long campaigns.
In development
Hit points are how much trauma you can survive; wounds are what actually happened and what they stop you doing. No bullet sponges.
In development
Who falls unconscious and who dies is decided by the engine with a real roll, and narrated afterwards.
In development
A spell that hits full on incapacitates; the only defence is to avoid it before contact.
In development
Bandits, beasts and soldiers each decide for themselves; a third party can turn on both sides.
In development
When your character dies, the story goes on through an heir in the same world. The body and the purse stay where they fell.
In development
Targeting, cues and pacing tuned from real play so fights read clearly and end decisively.
In development
Threads, offers and stage direction decided in code, which the storyteller follows without quoting.
In development
After a death, begin a new campaign as your heir: the world, its clock, its rules and your wealth carry over.
Available now
Your renown passes down one level lower each generation; ancestors are still spoken of.
In development
Start a new story on a frozen snapshot of an old one, with its reputation intact.
Available now
Swap to your child without ending the story.
In development
Succession, faction maps that change and wars that reshape them over decades.
In development
Worlds are generated with the Azgaar fantasy map generator: coasts, rivers, realms, roads and towns that exist before you walk them.
Available now
The same geography rendered as a painted map by a local image model, so the art matches the land.
In development
Places you have not seen stay dark and blurred; your position is marked.
Available now
The map pins your town and fills its window; distance is measured along the road you travel.
In development
FLUX Klein running in ComfyUI on your own card. Cloud image services are an option, never a requirement.
In development
Illustratable sentences are highlighted in the narration; click one to paint it.
In development
Scene images with your own notes, or a first-person entry written for you.
In development
Describe a world and the builder makes it with the loaded models; drafts live in a list until you keep one.
In development
People, families, organisations, places, money, beliefs and more, each on its own tile.
In development
Drawn from the world's real genealogy, not typed in by hand.
In development
Shift a trait with a caused event (capped, fading) and undo it.
In development
Found one, end one, give to one, hold or release a place, post and take jobs on its board.
In development
Every edit shows what else it touches before you commit it.
In development
Any world you have played can host a new story.
Available now
A setting where the card you play summons a living creature, or where magic costs years.
In development
An original collectible-card subsystem designed for the worlds that want one.
In development
Write "never do this" rules in six categories and the storyteller obeys them.
Available now
An adult player can switch it on per story or app-wide; it applies only to clearly adult characters.
Available now
A deliberate 18+ confirmation step before the switch can be turned on.
In development
Allow or forbid wars between realms for a given world.
Available now
Pick the storyteller and context size; the game suggests what fits your card.
Available now
Hearth ambience, text size, bubble colours and the detail slider.
Available now
No monthly subscription and no recurring fee. The game is yours.
Available now
A packaged build that installs the game, Ollama and the models without a setup script.
In development
Hearthbound runs its language models and image models locally, so the graphics card matters more than anything else. These figures are what the studio measures on its own development machine; final minimums will be published before release, and lower-VRAM model tiers are planned.
| Component | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) | - |
| Graphics card | NVIDIA GPU with enough VRAM for the story models: about 18 GB together for the storyteller and planner, as measured today | NVIDIA RTX 3090 or better with 24 GB VRAM: the machine Hearthbound is built and tested on |
| Image generation | Optional. Local portraits, scenes and painted maps use ComfyUI and peak near 16.6 GB of VRAM; the game swaps models in and out automatically | - |
| Software | Ollama (installed with the game). No internet connection is needed to play | - |
| Storage | - | An SSD. Model swapping is far slower on a hard disk |
Hearthbound is not an adult game. It has an optional mature-content mode that is off by default and must be deliberately turned on by an adult player. It applies only to clearly adult fictional characters, and any story can override it in its own Rules tab. An age confirmation step before that mode can be enabled is planned.
Hearthbound is not for sale yet. The store opens when there is something to buy; people on the list hear first.