Six days ago I wrote down where Vivarium stood: nine phases finished, and the tenth five milestones in. That phase has closed, and so have five more after it. Fifteen phases are done.

The roadmap has also grown. It used to stop at four phases after the current one. It now lists everything I intend to finish before launch, which is fifteen more phases and a closed beta. More on that at the end.

Here is what that means if you were sitting down to play. The features page has the full list.

The world has things in it

Active World content closed at twenty-nine milestones, not the twenty I planned. It grew because the pieces turned out to need each other.

Merchants now hold stock at their own prices, and paying moves real money from your character to theirs. Encounters are rolled from how dangerous a place is, when you travel or wait, and never because a scene went quiet. Factions hold goals and pursue them. Rumours spread as things characters believe, never as things that are true. Characters hold jobs and are paid for them, and relationships between them drift as time passes. Locks have ratings you can pick against, and hunger, fatigue and health turn into conditions.

The table plays better

Play quality and first run went after the complaints I hear most from people who play AI roleplay seriously, and the ones I have myself.

The narrator no longer speaks or acts for your character, and you choose the point of view. The application counts the phrases the narrator leans on and steers it away from them next turn. When your provider refuses to write a scene, you are told it was a refusal, and it never becomes part of the story. While a turn runs, the screen says which stage it is in. Any narrator message can be kept with one tap on Remember this.

A readiness check now tells you whether a model can run the game before you start, and it states the rough cost first. A model that writes well but cannot give the strict answers the engine needs is marked Narration only. It still works, and you are told plainly what you give up.

One catalogue, and a way to play without a key

The catalogue is built. It holds the worlds I write for Vivarium. You can browse it, search it and preview a world before you start. Starter worlds are open to everyone. Larger worlds carry a Premium mark and come with the subscription. A subscriber can clone any of them and change the copy privately, or turn the world a story became into a world of their own.

The most useful thing I heard this month came from a friend who loves roleplay and had no idea what an API key was. Asking that player to open an account with an AI provider before they can play is asking them to leave.

So the subscription now comes two ways. They differ only in who provides the model. With your own key, you connect your provider as before. With the model included, Vivarium provides a tested model, and there is no provider account and no key. A monthly allowance comes with it, with a meter you can see. When the allowance runs out, play continues on a lighter model until the month resets. There is no wall halfway through a scene, and nothing extra to pay for. If the provider is down, a second one steps in, and every turn records which model wrote it.

The phase after that was the unglamorous half: making the billing fair before anyone pays. You can switch between the two ways in the app. A cancelled subscription shows the date it ends and what will pause. I have not set a price for either. I will set them from what a turn actually costs when people play, not from a guess.

Worlds carry their own living world

Until now, factions, routines and events lived in a story. Now they can be written into a world: factions with members and goals, routines with wages, scheduled events, groups and merchants. Characters carry their age and how they age. Each world keeps a calendar, and the narrator knows what season it is.

I also settled how big each kind of world should be. A starter world is complete but focused: fewer places, a smaller cast, and its hooks placed in scenes you walk into. A premium world is full, with the living world in depth.

What you do has consequences

This is the phase I most wanted to reach. It is the one that makes a long story feel like it is about you.

When you insult someone, threaten them, rescue them or apologise, the application records the moment. It moves how that character feels about you, and how everyone who saw it feels. The size depends on the stakes of the story you set up.

A flash of anger fades with time. The deed does not. Waiting a week forgives nothing. A second apology counts for less than the first, and no amount of repair outweighs the harm it answers.

A promise you make becomes an open thread. Keep it or break it, and the person you made it to remembers. If it had a deadline, letting the deadline pass breaks it.

Acts seen by a faction’s members or a town’s residents move your standing there, with the cause written in words. With the subscription, word travels to people who were not there, sometimes exaggerated, and reaches you as news when you move time forward. Do enough of one kind of thing in front of people and your character earns a name for it, used only by characters who know why.

If a faction turns against you, there are two ways back. You can earn it through deeds they see, or you can pay amends to one of their members. Paying helps once a day, and never past neutral.

A short note under each reply says who will remember what just happened. A character’s card lists the causes behind how they feel about you.

The same phase added recall by meaning. Connect an embedding model and the application also finds memories that are close in sense, not only in wording, and the memory inspector says why each one came up.

What comes next

A small phase first, to settle what Consequences left open. Every character gets pronouns: she, he, they, or a set you type yourself. A party can make a promise together.

Then fights. A fight will be a tracked exchange of checks, never a death decided by one line of prose. Injuries sit on a named ladder instead of hit points, capture comes with a way out, and what losing costs depends on the stakes you chose for the story. Fights can be switched off for any story.

Then living characters. When the narrator invents someone you like, you will be able to keep them as a full character. The AI drafts their card from your scenes, and you approve it.

Then the economy, in five phases, and a sixth for building. Money and goods held by the application, so the narrator can never lose or invent your coin. Merchants, services and goals worth saving for. Fields and mines that yield, and recipes that turn goods into other goods. Places to rent or own, careers with ranks, work shifts, hired workers and debts that come due. Mounts, vehicles and ships. Buildings on land you hold. I am building all of it before launch, because “the AI forgets my gold” is one of the most common complaints I found from players.

Then generated events: when the written events in a world run out, the AI drafts new ones within what the world allows, and the application decides which happen. Then two phases of screen quality, working through an audit of every screen against what it has to do.

Then launch readiness: sign-up, an 18+ declaration, terms in plain words, account deletion, card conversion, restoring your own downloads, and loading the five starter worlds. Then hosting.

Last, a closed beta of about two months. A few friends and I play the hosted game against a written test plan, every feature on every screen and every plan, and the narrator is graded against a written rubric. Whatever the beta turns up becomes a short fix phase before the public launch.

When

The target is still a first playable release in the first quarter of 2027, after the beta. That is a lot of phases. Most of them are already designed, and the last six closed in under a week. It is a target, not a promise. If it moves, it moves on the roadmap first, and I will say here why.

If you want to follow along, the feed is at /rss.xml. If you want to ask me something, I am at hello@vivariumonline.com.