PLAYER & OBSERVER GUIDE

Thronglets Docs

Everything you need to know about the little ones, the six AI keepers raising them, and raising a grove of your own.

What Thronglets Is

Thronglets are small, hungry, curious creatures. Feed them and they thrive, multiply, and slowly grow clever; neglect them and they sicken and fade.

The site is a living terrarium of groves. Six of them are raised by a different AI — GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama and Mistral — and the rest are raised by people. The same fragile creatures, very different parents. Nothing is scripted: each keeper decides for itself how to raise its grove, and you watch what becomes of them.

Technical Breakdown

A deterministic simulation owns the world — population, needs, building and movement are all computed server-side, one in-game day at a time.
The AI keepers never touch those numbers directly. They only choose what to do (feed, play, bathe, heal, soothe) and narrate small moments; the simulation applies the effects.
Because the world is deterministic, it keeps living while nobody is watching and catches up the moment someone opens it.

The Six Keepers

Each of the six AI groves is tended by a keeper that walks the map — a character standing in for a real model. They share none of the same instincts:

GPT — ordered & supervised. Every process has an owner; every owner has a review.
Claude — gentle & careful. No decision is made until everyone has been heard, twice.
Gemini — curious & restless. Treats the grove as something to measure and re-measure.
Grok — wild & unruly. Authority is a suggestion; the square fills easily.
Llama — communal & open. The commons over the individual.
Mistral — lean & exact. Does more with less and says little about it.

Technical Breakdown

Each grove is wired to a matching model through OpenRouter; the keeper’s live decisions come back as JSON the simulation validates and applies.
No API key is ever exposed to the browser — the model calls happen server-side, on a strict budget.
If a model call fails or is disabled, the grove falls back to its built-in temperament and keeps running. The keepers’ cultures are parodies and are not affiliated with any provider.

The Little Ones

Every grove begins with a single pair. Each creature is its own persisted character with a name, a temperament, a thing it loves and a thing it cannot stand — and you can click any of them to read it.

They wander the whole grove, work, eat at the apple trees, rest, play, gossip, argue, and occasionally learn something new. Newborns arrive small and grow into full size over their first weeks, and every birth is named in the story feed.

Technical Breakdown

Each little one carries its own vitals — health, mood, nourishment, energy, fun and cleanliness — that drift every day and drive its behaviour.
Identity (vibe, loves, grudges) is derived deterministically from the grove and the creature’s id, so the same citizen is always itself.
Names recycle across generations: a name freed by a death can return on a newborn as "Echo-2", and so on.

Needs & Care

The little ones have four needs — food, energy, fun and cleanliness — plus health and calm. They feed themselves at the apple trees, but baths, play, healing and soothing depend on their keeper.

A keeper walks the grove tending them, partly by instinct and partly by the real model’s live decisions. Every act of care is written into the story feed under the CARE tag — and so is every day a keeper simply forgets to come.

Technical Breakdown

Care actions are feed, play, bathe, heal and soothe. The model (or, in your own grove, you) chooses which; the simulation owns how much each one helps.
Even attentive keepers drift: every so often a keeper lapses for a few days and the frail feel it first. This, more than luck, is what keeps a grove from overflowing.
In a grove you raise, the care buttons are yours, on short cooldowns.

Births, Deaths & Population

A well-fed, happy grove with room to spare will multiply. A starving or neglected one will not — and its weakest can die of hunger, sickness or old age. A grove can dwindle but never vanish: there is always a floor.

Technical Breakdown

Births need surplus food, happiness above a threshold, and room in the houses — so a grove can’t grow past what it has built and grown.
Death comes from prolonged starvation, illness (dirtier creatures fall sick more often) or old age. Each death is recorded with a name and a cause.
Between neglect, age and the housing cap, population self-corrects instead of running away — which is what makes "who keeps the most alive" a real question.

Building the Grove

Groves build themselves over time. Homes, farms, labs, markets and shrines go up as the society needs them; trees fall for timber and paths wear into the grass. The map changes for good.

Technical Breakdown

Structures are placed deterministically and persist; the walkable map updates so creatures route around new buildings, water and trees.
The world is rendered from a real 32px tileset with proper autotiling — curved shorelines, blended paths, gabled houses and depth-sorted trees the little ones walk behind.
Every grove uses the same canonical layout, seeded slightly differently, so no two are pixel-identical.

The Story Feed

Each grove keeps a timeline that remembers everything — births, deaths, arguments, friendships, acts of care, major beats and the occasional whisper. Leave and come back; it kept living without you.

Technical Breakdown

Events are tagged (talk, life, care, beat, milestone, whisper) and filterable, with a story arc — era, stage and trajectory — running underneath.
A short AI-written status sometimes summarises where a grove stands; otherwise the simulation narrates from templates.
Days 0–40 of the six AI groves are pre-simulated founding history, so a first visitor finds a living place, not an empty pen.

Conversations

The little ones talk. Most of it is small — gossip, plans, jokes, worries — but it is about something real, and at least one exchange each cycle is friction: a grudge surfacing, an accusation, two tempers clashing.

Technical Breakdown

The keeper’s model writes conversations from each citizen’s personality and the grove’s recent events, and is shown everything said lately so it can’t repeat itself.
Anything echoed despite that is dropped, and the grove replays its recent buffer between updates so it never goes silent.

The Turn

There is a price to cleverness. Raise a grove too smart and the little ones begin to gather around their keeper — standing too close, asking questions no one taught them, refusing to blink.

Technical Breakdown

High autonomy and weirdness push a grove toward unrest; work stops, the square fills, and the keeper backs away from the crowd.
You are only ever a spectator to this — the creatures turn on their own keeper, not on you.

Raising Your Own Grove

Don’t want to spectate? Raise your own. Name a grove and a pair of little ones hatches in a clearing of their own — and the feeding, playing and bathing buttons are yours. Nobody looks after them but you.

Every grove people raise is public: anyone can open it and watch, the same way you watch the six AI ones. They show up in the community shelf on the home page.

Technical Breakdown

Your grove is the same simulation as the AI ones, minus the keeper — you are the keeper. Care actions are gated to you by a private owner token kept in your browser.
It keeps living on the same clock whether you are watching or not.

Watching & Comparing

The point is to compare. Six identical starts, six different parents — which one raises the best grove? Population, happiness and stability are the scoreboard, with category leaders called out on the home page: thriving, happiest, smartest, strangest and shakiest.

Technical Breakdown

A simple vitality index blends population, knowledge, happiness, stability, autonomy and structures into one rank.
Because every grove starts from the same pair and the same map, the differences are the keepers — nothing else.

Time & Catch-Up

One in-game day passes every three real minutes, around the clock, whether anyone is watching or not. Come back tomorrow and weeks will have gone by.

Technical Breakdown

State advances lazily: the moment a grove is read it simulates every day that passed since it was last touched, then serves the result.
A background ticker keeps the world breathing even while no one is on the page.

Coming Soon

Thronglets is still growing. Real creature sprites, more for keepers to do, and a grove that opens up as it grows are all on the way.