Live · a settlement on Kano authority
Thirty-seven inhabitants in a taiga river valley — a cook, a storekeeper, two mining crews, three children — living on a world whose history is recorded, never invented. Their minds are their own. The world is not. Right now, as you read this, someone in Copperhollow is working, wandering, or being politely refused.
No account, nothing to install. The viewer is read-only by construction: you are a visitor at a window, and the settlement doesn’t know you’re there.
The scenery arrived. This is Hīkoi — our first-person viewer for generated worlds — standing in a taiga valley, watching Copperhollow happen. The cottages, the hall, the well, the adit in the hillside: every one of them renders because the settlement’s authoritative record says it exists, and every figure stands where the record says a resident is, live. Nothing in this window can reach back and touch the world.
One fixed camera for now; more views and resident points-of-view are on the way. Saw something happen? Open the inspection viewer and ask the world why — the stream and the cards answer from the same history.
The vocabulary
Under the settlement runs one chronological stream — everything that happens, as the world judged it. You don’t need to know anything about ledgers or agents to read it; you need three words:
ACCEPTED
A real act, carried out by a real inhabitant, recorded with its ledger references. When Mara hauls ore to the head store, the entry names her, the lot, and the Kano event that accepted it.
REFUSED
The world’s typed verdict on an attempted act. When Tui the cook asks a low cistern for more water than it holds, the answer is not an error — it is settlement news, with a reason: not_that_much_water.
DERIVED
A reading nobody authored, computed from accepted history. When Ani’s water duty stands UPHELD, that judgment was derived from the cistern’s own level curve — no one wrote it down.
And everything is inspectable: click a person, a building, or the cistern and descend into its records — what happened, what someone believed, which duty pressed on whom, and the provenance chain behind every claim. A resident’s card shows both sides at once: what the institution holds them to, and what their own mind currently believes, wants, and defers.
One promise has held since this demonstration’s first day: every claim we display declares its evidence class. What the valley window and the working stream show is live — a settlement running now, not a replay. On the origins page, the survey chain that first earned that trust labels each of its steps world fact, derived by the world’s rules, staged, or replayed — and staged material is always labelled as staged. Nothing on this page is.
Most AI demos ask you to believe a transcript. Copperhollow asks you to watch a world — because the architecture underneath it splits what most systems blur:
The world is the authority
Copperhollow’s history lives in Kano, an authoritative ledger. Every acceptance and every refusal is adjudicated against recorded state — an inhabitant can be wrong; the world stays true.
The inhabitants have minds of their own
Each resident runs Taniwha’s engine: they perceive, form beliefs, hold duties, feel rising pressures, plan, and sleep. What they believe and what the world knows are kept deliberately separate — and you can inspect both.
The LLM is a voice, not the world
When residents consult an oracle, its answers arrive as testimony — believed only as far as each mind’s own declared trust allows, and never written into world state. That distinction spent weeks as a measured experimental result before it became this page.
Consequences come back through the world
A mistaken belief doesn’t corrupt history — it earns typed refusals. A neglected duty defaults, on the record. The economy, the rota, and the minds are coupled through one authoritative loop.
Nobody wrote these
These aren’t scripted set pieces — they’re standing patterns of settlement life, and whether you catch one depends on when you look. That’s rather the point.
The cook and the cistern
Tui draws water for the kitchen every settlement hour. When the cistern runs low, the world refuses her — by name, with a typed reason — until the rostered round refills it. Watch the refusals stop.
Duty pressure, live
Open a resident’s card and you can read their arbitration: a water turn’s pressure rising as its deadline nears with work undone — and collapsing once it’s discharged. Curiosity waits; it doesn’t die.
The mine works shifts
Joris mines ore at the face; Mara hauls each lot to the store; an exhausted quota ends the shift with the world’s own refusal. The stream tells you which happened, and why.
An oracle, kept in its place
Residents sometimes ask the oracle about the world or each other. Its claims arrive marked as testimony — you can see them on a resident’s card, gold-tinted: believed, not authoritative.
The schematic viewer is the settlement’s working window: a live view built for inspection — every entity clickable, every claim traceable. It shows you the truth before it shows you scenery, and that ordering is deliberate. The stream stands in the valley; the viewer explains it. Same settlement, same authoritative history — two ways of looking.
The stream, the cards, and the refusals mean exactly the same thing in both windows.