Vision

What Ishtaria is

  • One planet per world, Earth-sized. About 510 million km² of surface, generated procedurally from a seed. Only changes are stored.

  • Comparable physics and ecosystem. Rigid-body physics near players, population dynamics of plants and animals everywhere else.

  • Persistent time. The world does not pause when a player leaves. Crops grow, animals migrate, a sleeping avatar gets hungry.

  • Start from nothing. No towns, no shops, no money supply. Economy emerges from gathering, crafting and trade between players.

  • Decentralised. Any operator can run a world. Worlds federate through bilateral agreements and in-game portals.

  • Open source, Linux first. Everything is distributed as Debian packages.

What Ishtaria is not

  • Not a single centrally owned universe.

  • Not a blockchain project. Trust between worlds comes from signed messages and explicit agreements between operators, not from a ledger everybody must share.

  • Not a scripted theme park. Content is mostly systemic: rules, recipes, species, biomes.

Design principles

  1. Simulate where someone looks. Full fidelity is spent only where it is observed; elsewhere the world advances by cheaper aggregate models that stay consistent when observed again.

  2. Never trust a peer blindly. Every federated exchange is signed, bounded by the local import policy and reversible on defederation.

  3. Small, shippable steps. Each roadmap milestone is usable on its own.

  4. Open standards. glTF/VRM for avatars, H3 for spatial cells, CBOR/COSE for signed data, Matrix for chat.

Platforms

Ishtaria targets Debian and Ubuntu on x86-64. All components – server, client, generator, content and this documentation – are shipped as .deb packages. Windows and macOS builds are not planned.