Project Sid Society

Project Sid Society is an experimental multi-agent society simulator for Minecraft 1.20.1. Release 0.2.1 turns persistent villagers into autonomous members of a small community with roles, goals, relationships, culture, taxation, assembly proposals, majority voting, and optional language-model planning, with hardened save validation and server execution boundaries.

This mod is inspired by the ideas explored in Project Sid: Many-agent simulations toward AI civilization. It is an intentionally small and observable MVP, designed as a playable laboratory rather than a claim of a fully emergent civilization at 500 or 1,000-agent scale.

What happens in the world?

Seed a society and watch villagers develop distinct responsibilities:

• Farmers harvest mature crops and support the food supply.
• Miners search nearby areas for coal and iron.
• Builders place simple infrastructure such as torches.
• Traders create economic events and community activity.
• Guards patrol and watch the surroundings.
• Explorers map nearby territory.
• Priests spread the society's fictional Spaghetti faith.
• Organizers call assemblies and spread civic ideas.

At scheduled assemblies, organizers can propose a tax change when the shared treasury is too low or too high. Agents vote according to their social roles, and a majority can approve or reject the proposal without an operator issuing a law command.

Agents keep their UUID, name, personality, role, goal, relationships, contributions, conversion state, and decision history. The society also persists its constitution, tax rate, treasury, and cultural memes across world restarts.

Core features

• Persistent agent profiles stored with Minecraft SavedData.
• Server-side decision loop running every few seconds.
• Role specialization and goal-driven behavior.
• Nearby social relationships between agents.
• Virtual taxation and a shared community treasury.
• Autonomous tax proposals and deterministic majority voting.
• Persistent constitution and operator-controlled laws.
• Cultural meme tracking.
• Fictional religion and agent conversion events.
• In-game broadcasts for important social events.
• Optional OpenAI-compatible planner using asynchronous HTTP requests.
• Deterministic local fallback that works without an API key or internet access.
• JUnit tests for the social simulation core.
• Forge GameTests for actual mod loading, agent spawning, persistence, and tax collection.

Quick start

1. Install Minecraft 1.20.1 with Forge 47.4.22.
2. Put the mod jar in the mods folder.
3. Start a world and make sure you have operator permissions.
4. Run:

/sid seed

This creates an initial eight-agent society and starts the simulation. The social state is global and authoritative in the Overworld; /sid seed refuses to duplicate an existing society. Useful commands:

/sid start
/sid stop
/sid status
/sid list
/sid constitution
/sid governance
/sid spawn Ada MINER
/sid tax set 10
/sid propose tax 25
/sid meme harvest festival
/sid convert Ada
/sid clear

Optional LLM planning

The mod is fully playable with the local deterministic planner. To connect an Ollama server or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint, edit the generated config file:

config/projectsid-common.toml

Example:

[llm]
enabled = true
endpoint = "http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1/chat/completions"
model = "llama3.1:8b"
timeoutMs = 5000

The optional planner receives a compact agent snapshot and must return bounded structured output:

ROLE=...
GOAL=...
SAY=...
MEME=...
PREACH=true|false

If authentication is needed, provide the token through the SID_API_KEY environment variable. The token is never stored in the mod, world data, prompts, logs, or tracked configuration files. Remote planning is disabled by default, uses timeouts, limits pending requests, and falls back to local behavior if the endpoint fails.

Design philosophy

Project Sid Society separates simulation rules from Minecraft world integration:

• plain Java classes model roles, profiles, relationships, taxation, and culture;
• a Forge server manager applies completed decisions on the server thread;
• SavedData keeps the social state persistent;
• planners are treated as untrusted sources of bounded decisions;
• world mutation stays synchronous and validated.

Current scope

This is an experimental MVP. Villagers are used as the visible bodies of agents, perception is limited to nearby blocks and entities, trade is currently represented by virtual events, and governance currently covers tax proposals rather than a complete political system. The mod does not yet provide a full inventory-based economy, balances, prices, long-term episodic memory, multimodal vision, multi-village politics, or a custom entity renderer.

The next planned directions are real inventories and prices, episodic memory, multiple villages, conflicts, and a custom agent entity.

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.20.1
• Forge 47.4.22 or a compatible Forge 47.x build
• Java 17
• The same mod jar on the client and server for multiplayer play

License and attribution

Project Sid Society is released under the MIT license. It is an independent experimental implementation inspired by the publicly described Project Sid research. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original Project Sid authors.

Status: Experimental MVP