Your life begins
with one choice.

Start here

The Life Engine is a persistent life and society simulation. You play one person inside a World filled with other players and autonomous residents. There is no single campaign to finish and no perfect build to copy.

1. Choose a Reality. Start with contemporary Earth, original-world Aurelia, or supernatural Parallax, then read its conditions and World Rules.
2. Create an account. Your account can hold lives in different Worlds, but each character belongs to one World.
3. Create your first character. Choose an origin, identity, and starting circumstances.
4. Complete Arrival. It introduces your situation and suggests useful first steps; it is not a test.
5. Pick one immediate goal. Find work, secure a home, meet people, begin learning, or simply explore.

Three flagship Worlds

Earth is contemporary real life, expanded as sourced regional data is ready. Aurelia is the original City One reality, with its own geography, currency, institutions, and future. Parallax begins with familiar Earth and adds a declared supernatural society.

All three are Continua. They can advance into later eras without erasing the lives, property, institutions, obligations, or history already created.

Create a person, not a character class

Your origin affects your opening circumstances, not your final potential. Identity, skills, health, relationships, possessions, reputation, and lived experience can all change over time.

• Identity: Name, personal details, and the way your character presents to the world.
• Origin: The region and material situation in which life begins.
• Needs: Immediate pressures such as food, rest, safety, belonging, and stability.
• Skills and education: What you know now and what you may learn later.
• Aspirations: Personal directions you can revise as life changes.
• Privacy: Personal and accessibility information remains private unless you choose to share it.

Finding your way around

Current World is your way back to the life you are playing. It gathers the facts that matter now and leads into every connected part of the simulation. Arrival helps when you are new; the main navigation remains consistent as you move through the game.

The suggested actions show a short list that fits your immediate condition. The expandable Activity Library holds the wider set: care, study, career development, household work, relationships, community participation, culture, public life, travel, research, legacy, and any special actions belonging to your World. Choosing one records time, costs, changes, and an outcome; it is not merely a link to another page.

You will also find dedicated areas for your home, career, finances, relationships, community, travel, culture, politics, business, research, history, and more. Open only what interests you. Changes made in one area can appear elsewhere because they belong to the same life.

The World continues between visits

Every World has one authoritative clock running at six World minutes per real minute. While you are away, residents still work, households change, markets move, projects advance, institutions respond, committed player actions finish, and public events become history. Returning after time away should feel like returning to a place—not reopening a paused save.

A one-World-hour action takes ten real minutes; five World hours take fifty real minutes; eight World hours take eighty real minutes. Closing the game does not pause or instantly complete a commitment. Your character’s continuity rules determine what can happen during an absence, and major irreversible choices require the protections declared by that World.

Needs, health, home, and ordinary days

A large life is built from small routines. Care for physical and emotional wellbeing, seek treatment when needed, find a safe place to live, manage household expenses, maintain possessions, and make room for rest and connection.

• Rent a room, share a household, buy property, or move somewhere new.
• Furnish rooms, pay utilities, handle maintenance, and improve accessibility.
• Track wellbeing and private health conditions without turning illness into a character class.
• Use preventive, clinical, therapeutic, or emergency care when appropriate.
• Balance immediate needs against longer ambitions.

Learning, careers, and enterprise

Careers grow from education, experience, reputation, opportunity, and circumstance. You can study, train, take paid shifts, pursue a profession, change direction, work independently, mentor others, or build an organization.

Some roles require skills, credentials, licenses, or public trust. Businesses need capital, staff, customers, and responsible decisions; they can grow, struggle, recover, or fail. Work affects more than income—it can reshape relationships, health, status, and the region around you.

Money, markets, and property

Each World has an isolated value system appropriate to its Reality, Epoch, and region. Aurelia uses the Aurel; Earth can use sourced period and regional currencies; Parallax can add hidden settlement systems. You may earn wages, hold cash, use bank accounts, save, borrow, insure property, pay taxes, trade investments, ship goods, and own homes or businesses.

Prices respond to supply, demand, regional conditions, public policy, and the activity of residents. Debt and loss are possible, but there is no way to buy in-world currency with real money and no cash-out. Wealth stays inside its World.

Relationships, households, and families

Relationships remember what happens. Trust, closeness, tension, care, and shared history grow through repeated choices. You can form friendships, partnerships, families, support networks, and households without being forced into one model of belonging.

Families can share budgets, care for children or elders, face disagreements, seek mediation, plan estates, and name successors. If a life eventually ends or retires, a new generation can inherit property, responsibility, reputation, and unfinished hopes.

Community, culture, and other players

Join organizations, attend events, visit cultural spaces, contribute resources, build local traditions, follow the news, publish claims, or investigate what powerful people would rather leave unexamined.

Online presence does not grant automatic access to you. Directory visibility, messages, parties, trade, and competitive contact have separate permissions. You can participate publicly, keep a smaller circle, or live mostly privately.

Regions, travel, and relocation

Where you live changes what is nearby, what things cost, which jobs exist, how people speak, and which institutions hold influence. Use the Atlas to understand regions and plan travel.

Public transit, private vehicles, routes, fuel, maintenance, delays, and journey history all matter. You may commute, travel for a purpose, relocate permanently, or eventually take part in journeys far beyond the home world.

Society, politics, law, and information

You can remain a private citizen or step into public life. Vote, organize, campaign, hold office, propose policy, serve on a council, manage an agency, fund infrastructure, negotiate agreements, or challenge an official decision.

Laws and institutions affect real conditions inside the World. Public claims can be examined, disputed, investigated, and preserved. Power leaves records, and public authority comes with accountability.

Risk, the underworld, and consequences

Some lives cross legal or moral boundaries. Underworld play uses abstract planning rather than graphic instruction. Crews, opportunities, evidence, witnesses, investigations, courts, incarceration, appeals, and rehabilitation belong to the same persistent society.

Failure is not always the end of play. Consequences may close one path while opening another: repair harm, rebuild trust, change loyalties, accept a sentence, appeal a decision, or carry a damaged reputation forward.

Realities, Worlds, Epochs, and lifecycles

• Reality: Earth, Aurelia, or Parallax—the deepest truth shared by a family of Worlds.
• World: One playable timeline with its own population, economy, property, events, and history.
• Epoch: The broad period of history that shapes available knowledge, technology, institutions, material life, and social conditions.
• Ruleset: An optional layer that changes what is possible. Alternative History, Mythic, Supernatural, Cyber-Arcane, and Frontier settings use rules beyond the standard historical foundation.
• World Rules: The public promises for one specific World: access, mortality, inheritance, continuity, conflict, economy, and lifecycle.
• Continuum: A flagship World that can cross into later Epochs while preserving its history.
• Epoch Eternal: A World that stays inside one broad era while its society continues to change.
• Chronicle: A World that starts earlier and follows a declared sequence of Epoch transitions.

The directory contains four flagship Continua, sixteen Epoch Eternal Worlds, and the Long Chronicle. Beyond is a spacefaring capability that Worlds can develop, not a fourth Reality. Each remains independent; money, property, characters, and events do not leak from one World into another.

Living in Parallax

Parallax uses the same life, economy, relationship, career, property, law, family, and legacy systems as every other World. Its ruleset adds powers, dangers, factions, locations, and consequences without creating a second codebase.

• Choose a path: remain mundane, become awakened, inherit a lineage, carry a curse, or live as nightbound.
• Learn gifts carefully: practice develops control and power, but repeated use creates strain and may increase exposure.
• Investigate manifestations: gather evidence, compare witnesses, identify patterns, and decide whether to contain, negotiate with, document, or avoid an anomaly.
• Join a faction: earn standing with organizations whose doctrines, secrecy, resources, and coexistence goals differ.
• Use hidden sites: regional thresholds, archives, refuges, markets, and ritual commons have their own wards, sanctuary, resonance, and visibility.
• Live with consequences: injuries, witnesses, evidence, broken wards, faction tension, public exposure, and World history persist.

The Parallax link appears in the in-World navigation only when your selected life belongs to the supernatural ruleset.

Absence, mortality, succession, and legacy

Worlds are built for lives that continue across many visits. If you take a break, the World moves on under its continuity rules. If a character retires or reaches the end of life, their story remains part of history.

Succession lets another character inherit what the World Rules permit: property, enterprises, responsibilities, parts of reputation, and family memory. The Archive preserves completed lives and important World moments as history rather than erasing them.

Safety, consent, and responsible play

• Blocking takes effect in both directions.
• Messages, parties, trade, discovery, and competitive contact use separate permissions.
• Reports preserve enough context for review without publishing private evidence.
• Moderation decisions can include warnings, restrictions, suspensions, or dismissal; eligible decisions can be appealed.
• Mortality begins protected and follows the promises of the World you enter.
• Optional chance-based activities use fictional currency only, include limits and cool-off tools, and never allow purchase or cash-out.

If something feels unsafe or broken, use the in-game report tools or the Support page. Immediate real-world emergencies should always be handled through local emergency services.

Accessibility and supported participation

Account preferences include reduced motion, higher contrast, larger text, a quieter focus mode, dyslexia-friendly typography, and larger controls. You can also record private accommodation needs for home, work, education, travel, social participation, and the interface.

These settings are meant to support participation, not reduce anyone to a diagnosis. The Accessibility page explains current support and provides a route for feedback.

What Alpha means for players

The core game and all public Worlds are available for testing, but Alpha means the experience is still being shaped. You may encounter rough wording, confusing navigation, balance problems, incomplete cultural detail, or a feature that behaves differently than expected.

Your testing helps most when you describe what you were trying to do, what happened, what you expected, and which page or World you were using. Include enough detail for the problem to be reproduced.

Quick glossary

Aurel

Aurelia’s fictional in-world currency.

Arrival

The guided introduction to your current life and useful first steps.

Autonomous resident

A person simulated by the World who continues acting without direct player control.

Chronicle

A long shared undertaking, or a World whose history can progress across Epochs.

Eternal

A World whose timeline continues without a planned final ending.

Epoch

The broad historical foundation attached to a World.

Observatory

The public view of a World’s identity, population, conditions, and recent history.

World Rules

The promises and boundaries that govern one particular World.