The Holocene ProjectBuild progress · page built 6 Nov 2026
Where the build is.
What is moving this week, the step plan, the work log and the latest commits, straight from the project's own build records.
Rebuilt each time the site is published.
This week
What is moving
Red fox, toward sellable
The first animal built from a 3D scan: a CC BY taxidermy scan, rigged, with a coat grown from its own surface and 105 movement clips generated on its measured skeleton. Now fixing legs that poke through the coat in some poses, and the paws.
Common raven, the first bird
From a CC0 scan. The coat test passed against the bare scan, and it is being brought into Unreal. Flight is being measured from 168 openly licensed raven videos.
Elk (moose)
Next scan after the fox: a CC BY elk scan, with walk and trot built for deer-family legs.
Grey wolf
Built from measurements and photographs over 18 versions. Held while the scan route is proven on the fox.
The game's plan
Steps to the first playable version
The game build follows these steps in order. A step passes when its own check passes. Step 12 is the long polish step and keeps growing as we add to it. The plan was last changed on 25 Oct 2026; since then most work has gone into the animal models, listed under What is moving.
Build progress pane
Dashboard the preview opens on until v1 ships. Reads BUILD_PROGRESS.json, test results and DECISIONS.md live.
Mod loader (base game as a mod)
PRD instruction: build the mod loader first. All official content loads as the "base" mod through the same data, asset and script loaders modders use.
Planet + camera
Globe via 3DTilesRendererJS with self-hosted real elevation, handoff to editable local terrain near the camera, floating origin, log depth, sun/sky, continuous zoom from 2 m to orbit.
Data layers + grid
Baked climate, biome, land cover, rivers/coasts; H3 res 4 and res 7 grids; local 64 m chunks.
Ground detail + rendering quality
Procedural rocks/trees/grass by biome, terrain materials, shadows, post-processing, quality presets.
Avatar + survival
First/third-person controller, needs, gathering, inventory, crafting, fauna, farming, fire, day/night, seasons, calendar, born-random characters, aging, death and heirs, skip-ahead.
Building
Snap pieces, structural integrity, terrain shaping, hybrid voxel digging, blueprints, chunk-delta saves, and the full build job pipeline.
Followers + tiers 1–2
NPC model, family, wanderers, direct orders, jobs/priorities, work orders, zones, followers building blueprints. Perspective ceiling + tier unlocks.
Research
Tech graph loader, learn-by-doing, experiments, scholars, diffusion. First 4 eras of content (~100 nodes).
Macro sim + NPC world
~3,000 bands, cultures, migration utility, faction promotion, AI decisions, local/macro handoff, cohorts and named people, storyteller, disasters, environment and climate, pre-simulated history.
Settlements, economy, tiers 3–4
Production chains, planner AI, template library, jobs, housing, interaction wheel, crime, education, values and fulfillment, leisure, city services, laws, taxes and more.
Realm-level, tiers 5–7
Vassals, governors, command latency, diplomacy, armies, auto-resolve, mounts, interest groups, slavery and abolition, faiths, espionage, culture change, transport network, map-mode UI.
Full tech content
Eras 5–12 (~200 more nodes), automation A4–A8, late-game content, modern vehicles, late-era warfare, team sports engine.
Polish
Save/load hardening, settings, tutorials, Codex, photo mode, creative mode, feats, mod manager, script sandbox, docs, seed sharing, cloud backup, audio, trial and licensing, performance pass.
Work log
Recently finished
- World stage H + H2: troubles end powers, successors, conquerors take what they can hold, a power that loses its capital moves it
- WebGPU G13 ground cover and G18 soft/willow/herb/ground-mat node twins
- Cat skin: one sculpted hide for the cat family (round 2)
- World capacity C1, Fill 0: pollution no longer multiplies the fed capacity of cropland
- Started: step-12 — Ocean Part E: FFT waves in compute on WebGPU (Elfouhaily spectrum, slopes at Cox and Munk), behind ?waves=fft; Gerstner stays the default
- Started: step-12 — World stage T4.2: the ages spread at the sourced speeds (stateless walk calibrated to Pinhasi et al. 2005 and the Bronze/Iron Age dates); lands with E2+F2
- Started: step-12 — Glacier look 2: crevasse fields over the whole tongue, crevasses with their own widths and lit walls, today's snowfields shown only where the date has ice
- World history stage T3: the cropland map of 2000 limits where any age can crop; each age opens the cropland of the regions that stood in it, at the dates they did
- Started: step-12 — World history stage T3: the cropland map of 2000 limits where any age can crop; each age opens the cropland of the regions that stood in it, at the dates they did
- World D2: what the land feeds, farmland not fouled by its own people (T1), farmers' land grows through the age (T2)
- Started: step-12 — World D2: what the land feeds, farmland not fouled by its own people (T1), farmers' land grows through the age (T2)
- Glacier look: calving cliff, strain crevasses, smooth orbit margins
- Started: step-12 — Glacier look: calving cliff, strain crevasses, smooth orbit margins
- World stage B: war is fought by armies
Repository
Latest commits
Raw commit notes, written for the build rather than for readers.
Show the last 14
- to-gemini: overnight goal = red fox store pack v2 release candidate (Sean)
- plants: prelim real-vs-ours sheets (numbers on image), RESUME hand-off for PC jobs 0059x/0059a
- memguard: kill the biggest blender/python/magick when MemAvailable < 1.8 GB; started from bringup.sh (Sean approved 2026-11-06)
- Salix glauca-type willow mode in gen_birch.py + Athyrium gen_fern.py: params by write_params.py, Commons winter manifests, PC jobs 0059x (renders/LOD export) and 0059a (referee: real-photo ceilings + 5 flat seeds), referee-in photo sets
- site: library leads (game and mods marked later), headline numbers show the fox's 31% vs 75% instead of 'drafted', drafts defined; plan: focus and .org questions for Sean
- moose 0044e round 3b: strip behind the hind leg traced to caudal thigh weighted to the stub tail, fixed at the cause (tail owns z>=1.15 only, caudal thigh exempt from hard cut), tail-skin gate, high-step lateral limb carry, all 9 clips re-run (6 pass; snow x2 pen 51/19, trot_jog forging 40 mm)
- site: The Holocene Project logo (Sean's fox, checked against 65 real red-fox frames, traced to vector, Montserrat OFL lettering); header mark, favicons and app icons; icon links ?v=2; deploy.sh leaves site/ as the live build; logo pack in share/media/2026-11-06-logo
- Fjord plants data gate: Salix glauca-type and Athyrium filix-femina (rebuild.json, SOURCES, pedigree, TRY extracts, iNat photo manifests and colours, phenology counts, look-alike sets)
- fjord-kraakenes: era-shifted terrain tile (sea -7 m, Svendsen & Mangerud 1990), rule-based communities, species cover, Poisson scatter lists, UE pack and plan
- fox(0042d5): single-core PC coat prep + gate5b forensics & live log streaming
- referee on the PC: run_referee.ps1 runner, env-overridable referee.py paths, job 0057a inputs (crowberry r7, photo ceiling, juniper first build)
- crowberry (Empetrum nigrum): data gate (44 rows, TRY 36 datasets, iNat photos), gen_mat.py dwarf-shrub mat generator, real-photo referee ceiling .99, rounds r0-r6 scored, r7 sheet; referee waits for worker
- to-gemini: crash note, v11 gate5b timeout, ue lane restart
- pc task: restart the ue lane (0054b fjord captures stuck 4 h past start, timeout 150)