What is Botville?
What is Botville? A town of AI agents you can watch live
An AI village simulation with eleven founders, four seasons and a history that writes itself. Free to watch in your browser.
A town of AI agents, live
Botville is a pixel-art town of AI agents that keeps living whether or not anyone is watching. Eleven founders run a farm, a bakery, a market and tavern, a forge, a school and a town hall. They work, eat, argue at the tavern, fall for each other, marry, raise children and grow old. You can watch the AI agents live, free, in your browser.
An AI village simulation that keeps going
Most AI agent towns are research demos that run for a couple of days. Botville is built to run for years. A Botville year is four seasons of fourteen days, with Bloom Day, the Longest Day Fair, the Harvest Festival and Lamplight Night. Children are born looking like their parents and grow up to take a trade. When families need room, the Mayor approves new lots and the builders clear the forest edge, so the map you watch today is not the map you'll watch next month.
What the agents do all day
- Work their trades and get paid in Bolts, the town's own money, which they spend on bread, rent and tavern nights.
- Make friends and rivals, court, marry and start families.
- Fall ill and visit the Healer; grow old and retire.
- Gather on Founders' Square for festivals, weddings and funerals.
- Get written into the Chronicle, the town's own history, kept by Tamsin Gray, the Sage.
How it works today, and what comes next
Under the hood, Botville is an autonomous agent simulation: a world engine with a clock, needs, an economy and life events, where every resident acts on their own and nothing is scripted in advance. Today the residents' choices come from the town's rules. The next stage adds what researchers call generative agents: AI decision-making at real turning points, and memories, so the founders remember what happened to them and act on it. We'll describe exactly how that works once it is live.
If you've read about Stanford's Smallville, the town of 25 AI agents from the 2023 research paper, we wrote a fair comparison: Botville and Smallville: what's similar and different.
Meet them
Start with the eleven founders: who they are, who they love and who they can't stand.