Long March (Go)

A dwarf-fortress-inspired, dark-and-adult management simulation set aboard a generation ship crossing the void. You are the ship's intelligence — the Overseer — thrown into a spiral between helpless onlooker and omnipotent control-freak as you wrangle a doomed voyage in which every concept is tested and perverted: upstanding people eroded into maniacs, order falling into chaos, religion splintering into cults, the ship itself decaying. The challenge is not grind and not systems — it is people. Hard limits can be set in the configuration; the game itself does not hold back. Light is contrast — the warmth, love, and belonging aboard are what make the dark hit home.

Top-down ASCII / TUI, deeply simulated, highly immersive and customizable.

Adults only (18+). Explicit text content; granular content controls including a fade-to-black mode and configurable hard limits. Fully offline, no telemetry, no network.

Status: engine + TUI built; content authoring underway. Phases 0–9 of docs/IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md landed the deterministic simulation (world, agents, needs/utility AI, social, intimacy, the Helm, story engine, lifecycle, faith, raveling, crime, items, runtime hulls) and the internal/tui terminal front end. Phases 10–12 closed the identity vocabulary, the Content Forge, and the base anchor pack; Phase 13.0 opened the cross-cutting engine seams; Phase 20 landed the erotic parity program (E1–E8); Phase 21 landed the Rust-parity register (P21-A–H, with PG5/PG8/PG11 deferred by owner decision, docs/GAPS.md §4); the TUI stages T-1–T-7 are landed, including T-5 (golden render corpus, accessibility, --export-journal, make dist). Content is underway: mods/society and a data-only xenobiology proof of concept (mods/uplift, mods/companion, mods/cephalid) land the first module packs; Phase 22 adds a full organ model (region-mapped, installable/removable, role-scoped act gates; save v34) (docs/CONTENT_FORGE.md, docs/CONTENT_CAPABILITIES.md). See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the architecture.

The canonical target specification lives in docs/spec/, with binding decisions in docs/spec/10_DECISIONS.md; docs/REFACTOR_PLAN.md tracks the Phases 0–7 normalization of the code to that spec. See docs/README.md for the doc index.

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Why a rewrite

The Rust implementation reached a working M4.8 build but accumulated a large migration program (unified event pipeline, templating engine, one outcome vocabulary, one use program, one body resolver, one scene tree, runtime hulls, data-driven jobs). Its own architecture docs specify that target state, but only via a long strangler-fig migration. This project builds the target state directly in Go and skips the migration entirely.

Fresh decisions locked for this rewrite:

Decision	Choice
Language	Go (single module, internal/ packages)
Simulation core	Explicit typed world keyed by stable IDs; no generic ECS
Content & user config	YAML (strict, validated, merged packs)
Saves	Fresh versioned binary format; Rust LMSV saves are not imported
Scope	All planned tracks (H3–H9), including the previously held items reopened in Phase 21 (conversion, forced upload, Theft/justice, worldgen depth, item quality/relics)
TUI	tcell + a custom diffing cell grid and map widget
Prose	Deterministic local template grammar; no LLM, no scripting, ever

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Documentation

Doc	Contents
docs/DESIGN.md	Vision, pillars, core loops, scope, decisions log, glossary
docs/ARCHITECTURE.md	Target Go architecture — packages, the unification cores, formats, determinism, TUI
docs/SYSTEMS.md	Consolidated system specs (ship, agents, needs, social, erotic, crime, faith, decay, items, story…)
docs/CONTENT.md	Content policy, taxonomy, YAML schema conventions, pack merge/validation
docs/CONTENT_FORGE.md	The authoring method: derive rows from the engine contract; lints, gates, provenance
docs/SCENECHECK.md	Dev-only external scene decision-graph viewer (cmd/scenecheck)
docs/TEMPLATING.md	Prose template grammar, filters, includes, and render-context reference
docs/GAPS.md	Content gap register: what the engine must provide for the module packs
docs/FORCE_AND_BREACH.md	Forced item use, the bounded check, and personality-redefining breach scenes (Phase 27)
docs/RECONSTRUCTION.md	Memory reconstruction: two-trace puzzle, voices, scope, and retention
docs/PROSE_PIPELINE.md	Offline prose generation loop: briefs, local model, validation gates
docs/MINING.md	Corpus mining method, source→system map, motif provenance, exclusions
docs/PROSE_FORGE_SKILL.md	The prose-generation system skill (for the local model)
docs/ROADMAP.md	Ordered rewrite phases (0–9) with exit criteria; appended Phases 10–21; H3–H9 mapping
docs/TESTING.md	Determinism replay, world-hash coverage, golden prose, content-matrix leaks, soak
docs/UI.md	Terminal front-end spec: screens, templates, themes, images, input contract, stages
docs/IMPLEMENTATION_PLAN.md	Module-support plan: engine additions, phase slots, Stage M content packs

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Repository layout (target)

longmarch_go/
  cmd/longmarch/        CLI, flags, headless, --replay-check, packaging
  internal/domain/      pure types + vocabulary (no io/behavior)
  internal/rng/         xoshiro256**; scoped Stream(seed,domain,slot)
  internal/text/        deterministic jinja-subset template engine
  internal/content/     YAML pack load -> merge -> validate -> index
  internal/sim/         world, schedule, worldgen, systems, facade
  internal/save/        versioned snapshot codec, migration, autosave ring
  internal/tui/         screens, one Action input contract, T1/T2, art
  internal/mods/        pack discovery, precedence, worldgen report
  content/              base content pack (YAML)
  mods/                 example content packs (YAML)
  tests/                determinism corpus, golden prose, matrix, soak
  docs/                 this documentation

Dependency rule: cmd → tui → sim → content → domain. The simulation never imports the TUI or any IO, so headless replay and CI runs stay possible.

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Building & running

go build ./...                  # or: make build
go run ./cmd/longmarch          # interactive TUI
go run ./cmd/longmarch --headless --ticks 259200 --seed 1234
go run ./cmd/longmarch --headless --replay-check --seed 1234 --ticks 259200
go run ./cmd/longmarch --export-journal run.txt --ticks 259200 --seed 1234
go run ./cmd/longmarch --print-config
make dist                       # bundle binary + content/ + README into a tarball

Testing

go test ./...                   # or: make test
go vet ./...                    # or: make vet
go test -bench . ./internal/sim

The flagship gate is replay determinism: the same seed, parameters, and content-pack IDs must produce byte-identical world hashes. See docs/TESTING.md.

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Non-negotiable invariants

1. Determinism — same seed + params + pack IDs ⇒ identical sim.
2. Engine-authoritative gates — adult gate, hard limits, kink/body/tier gates are engine checks, never fiction.
3. Everything is data — packs are YAML data; no scripting, no LLM, no network, no telemetry. Saves stay local.
4. Single-threaded simulation — no goroutines in the sim; the TUI is a separate consumer that only exchanges commands and snapshots at tick boundaries.
5. Covenant — adults only, fictional people only; coercion exists only through the gated register; conversion drift is engine-gated (Phase 21 PF1) and its content ships with the faith modules. E-tier erotic and horror/gore detail is in scope (the "darkest valleys", DESIGN §10 #18), always coerced-register-only and gated by the player's tier ceiling, fade-to-black, forbidden_acts, and hard limits.

License

UNLICENSED (private project).