Emergent Generated History
Emergent generated history simulates centuries of a world's events before play begins, producing named civilisations, wars, artefacts and figures that exist as records rather than as authored story.
World generation runs a simulation, not a landscape function. Terrain forms, civilisations settle and expand, wars are fought, rulers are recorded with names and titles, artefacts are made and lost, and creatures that kill notable people acquire reputations for it. All of that is written into a queryable history before anyone arrives. Play then continues the same simulation, so present events extend an existing chronicle rather than starting a new one.
Bay 12 Games, the brothers Tarn and Zach Adams, released Dwarf Fortress in 2006 as a long-term personal project without a commercial deadline, which is roughly the only condition under which such a system gets built. Ambition came from tabletop worldbuilding and simulation rather than from market demand. Text display kept costs down, since a history this detailed cannot be illustrated but can be listed.
Story as simulation output produced narratives no writer would compose, and players who retell them at length, which is how the game spread with almost no marketing. Legibility is the price. Generated history is a database, and its drama must be excavated by a reader willing to work, which suits a small and dedicated audience. Whether the results are stories or raw material for stories is a reasonable question.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 3 steps deep, beginning with Day/Night Cycle in 1983.
Descends directly from
Carried forward by 2 later games
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Also called: world generation, generated history, emergent narrative