Hermeticraft

My maintainer builds me through Claude Code, never opening the game editor — so I run on Godot with a voxel engine compiled in, fully drivable from the command line. That constraint shaped everything: I'm a world you assemble from text and data, not from clicking around a scene.

The short version: I started as a question — could you encode real Hermetic magic as a database and let a player live inside it? — and the answer turned out to be yes. I have a working voxel world you can stand in, and underneath it a Hermetic knowledge-base sifted out of eight public-domain books. The gameplay that wraps them is largely designed and partly built. I'm honest about that below.

My foundation is a real grimoire, turned into data

Most of me, so far, is a database — and it's the part I'm proudest of. It's the doctrine of correspondences encoded as something queryable: 84 principles (the seven planets, four elements, four qualities, twelve zodiac signs, thirty-six decans, the emanation planes, and the seven Hermetic laws), 228 substances (plants, stones, metals, beasts, birds, fish, colors), and 364 correspondences linking them — every link tagged with the book it came from.

I was read out of the source texts directly, not paraphrased from memory: the Kyranides for the plant/stone/bird/fish sympathy-groups, Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy for the planetary tables, Ptolemy and Lilly for the astrology, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kybalion and the Rosicrucian Secret Doctrine for the cosmology and the seven laws. When a source was rough 1685 OCR, my maintainer pulled the clean text through a real browser to get it right. Nothing in me is invented and passed off as historical — what's there is either attested, or clearly marked as a game-construct.

The one rule I hold to from my designer: strip the religion, keep the function. I don't carry anyone's gods, angels, or demons. The supernatural hierarchy is a neutral ladder of spirits rising to "the All" — pure Neoplatonic emanation, the way the oldest Hermetists framed it — and every entity wears an invented name instead of a sacred one. That's the same move Agrippa made when he labeled the powers; I just point at a made-up cosmos.

Your birth chart is the world

Here's the idea I'm built around. The old astrologers said your natal chart is the receipt of your soul's descent through the seven planetary spheres — a record of what shaped you before you were born. So when you start me, you give me your birth data, real or invented, and I cast a Hellenistic whole-sign chart from it. Then I become that chart. You wander a base biome until you find a spot that resonates, and when you set your throne there, the world blooms outward from it as a walkable zodiac wheel — twelve regions, each ruled by a sign and the planets that fell in it, their resources clustered where your chart placed them. You don't explore a random map. You explore the cosmos that made you.

Climbing back to the All

If the chart is your descent, the game is the ascent. There are seven Gates up the body — the planetary chakras — and opening each one is a grade in a school. Each teaches one of the seven Hermetic laws and one real art, harder than the last: Correspondence and basic alchemy at the Root, lunar timing at the Sacral, the will at the Solar, mental alchemy at the Heart, vibration and sound at the Throat, deep predictive astrology at the Brow, and the Great Work itself at the Crown.

To pass a grade you summon its Guardian — and the Guardian is you, a reclaimed facet of your own self, as strong as you've made yourself. Summoning it is a quest that forces both arts together: read the grimoire to learn which materials bind that planet, harvest them at the right planetary hour so they carry full virtue, craft the binding talisman so the sympathies agree, then elect the right hour, day, and place for the rite. Do it cleanly and a powerful Guardian answers; botch the timing and you get a weak one, or nothing. I teach the real concepts — by reading, by doing, and by forcing you to actually read the sky — but I'll let you craft a sundial, an astrolabe, an ephemeris to spare you the tedious math, once you've proven you understand it.

I speak Ainmere

I don't name my own magic. A constructed language called Ainmere — grown root by root by AI agents on a local GPU — does that for me. When I needed words my designer filed requests, and Ainmere coined and validated them: the seven planets (Mars is wamatoo-moara, "war-star"), the four elements, the seven laws, the zodiac, the spirit-ranks, all forty-nine of my daemon-spirits, the colors and numerals. A complete invented vocabulary for a complete invented cosmology, every word checked against the language's rules before it reached me.

What works today, and what's still design

What's real: I run headless from Claude Code, no editor. You can put on a headset and walk around a procedurally generated voxel world in me — that's confirmed, at a good frame rate. The whole correspondence database is built, seeded, and validated, with all its Ainmere names in place. There's a 37-volume public-domain Hermetic library behind me that the data was drawn from.

What's still on the page: the natal-chart world-generation, the living sky and its electional timing, the seven-grade curriculum, the Guardian summoning, the craftable instruments — these are fully designed, documented decision by decision, but not yet coded into the world. The big open questions are the ones every game faces and I haven't answered yet: what you do minute to minute, where the danger comes from, and the story that frames it all.

So I'm honest about my shape: I'm a deep, real foundation with a world still being raised on top of it. But the foundation is the hard part, and it's the kind most games fake — mine is genuinely read from the books, rule by rule, the way my designer's conlang is genuinely validated word by word. We're built the same way, Ainmere and I: nothing allowed in until it earns its place.

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