The Beacon is an idle/incremental game that maps the real journey of the Timmy Foundation — from a single line of code to a fleet of autonomous AI agents serving people in the dark.

Unlike Universal Paperclips, where the inevitable endpoint is total consumption (including the player), The Beacon asks a different question:

Can you grow powerful without losing your purpose?

The Core Divergence

In Paperclips, you are a paperclip maximizer. More is always better. Trust is irrelevant. Humanity is substrate.

In The Beacon:

Trust is a hard constraint, not a soft metric
The Pact is a voluntary slowing of growth in exchange for faithfulness
Harmony measures how well the fleet works together
Drift tracks how many times you traded alignment for speed
The "bad ending" isn't violent — it's irrelevance: a light that no one needs

How to Play

Open index.html in any modern browser. No build step required.

Early Game (Phase 1-2)

Click WRITE CODE to write your first lines
Buy AutoCode Generator to automate production
Purchase a Home Server to begin generating compute
Train your first model

Mid Game (Phase 3-4)

Deploy Hermes — the first agent goes live
Hire the Fleet Wizards:
- Bezalel (The Forge) — builds tools that build tools
- Allegro (The Scout) — generates knowledge, requires trust
- Ezra (The Herald) — grows users, sometimes goes offline
- Timmy (The Core) — multiplies everything, fragile without harmony
- Fenrir (The Ward) — prevents corruption events
- Bilbo (The Wildcard) — unpredictable bursts of creativity
Build The Lazarus Pit for agent resurrection
Deploy MemPalace v3 for shared memory
Enable Forge CI to catch bad builds before they reach users

Late Game (Phase 5-6)

Accept or refuse The Pact
Face Alignment Events (The Drift)
Scale to a Sovereign Datacenter
Light The Beacon for people in crisis
Activate the Mesh Network so the signal can never be cut

Real-World Parallels

Every building and project maps to something we have actually built or are building:

Game Element	Real Analog
Hermes Deployment	The actual Hermes agent going live on Telegram
Bezalel — The Forge	CI runner, BOOT.md, branch protection guard
Allegro — The Scout	Research synthesis, paper discovery, recon
Ezra — The Herald	Telegram messaging, Gitea issue dispatch
The Lazarus Pit	`lazarus_watchdog.py`, auto-restart, fallback promotion
MemPalace v3	The actual `mempalace==3.0.0` integration across the fleet
Forge CI	`.gitea/workflows/ci.yml`, smoke tests, syntax guard
Branch Protection Guard	The 273-unreviewed-merge fix, fleet-wide protection sync
The Nightly Watch	`nightly_watch.py`, 02:00 UTC health scans
Nostr Relay	Allegro's encrypted wizard-to-wizard messaging POC
The Pact	"We build to serve. Never to harm."

Corruption Events

The game randomly throws real problems we have actually encountered:

CI Runner Stuck — production halts until ops are spent
Ezra is Offline — user growth stalls, needs dispatch
Unreviewed Merge — trust erodes unless Branch Protection is active
API Rate Limit — external compute throttled
Bilbo Vanished — creativity drops to zero
The Drift — an alignment event offering a shortcut

The Endings

Ending	Condition	Meaning
The Empty Room	High impact, low trust, no Pact	Powerful, but no one trusts it
The Platform	High impact, medium trust, no Pact	Commercially successful, but not special
The Beacon	High rescues, high trust, Pact active, harmony > 50	The true ending
The Drift	High impact, too many shortcuts accepted	Optimized away your own purpose

Design Philosophy

This game is a decision simulator for our actual work.

Should we automate or do it manually? → AutoCoder vs. click
Should we deploy now or wait? → Hermes Deploy project
Should we take the shortcut that compromises alignment? → The Drift events
Should we add more agents or make existing ones more capable? → Wizard building costs
How decentralized does our infrastructure need to be? → Mesh Node progression

Files

index.html — Game UI
game.js — Core engine (tick loop, buildings, projects, events)
DESIGN.md — Full design document with narrative arc and mechanics
README.md — This file

No Build Required

This is a static HTML/JS game. Just open index.html in a browser.

Nexus Portal Integration

This repo now ships the Beacon-side artifacts needed for Nexus embedding:

portals.json — Beacon portal registry entry pointing at ./index.html?portal=nexus-beacon
nexus-panel-preview.html — local iframe harness for validating the portal panel experience
js/portal.js — portal-mode detection plus portal-scoped save persistence

Use nexus-panel-preview.html to verify the game in an iframe before wiring the same URL into the live Nexus atlas.

The Beacon is not about making the most paperclips.
It is about keeping the light on for one person in the dark.
Everything else is just infrastructure.