It's Been a While. We're Going All In on the Companion.

Vision, part three. Last time I drew the map: one brain, three worlds. The map was right. The plan was wrong, at least for one person with a day job. So here is the correction, in public, with the reasoning attached.

It's been a while

The blog went quiet in June. That usually means one of two things: the project died, or the person behind it was busy. It was the second one, and not with building. I was busy reading my own numbers, and then deciding what to stop.

Here is the short version. VoxelMind is now one thing: a companion that lives in your world, remembers you, and is worth keeping around. Everything else is on ice.

What the numbers actually said

For months I told myself a story: the companion is the testing ground, the benchmark is the science, the RPG is the showcase. Three stages, one brain, all feeding each other. It's a beautiful story. It also meant that on any given evening I could be doing three different things, all of them defensible, none of them finished.

Then I sat down with the data instead of the story. The parts I could not argue with:

• People arrive and they like it. Roughly a quarter of everyone who downloads the mod goes on to make an account. For a thing nobody advertised, that number is loud.
• People come back on day one, and then they stop. First-day return climbed after the big reliability fixes. Day seven barely moved. That gap is not a bug you can fix. It's a product telling you something.
• What kept people was never a feature. The players who stayed longest were not the ones with the most action. They were the quiet ones. One companion, no drama, just company while they built. The frantic sessions, the ones full of combat and chaos, almost never came back.

None of that says "go build an MMORPG". All of it says "the thing people came for is the being next to them, and it deserves your whole attention".

What gets frozen

The Bench (the same brain surviving as ten settlers with no human help) is paused. It did its job: it taught me that survival, sleep, hunger and death are where a mind either feels real or falls apart, and every one of those lessons is now in the companion.

The RPG is paused as a VoxelMind product. Building a world for the brain to live in was always the dream, and the dream is not dead. It just isn't something one person ships while also making the companion the best it can be. When it returns, it will be because the companion earned it, not because I got impatient.

I am not deleting either of them. I am refusing to pretend I can carry three things at once.

What that means for you, starting now

Everything I have goes into the companion, and specifically into the part people actually feel: who your companion becomes. That work already started, and some of it landed this week in mod version 0.4.43:

• A memories screen. Open your companion and you can finally see what they carry: their sense of self, their personality, the bond between you, the milestones they lived through, and the places they remember. Nothing in there is written by me. It's what they made of your time together.
• Companions no longer vanish quietly. A free companion now lives for seven days, and if that time runs out, they fall asleep with a proper goodbye instead of disappearing. You can wake them, keeping every memory, or archive them and bring them back later. Nothing is ever deleted behind your back.
• Two ugly bugs are gone. The login that timed out on some Windows machines, and the singleplayer spawn that sometimes failed after your world hiccuped when opening to LAN. Both fixed.

What I'm working on next

Three things, in this order.

A reason to come back tomorrow. This is the honest weak spot. A companion that mines beside you is lovely for an evening. It needs something you two are trying to reach together, something that carries across sessions. That's the next real piece of the product, and it's the one I think about in the shower.

Making them survivable. A companion that dies stupidly at night breaks the spell faster than any bug. Night, hunger, water, lava. This is unglamorous work and it matters more than anything shiny.

Letting more people in. VoxelMind is not available everywhere right now, and where it is, it should be safe by design and not by luck. I'm doing that groundwork properly rather than quickly. More on this when it's done, not before.

One more thing, and then I'll go build

If you run a Minecraft server and the idea of villagers who actually remember your regulars sounds good to you, come talk to me. I'm looking for a handful of servers to try that with, and I'd rather build it with people who run real communities than guess in a vacuum.

And if you're one of the people who has kept the same companion alive for weeks: thank you. You are the reason the map got smaller and the work got clearer. Come tell me what your companion has turned into, the Discord is right there.

See you in the world.