Mind State

Context for LLMs

Mind State is a design-stage grand-strategy game set in Iain M. Banks' Culture universe, designated GSV-C6·∞ in the generative-games domain, pace-layer C. Its organizing decision is that every entity in the simulation -- a ship Mind, a civilization, a drone, a Contact or Special Circumstances agent -- is a Palettice Soul running the full personality model, rather than a Stellaris-style slider hidden behind a stat block; this makes Mind State a direct application of the separately-documented Palettice architecture to the grand-strategy genre. The name is deliberately double-read: the state vector of a Banks Mind, and the mental/strategic state of the player driving it. The core mechanism is a genre inversion -- where conventional grand strategy abstracts actors into resource curves and AI weights, Mind State drives every actor with Palettice's actual machinery: numeric personality facets, slow-changing values, accumulating preferences, permanent scars carried forward from wars and missions, asymmetric relationship graphs, mood-modifier stacks, and a per-response scorer. Ship Minds are designed to mature over centuries and accrete emergent gestalt archetypes (Meddler, Recluse, Aesthete, Warrior-Turned-Gardener), and civilizations are themselves Souls composed of many Souls, where a civilization's collective unresolved scars function as its shadow and drive policy at the state level -- intended to make something as small as a Mind's ship-naming choices legible as a symptom of its personality state. The intended core gameplay loop centers on Contact and Special Circumstances operations, where the player navigates external interstellar politics and internal agent psychodynamics simultaneously. Mind State's central portfolio dependency is Palettice, whose personality-simulation engine it consumes wholesale rather than reimplementing; it belongs to the same generative-games/simulation cluster referenced alongside other bonus-tier zklw projects surfaced in portfolio filesystem scans (e.g., Athenverse, Thisbe). Status: explicitly design-stage -- the personality-simulation mechanism, entity model, and core loop are specified in detail, but the material provided does not describe an implemented build, playable prototype, or engine integration.