Blockwelt

1 · Scope

This manual describes a method for the construction of game worlds whose matter does not depend on any single machine. In the common construction, one server holds the world’s state, and every client trusts it. The world is then a service. When the operator stops the service, the world stops. The method removes this dependence. It gives the world a name that every machine computes alike, a law that every machine can check, one settled history, and stored copies that outlive their producers.

The goal is named virtual materiality. The term is technical. It names a set of verifiable properties, not a metaphysical claim. The metaphysics is present throughout the method, but it enters as requirements, and each requirement receives a mechanism.

2 · The definition

The method rests on one definition. A world state is material, over a stated interval, when five conditions hold together:

1. Identity. The same state has the same name on every machine. The name is a cryptographic commitment.
2. Law. The state changes only through a fixed transition rule applied to signed actions.
3. Settlement. One history is distinguished from every competing history.
4. Availability. The state can be rebuilt from attested replicas at any time in the interval.
5. Audit. The world’s invariants can be checked by anyone, without trust. In the demonstration world, the invariant is the conservation of matter.

Each condition produces a certificate, and the five certificates compose into one object, the materiality certificate. A machine that verifies this certificate does not need to trust the machine that produced it.

The definition separates what is usually confused. Validity is not settlement: a proof shows that a change was lawful, not that the world accepted it. Settlement is not availability: an accepted state whose data is lost names a world that no one can enter. A commitment without data is a fossil.

3 · The world

The demonstration world is small and complete. Space is a grid of 32 × 32 × 32 positions. The horizontal axes wrap, so the world is a torus with no edge. The vertical axis does not wrap: stone below, fog above. There are five kinds of block — air, dirt, stone, wood, and leaves — so one position needs three bits, and the full terrain needs 12,288 bytes. The information‑theoretic minimum for an arbitrary terrain of this size is 9,511 bytes; the packed form is within 29 percent of that bound. The whole world travels in one small message.

Two minds inhabit the world. A mind is a signing key with a body: a position, a health value, and an inventory. In each logical tick, a mind may sign one action: move one step, break an adjacent block, or place a carried block. Gravity applies after actions, one position per tick, which bounds the speed at which any effect can propagate. A fall of more than three positions causes damage. At zero health the mind dies: everything it carries enters the Void, and the body returns to a spawn point.

The transition rule is deterministic. Given a state and the tick’s signed actions in canonical order, exactly one next state follows. No wall clock, no randomness, and no floating‑point number enters the rule. Two machines that disagree about the next state cannot both be running it.

4 · Names

Every object in the method has a name, and names are of two kinds. An arithmetic hash, chosen for efficiency inside proof circuits, names semantic states. A byte hash, chosen for speed over raw data, names artifacts: stored blobs, transactions, and checkpoint headers. The semantic name says what the state is. The byte name says which bytes carry it.

The semantic name is computed from one canonical representation: the terrain’s 1,024 vertical columns, with each column’s 32 blocks packed into a single field element of 96 bits. This representation is fixed forever, with published test vectors that every implementation must reproduce byte for byte before any other work proceeds. An error here is permanent; the freeze is the point.

Storage is free to differ. A region may be stored raw at three bits per position, as a sorted palette with narrow indices, or as run‑lengths along each column. Different encodings give different blobs with different byte names — and the same semantic name. A copy verifies when its bytes match its byte name and its decoded content recomputes the semantic name. Storage can therefore improve without end, and identity never moves. This separation, not any single codec, is what makes long persistence possible.

5 · The tree that counts

The state commitment is a tree over the columns. Every node carries two values: a hash of its children and a count of the matter beneath it, with the four material counts packed into one field element. The root therefore does two jobs at once. It names the world, and it audits the world. Conservation — matter in the terrain, plus matter carried by minds, plus matter in the Void, equals the genesis total — is checked by addition at the root. When one column changes, its leaf and the ten nodes above it change; the rest of the tree stands. A proof about one column carries about 320 bytes of authentication path.

The known limit: a single root serialises the whole world, and spatial neighbours are not tree neighbours. The remedy is the method’s central rule, called boundary alignment. Compression, commitment, proof, and locality must share boundaries — the same regions of the world — but they need not share representations. Each layer uses the representation that suits it, cut along the same seams.

6 · Law

The transition rule is stated as a repertoire of tasks, each possible or impossible. To break dirt is possible, and moves one unit from the world to the mind that broke it. To place is possible, and moves one unit back. To break stone is impossible. To copy a unit is impossible, and to change its kind is impossible. To die is possible, and moves everything the mind carries into the Void. To retrieve anything from the Void is impossible within the epoch.

The method separates three grades of cannot. A task can be physically impossible, semantically invalid, or cryptographically inadmissible. A modified client can compute whatever bits it likes; nothing prevents that. What it cannot do, except with negligible probability, is produce an accepting proof for a forbidden task. Law, inside such a world, is the joint operation of the last two grades: the rule defines what is invalid, and the proof system makes the invalid inadmissible as shared fact.

The guarantee is exactly as strong as the proof system’s soundness and the agreement of every implementation of the rule. The method treats the second risk as the more serious one and enforces agreement mechanically: shared golden test vectors, and differential execution of the same action traces on every implementation.

7 · Proof

A checkpoint proof covers one step of the world. Its public inputs are three names: the state before, the state after, and the batch of signed actions between them. The circuit checks, in order: that each opened column decomposes into valid blocks; that the openings reconstruct the old root; that each action satisfies its rule — adjacency, occupancy, inventory, gravity, damage, death; that the updated columns and minds reconstruct the new root; and that the material audit still equals the genesis vector. Signatures are verified by the validators outside the circuit, which keeps the circuit small.

Any browser can verify the proof in well under a second. Producing it takes seconds, and it need not be produced on the device that acted: proving may be delegated without any loss of the guarantee, because verification, not production, is what constitutes the fact.

8 · Time

Proofs take longer than actions, so the world runs in two tenses. A provisional state renders at once and can still be lost. A material state is proven, settled, and stored. The delay between them is not treated as a defect. The present, in this method, is precisely the interval in which events have not yet become past.

9 · Settlement and availability

The demonstration settles by a small fixed tribunal: four validators, of which three must concur. A validator votes for at most one checkpoint at each height, so two conflicting checkpoints cannot both gather three votes while at most one validator is faulty. Each concurring vote also attests storage: the validator has fetched every blob the checkpoint names, has verified each against both of its names, and will hold the data through a stated lease. Three votes therefore guarantee at least two honest replicas for the term of the lease.

The limits are printed beside the guarantees. Membership of the tribunal is fixed, not open. Leases end and must be renewed. If the leader fails, the world pauses rather than risk a wrong history. Nothing is claimed to be eternal, and the interface reports the active assumptions at all times.

10 · Ongoing work

Four directions are reported as work in progress, and marked as such.

Matter with histories. Every unit of matter is a conserved quantum with a fixed kind and a recorded path. Two units of dirt obey identical laws and differ only in where each has been. The cost of this thisness is small — about one kibibyte of information for a thousand units — and the paths need no bookkeeping during play. Because the law is deterministic and selection follows a fixed convention, every path can be recomputed from the event archive alone. Identity rides on history without charge.

Epochs and the seal. Within an epoch, the Void only grows. When every unit of mutable matter has entered it, the world can close, and closure is proven like any other task. The closed epoch’s whole history is then sealed into one fixed‑size name. The seal cannot be read; it is a name, not a summary. The next world is generated from the seal — the same matter, in a new arrangement, caused by everything that happened before. The law thereby contains its own ending, and the ending is lawful.

Branches and their merge. Minds that separate can act on private branches. The mergeable object is the set of claims, not the state: claim sets combine cleanly by union, and a deterministic rule then projects the accepted world. Rejected claims enter an archive of exclusions rather than the Void, because a unit claimed on two branches never existed twice. Fair randomness for the projection remains an open problem.

Settlement along the light‑cone. Effects propagate at a bounded speed, so two regions that provably cannot have interacted can be settled independently. In the demonstration world, the fog is not decoration. It marks the bound of interaction, and therefore the boundary at which settlement may divide. The conjecture — reported as conjecture — is that this is the general rule for scale: shards should follow causal cones.

11 · The demonstration

The method is demonstrated at full strength in a small world before it is demonstrated at scale anywhere. The targets are concrete: the current state under one hundred kibibytes; verification under half a second in a desktop browser; a single‑step proof under ten seconds, with delegation permitted; the world reconstructible by a new machine from a genesis descriptor, a materiality certificate, and the named blobs, with nothing else trusted.

What remains open is listed rather than hidden: open membership, fair merge randomness, proving speed on small devices, and memory, which no proof can compress. Assurance shrinks to a constant size; remembrance does not.

This page is the demonstration. The world described above will open here. The word Enter, at the top of this page, will become clickable when it does.