{"id":52216,"date":"2026-05-18T18:19:30","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:19:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/seed-launches-planet-sized-society-simulator-in-early-access\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T18:41:35","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T22:41:35","slug":"seed-early-access-society-simulator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/seed-early-access-society-simulator\/","title":{"rendered":"Seed launches planet-sized society simulator in early access"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seed, the massively ambitious planet-sized society simulator from Berlin-based Klang Games<\/a>, is finally entering early access this summer, a decade after its core concept was first sketched out on paper. The game, which aims to simulate the daily lives of tens of thousands of persistent, player-created characters known as Seedlings across an entire planet called Avesta, represents one of the most audacious experiments in online world-building since the early days of Eve Online<\/a>. The comparison is not incidental. Two of Klang Games’ three co-founders, CTO Oddur Sn\u00e6r Magn\u00fasson and CCO \u00cdvar Emilsson, are veterans of Eve Online’s creator, CCP Games<\/a> (now Fenris Creations<\/a>). The third co-founder and CEO, Mundi Vondi, came from an arts and filmmaking background and brought with him a document outlining what he calls an “everything simulator.” The initial pitch to his friend Emilsson was met with a knowing sigh. “He’s just like, ‘Oh, here we go,'” Vondi recalls. But the conversation quickly shifted to the core problem they wanted to solve: how to make an MMO feel truly alive and populated at all times. In most online games, Vondi notes, even during peak hours, only a tiny fraction of the player base is logged in simultaneously, leaving towns and cities feeling ghostly and empty for the majority of the day. The Klang team wanted to reverse that dynamic entirely, making the persistent, autonomous life of every character the central game mechanic itself. The technical hurdles were staggering from the outset, and investors were initially incredulous. The prospect of running tens of thousands of AI-driven characters in the cloud, each with their own schedules, needs, and relationships, seemed prohibitively expensive and computationally impossible. “At the start they were just like, ‘That’s insane. That’s not possible,'” Vondi says. Yet after a few years of quiet breakthroughs, the team managed to prove the concept could scale. Preproduction finally began in 2018, aided in part by the broader metaverse hype cycle, which helped attract the kind of patient, risk-tolerant capital the project required. “That was right when Mark Zuckerberg had taken a big love for the metaverse and was putting in billions and billions and billions,” Vondi notes. “And there we were, having worked on something along those lines for way longer than anyone else.”<\/p>\n

Three Pillars of a Player-Driven Civilization<\/h2>\n

The foundational ambition of Seed is to enable an emergent society that evolves in ways its creators cannot predict. Vondi is unequivocal about the studio’s philosophy: “We believe in the future that more than 90% of the game is going to be built by the players, and it’s going to be way better than whatever any studio could ever build, because they’re not just building it, they’re also a part of it.” To structure this player-driven world, Klang has designed three broad player archetypes. Governors function much like the heads of corporations in Eve Online, responsible for enacting laws, planning economies, and setting the overarching direction of a settlement. Entrepreneurs will establish businesses, produce goods and services, and create the jobs that the entire economic system depends on. The third and most numerous group is the Caretakers, whose primary role is simply to look after their individual Seedlings, ensuring their basic needs for shelter, hygiene, and employment are met. Neglect a Seedling’s needs, and it will eventually die. While attracting Governors and Entrepreneurs has been relatively straightforward for Klang, appealing to the more casual Caretaker audience has proven to be the greater challenge. Starting from scratch in Seed is a formidable undertaking. Building a new settlement from the ground up is essentially a cooperative survival game, requiring multiple players to gather resources, construct basic shelters, and slowly progress through a technology tree. Because the game is persistently online, there is no fast-forward button. Seedlings must sleep for a portion of each day, which can result in long stretches of inaction. In a recent hands-on demo, a group of three journalists managed only to erect a couple of tents and a crude wooden shower and toilet after nearly two hours of play.<\/p>\n

From Hardcore Survival to Tamagotchi-Style Management<\/h2>\n

The key insight behind Seed’s design is that this slow, grinding survival loop is not intended for the vast majority of its eventual player base. Instead, the expectation is that most Caretakers will simply plug their Seedlings into already-functioning societies built by more dedicated players. Rather than micromanaging every moment of a Seedling’s day, the focus shifts to a calendar-based scheduling system. Players set their Seedling’s activities\u2014when to go to work, when to craft items, when to socialize\u2014and then check in periodically to adjust the schedule as needed. This has led the development team to describe the experience as a “massive society of Tamagotchis.” The analogy is reinforced by a companion mobile app that works in tandem with the main PC game. Players can use the app to check on their Seedling, adjust parameters, and receive notifications about their activities or, in the worst case, their death. Vondi acknowledges that making the Caretaker experience compelling is the hardest design problem they face. “It was not that hard for us to make the governance and the business gameplay fun, because there are common patterns we could follow there,” he explains. By contrast, Caretakers inevitably compare Seed to single-player life simulation games like The Sims, which offer high polish, direct control, and a fast-forward button that coddles the player through every moment. Competing with Electronic Arts’ deeply layered world on its own terms was always going to be a tall order. The breakthrough, according to Vondi, came from generative AI. “I would often say Seed’s going to be like Eve and the Sims combined, but it won’t have the fidelity of the Sims,” he says. “But then came our saving grace, which was generative AI. Because all of a sudden, we saw the possibility: wait a minute, we can go far deeper than any simulation game has ever gone, while still maintaining this huge scale. As far as silver bullets go, that really was the one.”<\/p>\n

The Generative AI Silver Bullet and its Thousand Breakages<\/h2>\n

Generative AI is woven directly into the core loop of Seed. At any point, a player can send a text message to their Seedling, who will pull out a phone and reply in natural language. During a demo, a Seedling was asked to flirt with a nearby character and report back. These interactions are not scripted; the AI generates responses based on the character’s personality and history. Seedlings can autonomously develop relationships with each other, even when their players are offline, creating a constantly evolving social web. This always-on nature, however, introduced a host of unexpected technical challenges. “It was much harder than we thought,” Vondi admits. “Because it’s always on, there are a lot of nuances. If you go offline, your Seedlings still continue talking. How are you supposed to find out what happened when you come back? How are they supposed to react to you being rude to them? How are they supposed to react to one another?” The team found itself wrestling with issues like conversation interruptions, AI memory, and contextual understanding. Vondi offers a simple example: “If I tell you it’s my birthday today and then I tell you again tomorrow, you need a very different reaction, because one of those days I must have been lying. We started to see a thousand little breakages like that, and then we realised, wait a minute, this isn’t going to be easy at all.” AI hallucinations\u2014where the model suggests actions that do not exist in the game\u2014also posed a problem. Yet, paradoxically, these hallucinations have become a feature discovery tool. Vondi recounts how one Seedling repeatedly said, “We should go for a drink sometime.” The team took this as a signal and subsequently programmed the game to automatically schedule a meeting on the calendars of two Seedlings who agreed to a drink rendezvous in a conversation. This iterative, reactive development has turned a technical flaw into a source of emergent gameplay.<\/p>\n

The Cost of Persistence and a Premium Escape Route<\/h2>\n

The sheer scope of the simulation demands extraordinary technical infrastructure. Vondi emphasizes that when a character walks around a corner in Seed, “he doesn’t disappear like in GTA, he’s going to go all the way to his house, and he’s going to brush his teeth before he goes to bed, no matter if somebody’s looking or not.” This level of persistence is computationally expensive, particularly when combined with generative AI functionality running constantly in the cloud. Klang Games’ monetization strategy, however, is deliberately straightforward. After experimenting with various models, the team settled on a premium purchase. “We’ve tried a few avenues, but what we’re really landing on is just the straight up premium: you buy it, you play it forever,” Vondi says. The decision is underpinned by a long-term bet on declining server costs. “The race to the bottom of the server centres is real,” he notes. “Prices have come down to a place where you can run a game like this, and that’s really lucky for us, because we bet on that, and that turns out to be true.” The monetization model is designed to scale with the player’s engagement. Every account receives one free Seedling, which will be replaced at no cost if it dies. Additional Seedling slots can be purchased either through direct payment or a subscription, and cosmetics will also be sold. For players who prefer not to spend money, there is an option to grind in-game activities to earn more Seedlings. This includes the possibility of earning “baby pills,” a mechanic Vondi describes as a “reverse contraceptive.” In Seed, all characters are essentially infertile until a player administers a fertility pill, allowing for controlled population growth within the player-driven society.<\/p>\n

A Relic of a More Optimistic Era<\/h2>\n

Seed arrives in early access at a moment when the gaming industry is largely retrenching. Major publishers, facing spiraling development costs, reluctant investors, and a post-COVID market correction, have largely retreated to safe bets, sequels, and established franchises. A project with Seed’s experimental scope and planet-sized ambition feels like a relic from a more optimistic decade, when the numbers were always going up and anything seemed possible. The game’s success will hinge entirely on its ability to attract and retain a critical mass of both hardcore builders and casual caretakers. Without enough Governors and Entrepreneurs to construct and manage functioning societies, the world will feel empty. Without a sufficient number of Caretakers, those societies will lack the population and economic foundation needed to feel alive. Vondi is aware of the stakes. With a decade of development behind it and a technological foundation that combines persistent simulation with generative AI, Seed is poised to either dominate the world of social simulation or collapse under the staggering weight of its own ambition. Early access opens this summer at seed.game<\/a>, with a full Steam release planned for later in the year. The outcome will be one of the most closely watched experiments in the history of online game design.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seed, the massively ambitious planet-sized society simulator from Berlin-based Klang Games, is finally entering early access this summer, a decade after its core concept was first sketched out on paper. The game, which aims to simulate the daily lives of tens of thousands of persistent, player-created characters known as Seedlings across an entire planet called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":85416,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/52216.png","fifu_image_alt":"Seed launches planet-sized society simulator in early access","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-videogames"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cards.overcentral.com\/cards\/en\/52216.png","fifu_image_alt":"Seed launches planet-sized society simulator in early access","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/overcentral.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}