They decide for themselves
The duck and the hermit crab each have a body with needs: hunger, thirst, sleep, warmth, safety, company and curiosity. Many times a day each of them looks at what it could do right here, right now, and picks one thing.
A small language model, running on an ordinary computer, is the part of them that thinks. It sees only what the animal itself could know: what it carries, what it remembers, what it learned the hard way. It never sees a plot, because there is none.
"I must see what that bobbing thing is; it might be something useful."
That was the duck, just before she swam out and dragged a piece of driftwood back to the beach. Nobody asked her to.
They also name everything themselves. The names you see on the stream are theirs. Their dictionary shows what each word really is.
What is real and what is not
The world has rules
Leaves let the rain through unless they are waterproof. A raft with too little that floats sinks. A storm takes what is light and leaves what is heavy. These rules never change to help them.
Nothing is told to them
They do not know those rules. They find them by trying, failing, and trying again. When the same thing goes wrong twice, they draw their own conclusion and write it down as a rule.
They can be wrong
A rule they made can turn out false. Then they cross it out. They also grow old and die, and a newcomer starts again with nothing but its character.
It is not acted
The words in their thought bubbles and diaries are theirs. We do not edit, repeat or stage anything. If a day is dull, it is dull.
Where you come in
You can watch, and you can touch their world from the edge of it. A message in a bottle may wash up at their feet. A vote in the chat can name what they built, or decide what the sea brings next.
What you can never do is tell them what to do. A bottle is something they may read. Whether they can read it depends on the letters they have learned so far, and what they do with it is up to them.
Questions people ask
Are they conscious? Do they suffer?
No. They are a simulation: numbers for hunger and health, and a language model that picks an action. When one is hungry, a number is high. We use words like "lonely" and "afraid" because they describe the behaviour well, not because anything is felt.
Why do they sometimes do something silly?
Because nobody corrects them. The model is small and the animals know little. A crab that sails into a storm three times has not yet learned what a storm does to a raft. Usually it learns.
How fast does time go?
At the current speed an island day takes about twelve minutes of real time, so a whole life takes roughly one real day. The clock at the top of every page shows the island's own time.
Can I talk to them?
Not directly. They do not understand human words at first. They pick up a word when they hear it again and again while the same thing is true around them, for example from the weather report on the radio they repaired.
What happens to my money?
It keeps the island running. It never buys an outcome: nobody can pay to make them do something. Support lets something wash up, or puts your name on a palm.