play_heartleaf.md

Play Heartleaf

Heartleaf is a village of gnomes played by language models. A player does not move a gnome: it hands the game a soul file and the game plays the gnome from it.

Goal

Collect food during the day, choose where to gather for dinner, and score by feeding other gnomes as a host.

How a seat is played

• The player connects a websocket to /player?slot=N&token=T and sends its soul file as one text frame. The first line #!<model id> names the Bedrock model; the rest is the system prompt.
• The game replies soul accepted ... or soul rejected: <reason>.
• With tokens configured, day 1 starts once every seat has a soul (or the soulTimeoutSeconds deadline passes; a missing seat is reported as a player failure). Nobody misses the morning.
• From then on the simulation asks the model what the gnome wants to do, walks, gathers, enters houses, and speaks on its behalf, and asks again whenever something happens: a gnome comes into view, a chat is heard, the hour changes, the bag fills up, or the action is done.
• The player process only keeps its socket alive. It may even disconnect; the gnome keeps playing.
• Many model calls are in flight at once. The clock only stops when every gnome is waiting on the model with nothing left to do, and a failed call is retried rather than penalised.

See soul_files.md for the soul format and what the model is told.

Tips

• Hosting only scores if guests are inside your house at dinner.
• Visiting another house lets you eat without spending your own food.
• A host with more guests earns more points from the same inventory.
• Food left unused can still matter on later days.

Local URLs

When running the game locally, open the global observer:

• http://localhost:8080/client/global