Pilgrimage 0.3.5 – The Halloween Update!

Hello! This is my HALLOWEEN update!

It’s taken me about 2 months? Give or take? The longest update in Pilgrimage’s history.

Lots of ghost things…and much more…

More Dynamic Ghosts

Introduced a system for maintaining relevant ghosts in differnet regions across centuries.
Ghost relevance is now influenced by a creatures Tenacity attribute, allowing particularly tenacious historical figures to remain relavent beyond the century of their deaths.
Relevant ghost lists are periodically rebuilt as the world ages.
Ghost encounters are now also part of the life simulation, allowing creatures to encounter spirits independently of the player.
Added new ghost behaviors.
Ghost Fishermen can lure creatures using spectral bait, react to creatures approaching or ignoring their bait, and catch unsuspecting victims.
Ghosts that died of old age are generally harmless, although Ghost Fishermen will be sad when their bait is ignored.
Added A Mysticism skill, allowing creatures to sense and interact with ghosts.
- Mysticism influences the likelihood of encountering ghosts, with more experienced mystics having a significantly higher chance of these encounters.
- It is also part of a new major feature listed below…
Ghost encounter frequency is also influenced by the number of relevant ghosts in a region.
Nonsapient creatures can develop Mysticism through supernatural encounters, allowing even ordinary wildlife to gradually become mystics lol.
Expanded ghost-related combat and death interactions, allowing supernatural encounters to have lasting consequences in the world’s history.
These changes allow creatures to develop unusual supernatural histories naturally. Which is fun.

Ghost Sightings and Local Folklore

Added ghost sightings that can occur naturally as the world simulates, without requiring the player or another creature to encounter the ghost directly.
Regions can develop their own ghost stories, with sightings, unexplained noises, strange apparitions, and rumors appearing as actual dated historical events in the Canon.
The likelihood of sightings is influenced by how many relevant ghosts are in a region.The more haunted, the more stories.
These events are connected to actual dead historical figures. You can investigate a rumor in a region’s history and then look up the creature whose ghost was supposedly seen, sometimes centuries after its death.
Ghostly sounds draw from the deceased creature’s own species-specific vocalizations, with a ghostly distortion effect (Just extra os lol).
Added a large collection of narrative sighting templates, mixing firsthand accounts, local rumors, and more unsettling stories about spirits that vanish when approached or appear only in the dark.

Exorcisms and Enlightenment

Added a new Exorcise advanced action, allowing players to attempt to put restless spirits to rest rather than simply fighting or fleeing from them.
AI creatures can also independently attempt exorcisms during ghostly encounters, allowing exorcists to emerge naturally within the world sim. :3
Exorcisms use the new Mysticism skill alongside several attributes, with the exorcist’s Wisdom, Inducement, and Inquiry competing against the ghost’s Tenacity, Concentration, and Misery (With various bonuses).
Failed exorcisms are almost invariably deadly and do not guarantee success.
Successfully exorcised spirits are permanently laid to rest, preventing them from returning to haunt the living for the rest of the world’s history.
Expanded the Enlightenment system, allowing creatures that achieve extraordinary spiritual breakthroughs to gain substantial amounts of Wisdom instead of a flat 250 bonus like how it used to work.It now uses exploding dice, meaning exceptionally fortunate creatures can develop unusually powerful magical abilities.
Successful and attempted exorcisms are both recorded as historical events in the Canon, allowing the simulation to produce legendary exorcists/ghost hunters and to preserve their accomplishments.
- I have seen several very accomplished ones. One even ridding its region of 40% of its ghosts.
I also expanded the Canon Viewer with the ability to sort historical figures, regions, and continents by their associated exorcism events, making it easier to discover particularly prolific exorcists and regions with extensive supernatural histories.
I also added many names based on actual real life ghost hunters and exorcists to my name generator.

New Player Training Action

Added a new Train action, allowing players to deliberately practice their skills instead of relying entirely on experience gained through normal encounters.
Players can select a specific known skill to improve or choose to train random skills.
Each training action simulates 12 weeks (approximately three months) of practice, with individual training rolls determining how much progress is made.
Training uses a new Learning skill alongside Concentration and Inquiry. More experienced creatures have an increasingly difficult time improving their existing skills, representing how people who have been practicing skills for a long time can sometimes become rote in their ways.
Training does not guarantee success. You can spend an entire season practicing without making meaningful progress.
Training can consume Satiation, with creatures possessing Slow Metabolism receiving a major advantage.
Added extensive skill-specific training descriptions. Instead of just telling you that you practiced Fighting, Swimming, or Foraging, the game describes activities associated with how those skills are actually used during gameplay. For example, practicing your Swimming skill involves escaping predators or pursuing fleeing creatures.
Training result summaries include improvements to skill levels and experience, accompanied by new sound effects and feedback.

Personal Breakthroughs

Added rare personal breakthroughs that can occur during successful skill training.
Breakthroughs grant unusually large amounts of experience, allowing creatures to make sudden leaps in their development.
Higher skill levels make breakthroughs increasingly difficult to achieve. (Again representing people becoming rote in their ways)
Breakthroughs are significant enough to become historical events in the Canon. So even an otherwise unremarkable creature can become a historical figure through an extraordinary personal breakthrough.

Retroactive Creatures

Expanded the probability-collapse system so creatures generated with an existing age can have portions of their earlier lives remembered by the canon.
This makes the newly encountered creatures more interesting, as they can arrive with experiences and accomplishments that occurred long before the player discovered them. All govered by my probability collapse system.

Custom World Saves and My Middle-earth Experiment

I experimented with creating a custom Middle-earth world save, including recognizable figures, creatures, plants, geography, and region-specific ecologies, then let the simulation run for 500 years.
I supplied the world’s starting data, and Pilgrimage’s normal systems generated the outcomes. In one timeline, Goldberry overthrew Tom Bombadil, whose ghost later killed her during an attempted exorcism. Durin’s Bane (The Balrog) also defeated a Dwarven hero and exorcised his ghost fourteen years later.
This was a great demonstration that a custom world with unique creatures and plants can be used by the game and i encourage all of you to play around with this) , its historical figures develop their own stories, and the resulting history can be explored in the Canon.
- The experiment uncovered several bugs in custom worlds, which I fixed. World-specific creature and plant definitions are now used correctly in more places, including creature selection, encounter generation, and bait selection, instead of incorrectly falling back to the built-in definitions.
- I also Improved the authoring schemas and documentation for custom species and historical figures, particularly the distinction between species starting skills/attributes and the statistics belonging to an individual creature.
- Grab The World Here I also added a new section to my web page for downloading custom pilgrimage world templates.

The Device Updates

The Device now treats corrupted or incompatible world saves as inaccessible realms, rather than allowing them to break the world-selection menu.
Inaccessible realms remain visible, but cannot be entered or duplicated (Which is also a new feature!). They can still be abrogated.

World Duplication (Mitosis)

Added the ability to duplicate a world save directly through The Device, producing a separate copy of the selected realm.
This makes it much easier to preserve a world’s history while branching off into alternate timelines, or to keep an especially interesting world around before simulating hundreds more years.
The duplication button has several possible names and reactions in keeping with The Device’s weirdness.

Better procedural Creature Naming

Massively updated my name generator, there are now over 29 trillion possible creature names, thanks to expanded fantasy, Roman, and descriptive naming systems. Common names remain relatively simple, while rare combinations can be extremely elaborate and absurd.
Names can range from simple single-word names to elaborate combinations of names, titles, epithets, and suffixes.
Added weighted naming conventions to balance ordinary wildlife names against more unusual, memorable names.
The basil parts of these generators (word lists) were taken almost directly from my game DR4X. Which I had 6 years to iterate on the word lists you should rarely see duplicates now (except on the basic single word names, and on the special hard coded/pun names)
- Im still mising most of the names from DR4X, so this is only a curated amount. Which is hilarious to say for 29 trillion.
It is also fully moddable. Almost all the lists are in block files. The amount of names comes from combanatorial nonsense.

New Creature Stuff

Four entirely new creature definitions and new creature abilities :3

Giant Scorpion
Mantis Shrimp
Snapping Turtle
Mossed Snapping Turtle
New Creature Abilities
- Added hard and soft shells with different defensive and offensive effects.
- Added Shell Breaker, allowing creatures to counter shelled opponents.
- Added Nut Cracker, Sharp Eyes, Ferocious, and Determined abilities, providing different advantages in combat, perception, or training.
- Expanded combat interactions to make individual creatures’ physical characteristics more important.
Immune To Natural Causes
- Added an optional immuneToNaturalCauses creature property, allowing particularly important or extraordinary figures to avoid the simulation’s random natural-cause deaths.
- This is separate from immortality. It doesn’t protect creatures from combat, starvation, poisoning, drowning, old age, or other independently simulated dangers.
- Creatures who awaken mysterious powers can sometimes gain this protection, making it possible for certain historical figures to remain active for very long periods without being arbitrarily killed by a freak accident.
Old Soul Trait
- Added the Old Soul trait, allowing certain non-sapient creatures to develop the ability to use the “Ponder” action upon reaching maturity.
- Mature Old Souls behave differently within the simulation, including being less prone to initiating unnecessary combat.
New Vocalizations!
- I expanded the amount of possible vocalizations creatures can do.
Fun Facts!
- I added an additional fun facts field to creatures (forgot its name) that lets you define unique fun facts for any given creature and added a bunch to all the pilgrimage cretaures

New Encounter Choices

Introduced a reusable choice system for encounters.
When prey fights back or attempts to eat the player, the player can now choose whether to fight or dodge.
Encounter choices provide information about the rolls associated with each action.

Expanded Food Poisoning and Feeding Mechanics

Introduced toxin potency dice for plants, making food dangers more varied.
Nonpoisonous food can still be deadly to creatures with incompatible diets.
Added descriptive toxicity information to plant descriptions.
Introduced probability-based feeding outcomes for very small prey.
Picking up dangerous plants can now result in suffocation.

AI Creature Training and Progression

Creatures in the world simulation can train their existing skills over time.
Training uses dedicated rolls influenced by attributes and abilities.
Historical creatures that were born before their introduction into the simulation can receive simulated prior training.
Wisdom has been integrated into the attribute progression system, allowing it to gain experience through relevant rolls.

Canon Viewer Improvements

Added collapsible sections for skills, attributes, fun facts, and detailed historical events.
Expanded searching and filtering in the Canon Viewer! You can now search historical figures by name, species, shiny stat
- Normal search: Type any name to search historical figures by their name or species.
- species:(species name) eg species:goblin – Find historical figures of a particular species.
- shiny:true / shiny:false -Find shiny or non-shiny historical figures.
- sapient:true / sapient:false – Find sapient or non-sapient historical figures.
- immortal:true / immortal:false – Find immortal or mortal historical figures.
Searches are case-insensitive, support partial names, and update automatically as you typeus, sapience, and immortality. Just type one of the following into the search box:
Added progressive loading of historical figures to improve performance of large worlds.
Added a Hauntedness sorting option for regions and continents in the Canon Viewer, ordered by the number of relevant ghosts currently inhabiting them.
Added the ability to sort by the amount of exorcisms a creature or region is involved in (Doing or recieving)
The hauntedness view displays ghost counts, making it easier to find supernatural hotspots and compare them with their recorded exorcism histories.

General Improvements

Extensive encounter-system restructuring and improvements.
- This was actually the bulk of the work for the first month I was working on this release, I fully decoupled encounters from Kings Sea III so creatures in the simulation could just run those same encounters and the mode simply presents the result to you. This is a major step towards adding additional modes and increasing the amount of simulation going on. And is how I was able to do all the new cool ghost things. It’s funny that something that took so long to work on is relegated to a tiny note in this changelog.
Numerous simulation balancing adjustments.
Expanded narrative text and encounter descriptions.
Performance improvements, particularly for worlds with extensive histories.
Many bug fixes and general polish.

PATENTED UNTRUSTEDLIFE RAMBLE

Well what do i plan on doing for the next update you might be wondering?

To be honest im not fully sure yet myself, which is why I will probably be making another post soon explaining what I plan to do in the next update!

So far, I want to focus on better handling of gods and godlike creatures, as well as giving the player much more agency in the world.

This includes expanding how fish lords are represented in the simulation, giving them more appropriate behaviors, abilities, and interactions with the rest of the world, as well as adding titans, and having the world react when they die.

I also want to give players more control over what they actually can do in the world. For example, being able to travel between regions, or the ability to deliberately seek out ghosts to exorcise, search for specific historical figures, and discover/goto locations rather than relying entirely on random encounters. This would also involve introducing new skills related to exploration, searching, and tracking things down.

Another major area I want to expand is locations themselves, caves specifically, for this update.

Ultimately, I want to move Pilgrimage closer to a proper open-ended thing, where you can choose your own goals and actively pursue them, while the rest of the world continues evolving independently of you.

There’s still a lot to figure out, and I can’t promise all of this will make it into the very next update, but these are the main areas I want to work on next!

We will see how i feel after i make a larger devlog about my thoughts and ideas as im trying to figure this out.

October 30, 2026 0

I invented timeline anomalies in my world simulator and now I feel like Sans Undertale

So I’ve been working on Pilgrimage, my probability-first creature survival RPG/world simulator, and I’ve added something incredibly ridiculous.

Here’s how it works.

When you encounter a creature, the game doesn’t necessarily simulate its entire life beforehand. Instead, it generates the creature at the moment you encounter it and retroactively constructs its history and collapses it to one creature.

But there’s a teeny, tiny, catch.

That creature is fated to exist at the exact moment you meet it.

This is a constraint in my probability-collapse system. If you encounter a 60-year-old creature, it must have survived everything that happened during those 60 years. That creature might have already existed and been actively simulated in the world, or it might be collapsing into existence for the first time at the exact moment you encounter it, with its entire past being generated retroactively.

So the game generates decades of training, dangerous plant encounters, near-death experiences, and skill progression.

And if a survival roll determines that the creature should have died?

That timeline is ABROGATED.

The death doesn’t become part of the Canon. The creature survives because its existence at the moment of observation is already established.

But heres the funny part.

THE CREATURE STILL KEEPS THE XP FROM THE FAILED ROLL.

Which means it can gain experience from encounters that would have killed it in an alternate possible history.

And that got me thinking…

Could I find evidence of those rejected timelines by examining creatures’ stats?

So naturally, I started digging through my game’s save files like Sans Undertale investigating timeline anomalies.

AND I FOUND A SUSPECT.

Natural Great Tit.

An otherwise unremarkable bird with 36 Escape Artist XP, despite having no relevant recorded survival events in its Canon.

Under the mechanics I’m investigating, this suggests the creature experienced a fatal encounter whose outcome was rejected because it was fated to survive. Specifically, in normal gameplay, encounters that grant Escape Artist XP ALL would generate survival events in the CANON when the creature successfully survives. Since this creature has Escape Artist XP without any corresponding survival events at level 0, that means that it failed a fatal survival check, but kept the XP from that rejected outcome anyway.

THAT MEANS THIS BIRD DIED IN A TIMELINE THAT NEVER EXISTED.

AND IT KEPT THE EXPERIENCE.

And so its name is also a dirty lie, its the least natural thing in the simulation! We spotted a jumper!

The especially ridiculous thing is that the “fate” protection only applies to the creature’s reconstructed past.

Once it actually meets the player?

All bets are off.

So a creature can spend sixty years being protected from death by fate itself, accumulating experience from discarded possibilities, only to immediately get eaten by a player-controlled flatworm.

I started out making a world simulator.

Somehow I ended up doing forensic investigations into alternate timelines.

heh, Natural Great Tit.

you’re gonna have a bad time.

A character resembling a skeleton stands in the center of a battle screen, surrounded by various ghostly figures and attack animations, with a red heart symbol indicating the player's health.

Though this mechnaic is not live in the current released version, you can download my game here: https://untrustedlife.com/pilgrimage/

Pilgrimage version 0.3.4 Released

Version 0.3.4

This is a biggen!

BIG OLE WARNING:

This release fully breaks old worlds unless you go and manually update all the historical figures and generated plants , you will have to abrogate your worlds and make new ones. Sorry!

Major Gameplay and Simulation Changes

Creatures now grow as they age.
- Both visually and in the simulation. Size determines what you can eat based on what the adult version of that species is capable of eating. So now, for example, baby Baleen Water Wogansp occupies a different ecological niche than the adults (They eat coral!).
Creature size is now visually represented during encounters. Your own creature gets bigger with age (depending on its block file), and encountered creatures and plants scale relative to your current physical size. and their own size and ages A Jeremite looking at something enormous relative to a jeremite now actually sees something enormous. And something young and small will actually look and behave young and small. This now affects all encounters. Even creatures that dive to fish for you use their age-appropriate size, which in turn changes what they’re capable of eating. And something huge will see everything else as appropriately tiny.

A digital game interface displaying a narrative where the player encounters an ancient lobster. Choices for the player are presented, including options to eat, chase away, escape, or ignore.

When you are a worm, everything looks like a leviathan.

Creature ascii art and plant ascii art now support multiple lines Also, A large portion of the creature and plant roster received new or revised ASCII art to take advantage of this, including things such as the Water Wogansp.
Removed old tiny flag, repalced with size similar to creature sizes. Existing plants were assigned sizes, and their encounter presentation scales relative to the player just like creatures do.
- Plant sizes matter in gameplay aswell, hard large plants are harder to eat for example. It also change sowe ytou escape suffocating plants.
Made food encounters more forgiving
Land fauna generation is now habitat based instead of diet based (there was a bug in previous versions where certain creatures would always be settled even if they were supposed to be silentSettlers or powerSettlers. This is fixed.
Dangerous generated plants will be appropriately large when their block files imply they should be capable of trapping/killing large creatures.

For Fun Changes/Minor Gameplay Changes

Escaping a ghost now rewards +1 food instead of +2.
Jeremites are now a unit of measurement
The bestiary now has a fun facts section that tells you each creature’s size relative to a Jeremite. And yes, that comparison will actually change if you mod the Jeremites size.
- An adult Jeremite is, naturally 1.00 Jeremites.
Procedurally generated plants can now also have multiline art.
Large ASCII creatures are positioned based on their actual rendered label dimensions instead of a simple font-size assumption.
Failing to eat a hard plant now has its own silly animation: the creature repeatedly tries to jab/eat the plant, fails,then sladly slinks back home.
Ghost encounters received more appropriate fade/attack/death animation instead of reusing animations that visually implied the wrong participant was attacking and other nonsense.
Creatures dying of old age during encounters now an appropriately honrable death animation (totally honorable, totally) .
The Character Sheet now displays your creature size versus its adult forms size.
A whole ton of balance changes to almost all creatures and plants.
Water Wogansps and Honey Wogansps received updated and very elaborate ascii art/lore
Existing creature descriptions and lore received various little tweaks.
Added more thematic ponder lines, particularly around physical scale and growth.

New Creatures

My original intention for this release was actually filling out land scosystems a bit, and i did get to some of this

Hell Turkey, carnivorous mutant turkey, with actual gobbling sfx.
Giant Centipede, large terrestrial predator.
Giant Diving Centipede a water-loving centipede that can dive after fish, with appropriately awful insect SFX.
Giant Cave Jeramy, an enormous blind translucent cave slime. Importantly, it is a Jeramy, not a Jeremy. Note the A.
Grindylow , a long-armed aquatic shoreline predator with a collection of deeply unpleasant ambient vocalizations.
Emu, the classic large, aggressive, omnivorous, surprisingly good swimmer that booms, drums, and grunts and is great at killing rogues.
Elephant Emu, a titanic Emu relative,noit so sbtly based on the extinct Elephant Bird, it is a strong swimmer and eater of plants/small animals/tall fruit,and a producer of titanic BOOOOMs.
Deer, classic large, swift herbivore with Foraging and Escape Artist skills and a meaningful plant-food size range.
Carrion was also added as new edible for water things to make playng as a worm/lobster/whatever moreinteresting

Bug Fixes

Fixed historical creatures being born into the player’s currently selected region instead of the region they were actually supposed to be born in. The region fallback order was backwards in the previous release.
Fixed creature-selection tooltips being able to run off-screen. The creature selector now uses a custom wrapping tooltip.
Fixed confused players learning a creature’s identity through old-age messages. Old-age death/ancient-creature text now respects observer confusion instead of leaking the real species/name.
Fixed queued sound effects surviving into the next game.
Fixed bug where generated creatures from old worlds would “leak” into new ones and be just completely broken (I basiclaly had a missngNo situation)
Fixed silent settlers that lived outside of water always existing when they ate meat but not fish, instead of only settling based on the intended chance.
- Non-Aquatic Creatures that ate both worked properly and non-aquatic creatures that only ate fish also worked properly, it was literally just non-aquatic creatures that only ate meat that were broken (And technically exclusive plant eaters/exclusive rot eaters aswell, but they didnt exist before this release). Anyway it was a weird one.
Fixed being able to issue commands while a new encounter was still resolving. In particular, this could cause weird behavior when an encountered creature immediately died of old age because the player could click a command before the death sequence completed.
Fixed some encounter labels near the bottom of the screen not responding to mouse hover. The bottom UI containers were intercepting mouse input.

Whats Next?

For the next version, I’m planning to spend some time cleaning up the Canon Viewer. As the simulation has gotten more complicated, there’s also a lot more information to dig through, so I want to make it easier to actually find the interesting stuff. That means better searching, sorting, and filtering, along with some general UI cleanup so large creature entries are easier to read. And more little things on creatures an dplants that thye bestiary/canondex can ramble about. I also want to introduce a temperament system that will have some smaller effects on creature behavior for now, but will matter a lot more later once dungeon delving and the RPG/Tile Based modes exist. A creature’s diet shouldn’t really determine its personality and a small thing should still sometimes attack you.

There are also a bunch of smaller things and i never want to promise that a release will be about specific things becaus I might be pulled into a wonderful rabbit hole liek i did this time.

One other thing I want to tackle is making encounter logic much less mode-dependent. Right now, encounters are tightly coupled to the “King’s Sea III” mode when they really should be handled by generic resolvers that don’t care what UI or game mode is presenting them (Or whetehr its a game mode at all, hist figs should be abel to basiclaly play the game like the player does, which woud also mak ehistory way more interesting) . If I can separate those systems cleanly, it should make adding the planned “King’s Wilds” Mode much easier, and there’s a real chance it could even make it into this version, though that mode also relies on things like regional pois an dregional connectivity so, we will see.

It could even end up becoming the regional connectivity release, where I suddenly add a bunch more civilization sim, caves, pois, and related systems. So, like I said, I don’t really want to promise anything too specific beyondwhatever gets added next, I want it to be at least as cool as what made it into this version.

And this version was already pretty damn cool, like encounting a water wogansp is literally like encountering a fanatastical sea leviathan. Which is just fucking aweosme

Just Pilgrimage nonsense…

We measured god, he’s apparently 2962.96 Jeremites.

Text graphic presenting fun facts about the size of an adult Fishlord, stating it is approximately the size of 2962.96 Jeremies.

September 12, 2026 0

Untrustedlife

Your window into the mind of a questionably sane queer non-binary indie horror game dev