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 interface displaying the skills and experiences of a character named Natural Great Tit in a game, including skills such as Fighting, Foraging, and Learning, with experience points listed for each skill.

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/