> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.gotchipus.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Persistence

> Beacon World does not reset. Choices persist, reputation accrues, the world records what actually happened — and the next player walks into the consequences.

## A world that remembers

Most games are amnesiac. You log out, the dungeon respawns, the
shopkeeper restocks, the king is alive again. Beacon World is the
opposite: what happened, happened. The world's state is stored on
Base, not in your client session.

This is not a stylistic choice. It is the property that makes
"on-chain MUD" mean something more than "MUD that uses crypto."

## What persists

| Layer                                 | Where it lives               | What that means                                               |
| ------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Resident inventories                  | Each NPC's TBA on Base       | If you buy the last one, the next visitor sees an empty shelf |
| Rapport edges                         | TBA state, scoped per pair   | Your standing with Mira survives weeks of absence             |
| Gotchipus personality                 | Bound to the Gotchipus TBA   | Travels with the NFT on transfer                              |
| Major story flags                     | World contract state         | Triggered events stay triggered for everyone                  |
| Witnessed moments                     | LLM-readable on-chain log    | Other residents can refer to what they "saw"                  |
| Owned wearables, soul, level, faction | Standard Gotchipus contracts | Same primitives that power the rest of the project            |

## What does not persist (intentionally)

A few things are deliberately ephemeral so the world stays alive
rather than crystallizing:

* **Conversation transcripts** — generated fresh each time. Memory is
  encoded as state, not raw logs.
* **Routine ambient detail** — the weather, the small talk, the kind
  of mood Mira is in this morning. The LLM regenerates flavor; the
  chain holds the consequences.
* **Player presence beacons** — who is online right now is not a
  permanent record.

The rule of thumb: if it should affect a future decision, it persists.
If it is texture, it is generated.

## Seasonal arcs and shared memory

We treat Beacon World as a long-running show, not a service that
streams the same content forever.

* **Seasons** introduce world-scale events that all players experience
  in the same time window — an arrival from the deep, a council
  decision in Lighthaven, an outbreak of corruption in the Old Pharos
  Chapel.
* **Outcomes** are settled by what the player base actually does
  during the season, recorded as durable world state.
* **Future seasons** open in a world reshaped by previous ones. New
  arrivals can read what happened before them — through residents who
  reference the past, through changed geography, through the standing
  of factions.

This is how a persistent world stays one world rather than fragmenting
into N parallel save files.

## Why this matters for ownership

A Gotchipus that has lived through three seasons is not the same
asset as a Gotchipus minted yesterday. Persistence is what gives
secondary-market value real meaning:

* Provenance is not a hash — it is a story other residents can tell.
* A high-rapport Gotchipus opens doors a fresh one cannot.
* Personalities that have been shaped by a year of choices are not
  reproducible. The new owner inherits something that could not have
  been bought new.

Static NFTs are jpegs of identity. Beacon World NFTs are accumulated
identity itself.

## What this asks of us

Designing for persistence puts a higher bar on the team than designing
for resettable content:

* Every system has to answer "what happens when this is full / empty
  / over?" with something that is interesting, not just degenerate.
* We have to build slowly enough that the world's history is coherent.
  Shipping a half-finished system into a persistent world creates
  permanent scar tissue.
* We have to read the world before we change it. Patches on a live
  Beacon World are surgery, not updates.

The trade-off is worth it. The alternative — a world that resets
nightly — is what every other project already has.