This New 24/7 Society Simulator Is Powered by Thousands of AI-Controlled NPCs
Inspired by EVE Online, Klang's ambitious simulation game SEED uses AI-powered characters that continue living, working, and shaping society around the clock, even after players log off, all using a custom-built inference pipeline.
For decades, MMORPGs have revolved around one simple limitation: the world only truly comes alive when players are online. Houses sit empty, cities become ghost towns overnight, and NPCs wait patiently for someone to trigger the next quest. SEED, the ambitious society simulator from Klang Games, wants to challenge that assumption with a persistent world where thousands of AI-powered characters continue living, working, building, and interacting 24 hours a day.
The project has been in development for years, but its vision stretches back even further to the early days of EVE Online.
According to Klang CEO Mundi Vondi, the team's original goal wasn't simply to build another MMO, but to take the massive social ecosystems they experienced while developing EVE Online and make them accessible to a much broader audience.
Source: Klang Games
Source: Klang Games
"We saw something there that we still believe is the future of gaming. EVE has these insanely vast ecosystems, but it's also one of the most hardcore games ever made. We started asking ourselves what kind of playground could support millions of players while remaining approachable. Eventually we realized the answer wasn't making the world bigger—it was making the people inside it alive. If every character continued living around the clock, then suddenly player-built cities wouldn't become ghost towns whenever people logged off."
- Mundi Vondi, Klang Games CEO, during an interview with 80LV
That realization became the foundation for SEED. Rather than directly controlling a traditional avatar, players manage AI-driven "Seedlings" that develop relationships, pursue careers, start families, and contribute to society even while their owners are offline. Every city is built by players, but it's the autonomous characters that keep those cities functioning.
The AI characters contextually understand their surroundings, and you can talk to them directly, as they're out and about living their own lives. The technology underpinning those behaviors goes well beyond simple dialogue generation.
Source: Klang Games
"Each character has what we call a Knowledge Graph that's unique to them. If one character falls in love with another, that's only true from their perspective unless those feelings are reciprocated. The graph is created entirely through experience, so everything they learn, see, or hear becomes part of their understanding of the world. If they don't know someone, that person simply doesn't exist in their knowledge graph yet."
- Mundi Vondi, Klang Games CEO, during an interview with 80LV
This Knowledge Graph allows each character to develop its own memories, relationships, and subjective understanding of the world. Instead of sharing a universal state, every character experiences events differently based on what they've personally witnessed or been told.
That asymmetrical knowledge creates one of SEED's most intriguing features: emergent drama.
Rather than scripting narrative events, Klang allows misunderstandings, rumors, and discoveries to unfold naturally between AI characters.
Vondi shared one example where a character falsely tells another that his mother has died. Later, when that character unexpectedly encounters the supposedly deceased woman walking through town, the AI independently pieces together the contradiction, realizes it was lied to, and changes its relationship accordingly.
Source: Klang Games
Source: Klang Games
"It's these asymmetries that allow us to create really convincing narratives," Vondi said. "Characters connect the dots themselves because their understanding of the world evolves over time."
Supporting thousands of constantly evolving personalities requires a custom technical approach as well.
Rather than relying on commercial AI APIs, Klang has built its own inference pipeline around Google's open-source Gemma model, heavily modifying it for the simulation while storing each character's expanding knowledge graph independently.
"We have our own model based on Gemma that we've modified ourselves, and we run it on our own hardware. Every character builds this enormous knowledge graph over time, and we store that efficiently so it can continue growing without keeping everything in memory. We also introduced systems like a social battery so characters don't become overwhelmed or exploited by players constantly interacting with them."
- Mundi Vondi, Klang Games CEO, during an interview with 80LV
Source: Klang Games
Source: Klang Games
The simulations extend far beyond conversation. Characters earn salaries, spend money, visit restaurants, seek medical treatment, maintain homes, and support businesses even while players are away. According to Vondi, that's one of the biggest differences between SEED and traditional life simulators.
For example, normally when players build a restaurant in a game, nobody actually comes to eat there organically. But the Seedlings do because most of the time their owners aren't even online. Now, restaurants, gyms, hospitals, cinemas, and every other service business have genuine customers who are going by willingly as they desire.
Perhaps the most memorable demonstration of those systems in action during the demo came not from a developer, but from the community itself.
During one early playtest, Vondi explained that a player successfully cornered the world's bread market by purchasing nearly every loaf produced across the simulation before reselling it at 100 times the normal price. The in-game government responded by building enormous bread factories, only for the player to buy their entire output as well. Eventually, the in-game president imposed a massive bread tax, collapsing the monopoly.
Source: Klang Games
"The president was going crazy on Discord. Finally, he introduced a huge bread tax, and within minutes the player's empire collapsed. But the community thought the government had overstepped its authority, so the president lost the next election."
- Mundi Vondi, Klang Games CEO, during an interview with 80LV
Stories like that represent exactly what SEED is trying to achieve: a world where simulation, player creativity, and emergent social systems combine to produce experiences no designer could script in advance.
The studio also recognizes that not every player wants to become a politician or economic mastermind. Instead, SEED is built around three distinct player archetypes: caretakers focused on individual families, entrepreneurs running businesses, and governors managing society itself. Players can choose how deeply they want to engage with those systems, or even just simply check in on their characters every now and then.
Ultimately, Vondi believes that's what could make SEED appeal to an audience that has gradually aged out of traditional competitive MMOs.
Source: Klang Games
Source: Klang Games
"One of the things we always wanted to do was make an MMO where 35-year-olds can win again. The average gamer is older now. They have jobs, families, and less time to spend mastering competitive games. We wanted to build something that you can enjoy in five-minute sessions, or dive incredibly deep into if you choose."
- Mundi Vondi, Klang Games CEO, during an interview with 80LV
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