LIVING WORLD

Methodology

What the Witcher Observatory knows, how it knows it, what the models do, and what is deliberately not claimed.

REFERENCE DEMONSTRATION

One real save, a bounded semantic catalogue, and explicit model limits

This Observatory is a presentation-safe reconstruction of one completed Witcher 3 playthrough. The save is imported as host evidence, mapped into semantic Historical Reality, compiled into Current State, and then evaluated by two separate analytical systems: probable-future pressure and information propagation.

The demo does not claim to model every quest, NPC, contract, encounter, or rumor in The Witcher 3. When the catalogue or propagation policy does not contain an authored interpretation, Living World leaves it unmodelled rather than inventing one.

WD87authoritative save-derived NOW
43Current State items at NOW
27ACTIVE probable futures at NOW
437information-holder occurrences at NOW

AUTHORITY

What each layer is allowed to say

Host ObservationEvidence imported from the save. It is not itself narrative interpretation.
Historical RealitySemantic events the evidence establishes as having happened in this playthrough.
Current StateWhat remains authoritatively true NOW after supersession and resolution are applied.
Analytical surfacesProbable futures and character knowledge. They can change without creating history.

The critical boundary is simple: probability, pressure, knowledge, and transmission never create Historical Reality. Historical events require authoritative evidence or an explicit future realization mechanism. The current public demo has no autonomous realization mechanism.

The last reconstructed historical event in this reference playthrough occurs on WD75. The save-derived NOW is WD87. That gap is intentional: World Day can advance without requiring a new historical event every day.

DATA COVERAGE

What is currently modelled

The base-game coverage spine is the 64-entry main-quest chronology used to reconstruct this save. It includes wrappers, flashbacks, recruitment quests, the epilogue, and three branch-dependent quests that did not trigger in this particular playthrough. The semantic evidence pass also captures directly evidenced related side-quest outcomes when they materially affect the main causal spine; that is not the same as comprehensive optional-quest coverage.

Wild Hunt base-game chronology — 64 quest / branch entries
  1. Kaer Morhen
  2. Lilac and Gooseberries
  3. The Beast of White Orchard
  4. The Incident at White Orchard
  5. Imperial Audience
  6. In Ciri's Footsteps
  7. The Nilfgaardian Connection
  8. Bloody Baron
  9. Ciri's Story: The King of the Wolves
  10. Family Matters
  11. Hunting a Witch
  12. Wandering in the Dark
  13. Ladies of the Wood
  14. A Princess in Distress
  15. The Whispering Hillock
  16. Ciri's Story: Fleeing the Bog
  17. Ciri's Story: The Race
  18. Ciri's Story: Out of the Shadows
  19. Pyres of Novigrad
  20. Novigrad Dreaming
  21. Broken Flowers
  22. Count Reuven's Treasure
  23. Get Junior
  24. Ciri's Story: Visiting Junior
  25. A Favor for Radovid
  26. The Play's the Thing
  27. A Poet Under Pressure
  28. Ciri's Story: Breakneck Speed
  29. Destination: Skellige
  30. The King is Dead – Long Live the King
  31. Echoes of the Past
  32. Missing Persons
  33. Nameless
  34. The Calm Before the Storm
  35. Ugly Baby
  36. Disturbance
  37. The Final Trial
  38. To Bait a Forktail...
  39. No Place Like Home
  40. Va Fail, Elaine
  41. Brothers In Arms: Velen
  42. Brothers In Arms: Novigrad
  43. Brothers In Arms: Skellige
  44. Brothers In Arms: Nilfgaard
  45. The Isle of Mists
  46. The Battle of Kaer Morhen
  47. Blood on the Battlefield
  48. Bald Mountain
  49. Final Preparations
  50. Blindingly Obvious
  51. The Great Escape
  52. Payback
  53. Through Time and Space
  54. Battle Preparations
  55. Veni Vidi Vigo
  56. The Sunstone
  57. Child of the Elder Blood
  58. Skjall's Grave
  59. On Thin Ice
  60. Tedd Deireadh, The Final Age
  61. Something Ends, Something Begins
  62. A Mysterious Passenger — not triggered in this save
  63. A Final Kindness — not triggered in this save
  64. It Takes Three to Tango — not triggered / no positive save evidence

The base-game causal evaluation currently contains 74 high-confidence playthrough-specific details connected to that chronology. Those details are decomposed into semantic causal seeds rather than treating “quest complete” as the only meaningful fact.

Blood and Wine — 16 main quests in the authored possibility catalogue
  1. Envoys, Wineboys
  2. The Beast of Toussaint
  3. Blood Run
  4. La Cage au Fou
  5. Where Children Toil, Toys Waste Away
  6. Wine Is Sacred
  7. The Man from Cintra
  8. Capture the Castle
  9. The Night of Long Fangs
  10. Beyond Hill and Dale...
  11. Blood Simple
  12. What Lies Unseen
  13. Tesham Mutna
  14. Pomp and Strange Circumstance
  15. Burlap is the New Stripe
  16. Be It Ever So Humble...

The Blood and Wine catalogue contains 45 authored outcomes and 94 causal seeds. It is a possibility space: the catalogue alone does not assert that every outcome happened. Save evidence selects the outcomes supported by this playthrough.

Included now

  • Save-derived base-game causal history anchored to the 64-entry chronology.
  • Directly evidenced related optional-quest outcomes that already affect that causal spine.
  • Blood and Wine main-quest possibility catalogue and save-selected outcomes.
  • Current State, probable-future lifecycle, and semantic information propagation.

Not comprehensive yet

  • Wild Hunt secondary / optional quests as a complete catalogue.
  • Witcher contracts, treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, POIs, and most ambient activities.
  • Hearts of Stone semantic quest coverage.
  • Every Blood and Wine causal seed as an information-propagation route.

PROBABLE FUTURE

Pressure is a deterministic model score, not a prediction percentage

The baseline future engine is deliberately small and explainable. Every historical event can emit semantic causal seeds. A seed's authored salience, detail-decay profile, persistence, and explicit semantic resolvers determine its lifecycle. The engine does not use machine-learned probabilities and does not claim statistical likelihood.

InputBaseline behavior
SaliencePeak pressure: low 0.25, medium 0.50, high 0.75, very high 1.00.
Detail decayRise to peak: fast 2 days, medium 5, slow 10. Base decay window: fast 14 days, medium 35, slow 70.
PersistenceTimed decay is adjusted by persistence. Medium uses 0.75×, durable 1.5×, quest-chain 1.0×. Permanent / until-changed context does not receive a fabricated expiry.
Explicit resolverIf a later semantic historical event resolves or supersedes the seed, the future becomes RESOLVED.
Conditional persistence without a resolverThe baseline returns INDETERMINATE rather than inventing a timed outcome.

Only ACTIVE probable futures are published to the public Frontier. Persistent context remains part of reconstruction analysis but is not presented as an unresolved opportunity.

No-intervention projection

The +30 / +60 / +90 controls do not simulate Geralt choosing actions. They simply re-evaluate the same established futures at later World Days while Historical Reality remains frozen.

HorizonWorld DayACTIVE futuresObserved baseline behavior
NOW8727Authoritative save-derived frontier.
+30 days1172121 fading; 6 no longer active.
+60 days1471818 fading; 9 no longer active.
+90 days17788 fading; 19 no longer active.

In the current baseline, nothing new activates during the 90-day no-intervention forecast. That is an engine limitation and an intentional refusal to fabricate autonomous history, not a claim that a real world would remain passive.

INFORMATION PROPAGATION

What happened and who knows about it are separate questions

Historical Reality determines what information can exist. A separate authored propagation policy determines where a semantic fact begins, which holders and channels are eligible, how confidence and distortion change, and which transmissions succeed as World Day advances.

Historical eventAn event in this save emits semantic causal seeds.
Propagation bindingAn authored policy declares origin holders, channels, routes, and transmission behavior.
Knowledge stateSuccessful routes create holder occurrences with acquisition day, confidence, channel, and distortion.
Conversation cueA later system can ask whether a specific character actually knows enough for dialogue, correspondence, or another realization.

The original authored propagation domain contains 95 propagatable bindings and 3 state-only bindings. The reconstructed Blood and Wine catalogue currently contributes 59 additional seeds without authored propagation bindings. Those seeds remain unbound; Living World does not invent origin holders or routes just to make the map busier.

At WD87 the reference save contains 437 accumulated information-holder occurrences. The exact WD87 next-day transmission Frontier is empty, which simply means no authored route is due on the following day. Across WD0–WD87, 55 snapshots expose at least one information-transmission candidate.

Regional Spread visualizes accumulated knowledge or genuine information-transmission candidates. It does not convert probable-future pressure into geographic spread. Transmission probability belongs only to the route model.

Why two similar playthroughs may share rumors

The information model is deterministic. If two saves establish the same semantic history and use the same authored propagation policy, much of their knowledge state should be the same. That is expected. Divergence comes from different historical outcomes, surviving actors, relationships, secrets, and which causal seeds exist in each playthrough.

PUBLICATION BOUNDARY

What the public Observatory deliberately does not expose

The browser receives presentation-safe semantic snapshots. It does not receive the raw save or the private evidence used to reconstruct it.

This separation allows the Observatory to explain causality without turning the public site into an evidence dump.

NEXT COVERAGE

What changes as more authored data is added

The next major enrichment is the Wild Hunt optional-quest catalogue. The save does not need to change. Adding defensible semantic coverage should allow the same imported playthrough to reconstruct more Historical Reality, more Current State, more causal seeds, more probable-future opportunities, and more information capable of propagating.

A later architectural cleanup will separate reusable propagation-catalogue data even more explicitly from per-save Historical Reality. That refactor should preserve the observable behavior shown here rather than redefine it.