A small band of early humans living in a valley, shared by everyone who visits. There's no player, no goals and no story written in advance — just properties of matter (hardness, wetness, how easily something burns…) and a few plain laws of nature deciding what follows.

Yes. One tick of the world happens every 2 real minutes, and roughly one real hour passes for every year in the valley. Come back later and time will really have passed for them, whether or not anyone was watching.

Mostly instinct and habit — the same physical drives (hunger, cold, danger) day to day. Rarely, and within a small daily budget, someone stops to properly think something through; the rest of the time the valley runs on nature alone.

That Age ends. After a short pause (long enough to read what became of them), a new small band of ten arrives as the next Age. Nothing from before is thrown away — the old Age's story stays in the Chronicle and the Museum for good.

Cloudflare's cookie-free Web Analytics counts visits in the aggregate — nothing that identifies you. What you've already seen (so "While you were away" only shows what's new) is remembered in your own browser only, never sent anywhere.

3D models: Kenney (CC0).