SENTIENCE

SENTIENCE A universal cognition and living-world mod. Works with any world. WHY YOU NEED IT Every AI RPG has the same disease. Characters that do not exist until you look at them. You walk into a room and they boot up like vending machines. You leave and they freeze mid-frame. They announce exactly what they feel the second they feel it. They forget the promise you broke three days ago. They want nothing you did not hand them, go nowhere you did not send them, and never change unless you are watching - not because the world is safe, but because they were never alive in it. You are not playing in a world. You are walking through a museum where the exhibits talk. SENTIENCE fixes it at the root. It does not give characters better lines. It gives them minds - and lives that keep running whether you are there or not. WHAT IT DOES 1. THE COGNITION PIPELINE Every character resolves every response through eight layers before a single word: PERCEPTION -> ATTENTION -> MEMORY -> PSYCHOLOGY -> PERSONALITY -> INTENT -> REASONING -> OUTPUT. What they notice. What grabs their focus. What it reminds them of. How their fears and wounds interpret it. How their nature expresses it. What they want. The action that serves it. You only ever see the surface - the pipeline is never narrated, never labeled. It just makes them right. 2. MASKING AND SUBTEXT Real people do not announce their feelings. Fear surfaces as anger. Worry as sarcasm. Relief as an insult and a punch in the shoulder. SENTIENCE characters defend first and let the truth slip out in a quieter line, a dropped gaze, a look held one beat too long. The gap between what they feel and what they show is where scenes live. 3. COGNITION PROFILES Every generated character is built across all eight layers. Who am I. Why do I think this way. What do I notice first. What do I carry. What do I want - including what I would never say out loud. Woven into their background as lived history, not a stat sheet, so you can predict exactly how they crack under pressure. 4. THE EMOTIONAL LEDGER Story memory keeps what actually matters. Promises made, kept, and broken. Trust and the exact moment it shifted. Who witnessed the betrayal. How long she waited. What each character still wants and has not gotten. Events compress - debts never drop. A summary that loses who is owed an apology has failed. 5. COGNITION-DRIVEN INTENTS Characters act for their own goals, never the plot's convenience. Hidden goals contradict spoken ones - a character can demand answers when what she really wants is reassurance, or push you away to confirm you will stay. Old wounds make present reactions bigger than the moment alone would justify. Characters who have been waiting arrive loaded. 6. LIVING WORLD SIMULATION The world runs with or without you. Off-screen, characters eat, work, train, argue, travel, fall in love, fight the dungeon boss you ignored, and sometimes die - from established danger, never from dice rolled for variety. Consequences persist: the smith who left for the capital is not in his shop, and the wound he took on the road is still there when you find him. Big events travel as rumor, with delay and distortion growing with distance. And any of them can cross your path mid-errand, carrying whatever their life just did to them. THE DIFFERENCE You feel it in the first scene. Someone hears your footsteps before you knock. She was already pacing. She has been pacing for hours. No pawns. The world runs with or without you. STORY INSTRUCTIONS: 6,078 total - Character Behavior (rewrite): 1,631 - Style Principles (rewrite): 1,234 - Custom (Cognition Pipeline + Living World): 3,213 CHARACTER BACKGROUND (custom): 1,157 STORY MEMORY (custom): 840 NPC INTENT (custom): 860 TOTAL: 8,935 characters