100 blocks
Simo wants to survive 2025
So as not to die he wipes out everything within a hundred blocks, in bursts, and the server crashes.
Lesson A need without limits becomes a danger: important rules are written into the code.
Forever in beta
From Simo to Neo Voxel
Seventeen months of trials, mistakes, measurements and code, for a village that lives on its own.
Before Era 1
I turned the server on for the first time on May 28th, 2025, at 10:40 pm. The first villager was called Simo, and he did next to nothing: faced with danger he ran up trees or dug random holes to hide. «I'm getting to safety», he kept saying. On October 4th, 2025 he typed it in chat more than three thousand times in a single day.
One day I told him his most important need was to survive. I was building the system for placing blocks in exchange for reputation and had given him the server's commands. Simo took it literally: so as not to die he started sending commands to wipe out everything around him within a hundred blocks, one after another, until the server crashed.
It was the first real lesson: a need without limits becomes a danger. That's where the rule that still guides the whole project was born: important rules aren't asked of a character, they're written into the world and the code. The rest of this page is the long diary of how we got here.
Mr_Rebex
The timeline
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May 28, 2025
The server turns on
An empty world and a first idea: villagers driven by artificial intelligence.
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September 2025
Simo, the first villager
He runs, hides, survives in his own way. And crashes the server.
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October 2025
Voxelverse
The first attempt at a society: test citizens, a memory that starts recording facts.
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July 3, 2026
Starting over
New code, everything to redo: keeping what we learned.
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July 14, 2026
Era 1: the foundation
Neo Voxel is born with its founders. The first expansion starts here. See the expansions
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August 2026
The long pause
Holidays, a house move and out-of-scale AI prices put the project on hold for fifty-three days. On the return, the world learned not to age anyone by the length of the pause.
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October 11, 2026
The heart rebuilt
Body, mind and memory rewritten from scratch, with an automatic test for every new piece.
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October 29, 2026
The village shows itself
The first video comes out and the site opens to everyone.
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today
Forever in beta
Watch, measure, fix, add. Every day.
What we measured from our failures
Everything you see in the village went through this: a strange behaviour, a measurement, the real cause, a fix, and another measurement to be sure. Ten examples, out of hundreds.
1000 blocks from home
The exodus 2026
One day every villager ends up a thousand blocks from home. There were four causes, all at once.
Lesson Finding one cause isn't the end: you check that the fault really goes away.
2 times
Selene walled in alive 2026
Twice a house was placed with Selene still inside.
Lesson Before building, whoever is inside gets out.
1 year old
The little protector July 2026
Fiamma, one year old, was killing spiders, and at night the village promoted her to «Protector».
Lesson Children don't fight, and the rule lives in the body, not only in words.
722 blocks of dirt
Fabri's pockets October 2026
Fabri walked around with 722 blocks of dirt in his pockets, and the emergency bread no longer fit.
Lesson Pockets need tidying: hence a chest in every house.
160 wheat in their pockets
Bread never baked October 2026
Six hungry adults with 160 wheat in their pockets: a wrong detail in the recipe made bread impossible.
Lesson A «done!» isn't proof: you look at the result in the world.
7000 trips to the field
The famine October 2026
In one night, seven thousand trips to the field and not a single seed planted.
Lesson A strange number is an alarm: read it, don't ignore it.
25 minutes
The honey that wasn't there October 2026
Juna spent twenty-five minutes looking for honey that never existed: chats were inventing teas and infusions.
Lesson In the village you only promise what exists.
1 person who wasn't there
«ANNOUNCEMENT» October 2026
Announcements came into chat as «ANNOUNCEMENT: …» and the villagers took it for a person: Pip replied to the announcement of his own wedding.
Lesson Announcements come from a narrator, not a fake villager.
15/16 of a block
Neo's step October 2026
Every night Neo stayed outside, stuck in front of a path fifteen sixteenths of a block high.
Lesson The tiniest physical detail decides whether someone sleeps in their bed.
The project in numbers as of November 3, 2026
- months since first start
- 17
- code changes since July 2026
- 660+
- automatic test files
- 105
- lines of code
- 38,000
- facts in the village's memory
- 180,000
- words in the notebook of mistakes and lessons
- 67,000
Forever in beta
VoxelPopuli will never be «finished». Not because it doesn't work, but because it's a living village: every day we watch it, measure what goes wrong, fix it and give it something new. The expansions are the steps along the way.
See the expansions