What They Say

Sims talk. Not constantly, and not in your global channels.

When they speak

They have something to say at the moments you are already paying attention:

• When you summon a friend, and again when the favour ends.
• When one decides you are a problem — spoken once, on picking you as a target, never repeated through the fight that follows. It should read as a warning, not as chatter.
• During a fight, in short shouts. Nobody reads a full sentence mid-swing.
• When one kills you. This is the line you are most likely to actually read, because you are looking at a death screen with nothing else to do.

There are over four hundred written lines across fourteen situations, so you should be some way in before you meet a repeat.

How loud

This is the part that was designed most carefully, because the failure mode is not "a bit chatty" — it is you turning chat off and never seeing any of it again.

Three limits run at once:

• Local channel only. Everything a sim says is spoken at normal say-range. There is no path from a sim's mouth to a global or system channel. If you are not standing there, you do not hear it.
• One line per player per thirty seconds, from anybody. Walking into a camp of eight sims does not produce eight lines — you get one. This is the limit that actually protects you.
• One line per sim every few minutes, so no single character monologues at you.

The one deliberate exception is the line when a sim kills you. That ignores the thirty-second limit, because it is the single most-read line in the game and suppressing it for something you heard half a minute ago would waste the only moment you are guaranteed to be reading. It cannot be spammed either — you have to come back first.

If it ever does feel like spam, say so. Those limits are dials, and they are meant to be tuned against how it actually feels rather than how it looked in testing.

Why it is written rather than generated

Every line is written by hand rather than produced on demand by a language model, and that is a deliberate call rather than a cost saving alone.

A line is spoken to one player, in passing, once. At that moment a written line is indistinguishable from a generated one — but a written pool costs nothing forever, can never produce something strange in front of a player, and does not make the shard's behaviour depend on any outside service being reachable.

Where a language model genuinely earns its place is the opposite case: things written once and read by many people, like a running chronicle of what the houses have been doing. That is where it is used.