Tribe

A Godot 4.6 survival/RTS sim where every NPC — tribe members, animals, dogs, and rival AI tribes — is driven by a small, custom spiking neural network ("Spikeling") instead of a behavior tree or state machine.

You play an FPS character who walks up to tribe members and feeds them (E) to build trust. As trust rises, members are promoted through ranks (Stranger → Acquaintance → Friend → Loyal → Devoted), which gates whether they'll accept risky orders (gather / hunt / scout / defend). Build enough backers and you become tribe leader, who can issue rally orders and lead the tribe through an inter-tribe war that converges to one winner — or razes your own camp if you lose it.

Spikeling — the brain

spikeling.gd is a real leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) spiking neural network, not a metaphor: each neuron has a membrane potential that leaks toward zero every tick, accumulates weighted input from synapses and external stimuli, fires when it crosses a threshold, and then sits in a refractory period before it can fire again. Synapses strengthen via Hebbian learning (learn()) when source and target both fire, bounded so weights relax back toward their innate strength instead of saturating — this keeps individual personalities (e.g. Wary vs Trusting) distinct over a long session instead of washing out.

Every agent type loads its own small brain from a .spk text config and steps it every tick:

neuron PlayerNorth threshold=100 leak=5
neuron SwarmNorth  threshold=100 leak=5
synapse PlayerNorth -> SwarmNorth weight=60
refractory=4

Wired into: npc.gd, tribemember.gd, animal.gd, dog.gd, world_tribe.gd (one brain per AI tribe, not per individual member — cheap enough to run many tribes at once).

Tribe DSL

Tribe archetype personalities (Raiders, Traders, Mystics, Warriors, etc.) are not hardcoded — tribe_dsl.gd parses plain-text .tribe files in tribes/ (traits, speech lines, material) at runtime, so a new archetype is just a new text file, no GDScript or recompiling needed. Parsed results are cached per archetype name (tribe_registry.gd) so many tribe instances share one parse.

Other systems

• BodyAnim (body_anim.gd) — cheap procedural aliveness (walk-bob, idle breath, lean, reaction pops) driven by tension/mood channels fed from the Spikeling brain (e.g. prey trembles from its SeeThreat neuron firing).
• Inter-tribe war — AI tribes muster physical marching war parties that attack rival totems; the last tribe standing besieges the player's base or the player can raze it first.
• Dogs — feed (H) to tame, then J to call to heel or leave them guarding the base.
• Scale presets — Skirmish / Standard / Epic, chosen at the start menu or via godot -- --scale=epic to skip straight to a size.

Setup

Requires Godot 4.6 with the .NET-free ("Standard") build (project uses GDScript only) and Jolt Physics, which ships with 4.6 by default.

git clone <this-repo-url>
cd tribe
godot4 .          # or open project.godot from the Godot editor

Run from the editor (F5), or headless-check it parses cleanly:

godot4 --headless --check-only .

To build a standalone executable, use the Godot editor's Project → Export with the included export_presets.cfg (Windows Desktop preset configured), or:

godot4 --headless --export-release "Windows Desktop" tribe.exe

Status / known caveats

• player.tscn and tribemember.tscn are stale/orphaned — their root nodes don't match what their scripts expect (@onready children like $Camera3D are missing), and neither is referenced by main.tscn (which builds the Player/TribeMember nodes inline instead). Harmless leftovers, not live bugs.
• player.gd is an empty no-op stub; the real FPS controller is FPSPlayer.gd.
• No automated tests yet — verification has been manual + headless --check-only/--quit-after runs during development.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.