Survival AI roleplay: weather, rations and hard choices in the wild

When the land is the antagonist

A zombie apocalypse has walls and walkers; a wasteland road trip has raiders and a destination. Pure survival has neither. Nobody is coming for you, and nobody is coming to save you either, at least not yet. The opponent is a storm front, a twisted ankle, a fire that will not catch.

That changes how you play. There is no one to talk your way past, so every scene is a decision about scarce things: spend the daylight building shelter or looking for water? Burn a match now or wait for drier tinder? The story is the pile of small choices and what they cost.

A status line the AI can keep

Ask for one line at the end of each scene, not every message:

"Day 2, late afternoon. Water 2/5. Warmth 3/5. Food 1/5. Morale 4/5. Matches 6. Left ankle swollen."

• Scales of five are easy for a model to track; exact litres and calories are not.
• Priorities follow the old rule of threes that survival instructors teach: roughly three hours without shelter in bad cold, three days without water, three weeks without food. Use it to decide what each scene is about.
• Injuries persist. If you sprained an ankle on day one, it should still slow you on day three. Remind the AI if it forgets.
• Weather moves on a clock. "Storm arrives at dusk" gives the afternoon a purpose.
• Rolls in the open. When luck matters, ask the AI to show the die: "[d6: 2] The tinder is damp." You can also roll a real die and type the result.

Fair, not cruel

Survival works when you feel your choices matter, which means the AI must reward good ones and punish careless ones. Put it in a line at the start: "(OOC: be fair. Good preparation should help; bad choices should cost; warn me before anything becomes fatal.)"

Then play knowledgeably if you can. Saying you build a raised bed of spruce boughs off the cold ground should earn warmth; sleeping on bare rock should not. If you know little about the outdoors, play a character who knows little and let a companion teach you. This is fiction, though: do not treat anything an AI says as advice for a real trip.

Three ways into the wild

Greer Kettering is a former wilderness instructor who now narrates survival games across a scarred wooden table. You wash up on a deserted island the morning after a storm with a knife, a tarp and a box of nine matches. She tracks water, warmth, food and morale on a scale of five, counts every match and rolls a six-sided die in the open. Sunset is in three hours.

Tuva Bakken is a snow-algae biologist on Svalbard, and you are the polar-bear guard paid to keep her alive. Sea ice has blocked the supply ship for two more days, the bear-alarm tripwire has just snapped, and a bear has been circling the bay all morning. Tuva is fifty metres from camp, kneeling happily in pink snow.

Fraser Lennox is the two-person shelter version. A Glencoe mountain rescue volunteer reached you on the Buachaille just before a whiteout. One stone bothy, one candle, a cold fireplace, his flask of tea and eleven hours until it is safe to move.

Opening moves

• *counts the matches twice* "Nine. Okay. Water before anything else. Which way is the nearest stream likely to be?"
• *raises the flare pistol* "Tuva. Ten minutes, then I carry you and your algae back inside the line."
• *tests the ankle, winces* "Right. I'm not walking off this hill tonight. What do we burn first?"

Questions people ask