Life Path Simulator
Born somewhere real, raised by your choices: live one small fictional life from a birth certificate to age 60 — and see exactly which fork changed everything.
Life Path Simulator is a tiny choice-driven story game. You play one fictional life from the day it starts: a seed deals your character a birthplace — a real city’s name, used purely as scenery — a fictional name, a fictional birthday and a birth certificate you can keep as a picture. Five short chapters of childhood follow, at ages 4, 7, 11, 14 and 17, and two of them carry a small choice of your own: how a seven-year-old spends the free hours, and which talent a fourteen-year-old keeps reaching for. At eighteen the character leaves for Port Saffron, a harbor town of gulls, tarpaulins and strong opinions about weather, and lives there to sixty. The Port Saffron choices move three simple story resources — Savings, Know-how and Friends — and the later chapters read those numbers honestly. One choice, at twenty-six, is not small: it forks the whole story, and the two roads rejoin years later for the same winter gale.
One life, seventeen chapters, about eight minutes. It begins with a birth: the seed deals your character a birthplace somewhere real in the world — and a birth certificate to keep. Five short chapters of childhood follow — school days, street days, and one small talent you will carry for the rest of the life. At eighteen they leave for Port Saffron, an invented harbor town, and live the rest. The birthplace is scenery; the rest is choices. Same seed, same choices, same life, every time.
Fiction, plainly labelled: the city names are real places used as scenery; your character, their family and Port Saffron itself are invented, and nothing here says anything about your real future. Your choices are never saved or sent anywhere — they live in this page only while you play.
Quick answers
What is the Life Path Simulator?
A free, eight-minute, choice-driven story game that runs in your browser. You live one fictional life from birth to age 60 — 17 chapters: a seeded birthplace and a keepsake birth certificate, five childhood chapters, then the harbor town of Port Saffron, where small choices move your Savings, Know-how and Friends and one big choice at 26 forks the story in two.
Each run is dealt by a seed code. Same seed and same choices replay the identical life, and at the end the game re-runs your seed with choices flipped — first the big fork, then your two childhood choices — so you can see exactly what each choice did, and what it did not do.
Does my character’s birthplace change how their life goes?
No. The birthplace is scenery only: a real city’s name on the birth certificate and in the childhood chapters’ weather, and it never touches a number, a probability or an ending. Make the same choices from two different birthplaces and the lives run identically, in different scenery.
That is a construction rule, not a promise: the birth is drawn from the seed for display — city, fictional name, fictional birthday, certificate number — and is never fed back into a single draw, price or outcome. The two childhood choices are nearly as gentle: one moves a story resource by one point, the other changes later paragraphs and no numbers at all.
Can two players get exactly the same life?
Yes. Every random moment is drawn from a stream keyed to the seed and the chapter, so a run is a pure function of the seed plus the choice sequence: same version, same seed, same choices — same birthplace, same chapters, same outcomes, every time.
That is why the seed is printed on the page and can be typed in: swap seeds with a friend and you each walk the other’s road, born in the other’s town. Change one choice — the fork at 26 — and the shared later chapters still deal the same weather, because their draws are keyed to the chapter, not to which road you took.
Does the game save or upload anything I play?
No. Your choices live only in the page’s memory while the tab is open: no account, no local storage, no cookies, no analytics on your run, and nothing is sent to a server. The share card and the birth certificate are drawn in your browser and only leave your device if you download or copy them yourself.
This is deliberate, and it is also why there is no save-and-continue: a life here lasts about eight minutes, and replaying with the same seed is the save system.
How to use
- Press Begin — or type any seed (a friend’s code, your initials, anything) into the seed box first, to walk one specific road.
- Your life opens with its birth certificate: the seed has dealt a birthplace, a name and a birthday — all fictional except the city’s name, which is scenery. Press “Make the certificate picture” to keep it as a PNG.
- Play through five short childhood chapters. Two of them ask something of you: how the free hours get spent at seven, and which talent pulls at you at fourteen. Neither can decide the life; both leave marks the story will mention again.
- From eighteen, read each chapter and pick the choice you would make. Small choices move your Savings, Know-how and Friends; the choice at age 26 forks the whole story.
- At the end, read your ending — then read the two computed panels: “The choice that changed everything” diffs your life against the other fork, and “The early years, re-dealt” flips only your childhood choices to show what they did and did not move.
- Replay the same seed and take the other fork, or press “Make my share card” to generate a picture of your life — birthplace included — in your browser, to download or copy.
About this tool
The birthplace decides nothing — that is a design rule, not a disclaimer. It appears on the certificate, in the childhood scenery and in one line of your share card, and it never touches a number, a probability or an ending; the engine’s draws are keyed to the seed and the chapter, never to the birthplace, and the results page says so in plain words. The childhood choices are nearly as gentle: the first nudges a single story resource by one point, and the talent choice changes no numbers at all — it leaves a keepsake (a sketchbook, a secondhand whistle, a mending kit) that later chapters mention in passing, the way a real keepsake would. Nothing you were born with, and nothing you chose at fourteen, can lock or unlock an ending; the endings are still decided by the road you take at twenty-six and what you built along it.
Every run is dealt by a seed — a short code like SAIL-4831 shown at the top of the page. The seed is not decoration: each random moment in the story is drawn from a stream keyed to the seed and the chapter, so the same seed with the same choices replays the identical life, chapter for chapter — same birthplace, same certificate, same weather. Type a friend’s seed and you walk their exact road; flip just one choice and you can watch the two lives separate. At the end, the game re-runs your seed twice over — once with only the big fork flipped, once with only your two childhood choices flipped — and diffs the chapter lists, so both “what changed” panels are computed from the rules, never canned messages.
Port Saffron is invented, and so is everyone in it; the birthplace’s city name is real, and it is the only real thing on the certificate. The game makes no claim about your real life, your future or your fortune — it is a story about how choices branch, told at the speed of a coffee break. It runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, there is no account and no save file, and when you close the page the life is gone unless you made yourself a share card or a certificate picture — both generated on your own device.
How it works
How the seed deals a life: the story’s random moments (which storm, which fog, which letter) are not rolled from one long random stream. Each is drawn from its own small stream seeded by the run’s seed code plus the chapter’s name, using a mulberry32 generator over an FNV-1a hash. A run is therefore a pure function of (seed, choices): replay the same seed with the same choices and every chapter, variant and outcome is identical — and chapters after the fork draw the same in both lives, because their streams never learned which road you took.
How the birth works: the seed also deals the birth, from its own streams (keyed seed|birth|…) — a city drawn from a pool of real place names across every continent, a fictional first and family name, a fictional birthday, a certificate number, even a line about the parents’ trades. It is drawn once, for display, and it is never an input to anything: no later draw, price, resource change or ending ever reads it. Same seed, same birth — before a single choice is made — and a different birthplace with the same choices produces the same life in different scenery.
How the causal panel works: when you finish, the engine silently re-runs your seed with only the fork choice flipped — every choice you made on the shared chapters stays the same, and turns that exist only on the other road are taken at that road’s first available option, so the comparison is still fully determined by your seed — and diffs the two chapter sequences. It reports the chapter where the roads split, the chapters only your road has, the chapters only the other road has, whether the shared later chapters dealt the same variants in both lives, and the ending the other road reaches. If the panel says a chapter changed, it is because the simulated event lists actually differ — the explanation is generated from the diff, not written in advance. A second panel re-runs the seed flipping only the two childhood choices (the age-7 pastime and the age-14 talent) and reports, from the same kind of comparison, which chapters’ text or variants actually changed, whether the final meters moved, and whether the ending did — including when the honest answer is that the destination held and only the texture changed.
Worked examples
One seed, the harbor road — SAIL-4831: Seed SAIL-4831: the seed deals a birth in Tromsø, Norway — 1 December 1993, certificate No. VS-460690, a child named Larkin Silva, born to a nurse and a tram driver. You spend your seventh year taking everything apart and your fourteenth choosing the mending kit. At eighteen you unpack the brass compass first, work as deckhand on the ferry Mabel, and spend the jar on the night course. At the fork you sign with the ferry company; you run the lantern raffle yourself at the festival and take Tam on as an apprentice, so your chapters twelve to fourteen are The Lantern Festival, The Night the Mabel Broke and The Apprentice — and the life ends as The Harbor Keeper, with final meters of Savings 4, Know-how 6, Friends 2.
The same seed, the other fork: Now change exactly one input: at the fork, sail with Wren’s expedition instead, and name the cove for Marisol the cook. The birth is the same — Tromsø, the same certificate — and the first ten chapters are identical. So is the storm at thirty-eight: the Winter Gale takes the fish-market roof in both lives, because that chapter draws from the same chapter-keyed stream. But chapters twelve to fourteen are now The Grey Water, The Cove With No Name and Ink and Salt, and this life ends as Chartmaker of the Grey Isles. Same seed, same sailor — one different Tuesday.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a prediction of my real life?
No — and it is not trying to be. Port Saffron, its people and its weather are invented, and the game asks nothing about you: not your real name, not your real birth date, not where you were really born. Your character’s name, birthday and birthplace are dealt by the seed — and the birthplace, a real city’s name used as scenery, is dealt too, not chosen from anything about you. It is a story toy about how choices branch. Anyone selling you a simulation of your actual future is selling something this page would not touch with a barge pole.
Does the birthplace change how the life goes?
No. It changes the scenery of the childhood chapters, the words on the birth certificate and one line on the share card — and nothing else: not a price, not a probability, not an ending. Make the same choices from two different birthplaces and the Port Saffron chapters deal identically. You do not have to take the page’s word for it: play the same choices under two different seeds and compare the results panels — they are computed from the engine, not written in advance.
Do the childhood choices matter?
A little, on purpose. The age-7 choice moves one story resource by one point — Friends or Know-how — which can tip a later chapter that reads those numbers. The age-14 talent choice moves no numbers at all: it leaves a keepsake, a sketchbook, a whistle or a mending kit, that later chapters mention in passing. Neither choice can lock or unlock an ending. At the end, the “early years, re-dealt” panel re-runs your seed with both childhood choices flipped and shows you exactly what changed — including when the honest answer is “the texture, not the destination”.
How long does one life take to play?
About eight minutes: seventeen short chapters, most of them a paragraph or two and one click. The fastest way to spend longer is the intended one — replaying the same seed to take the other fork.
How does the seed work, exactly?
The seed is a short code (like SAIL-4831) that keys every random draw in the story. Each chapter’s random moments come from a stream seeded by the code plus the chapter’s name, so the whole run is determined by the seed and your choices together. Same version, same seed, same choices: same life, guaranteed by construction rather than by storing anything.
What does “the choice that changed everything” actually compare?
It re-runs your seed with only one input changed — the fork at age 26 — while keeping every other choice you made (turns that exist only on the other road are taken at that road’s first available option, so the result is still fixed by your seed), then diffs the two chapter lists the engine produces. You see where the roads split, which chapters exist on only one road, and which ending the other road reaches. Because the later chapters draw their randomness per-chapter, any chapter both roads share is dealt identically — the panel checks and reports that too. A second panel does the same for your two childhood choices.
Is anything I play saved, tracked or sent anywhere?
No. The run exists only in this page’s memory while the tab is open. There is no account, no local storage entry, no cookie and no upload, and the share card and birth certificate are rendered on canvases in your browser — they leave your device only if you choose to download them or copy them. Close the tab and the life is gone; the seed code is the only way back, which is rather the point.
Can I share my ending with a friend?
Yes — the “Make my share card” button draws a picture card of your ending (your road, your seed, your ending title, and the town you were born in) in your browser, which you can download as a PNG or copy to the clipboard. The opening chapter offers a second picture: your character’s birth certificate, drawn the same way. If you send a friend the seed code as well, they can play your exact road — same birthplace, same certificate — and try to do better at the fork.
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