history
the studio, sourced and dated — the trust years, the london residency, the onchain games, the survival year, and the daemons pivot.
the trust years2017–2021
inside trust — the berlin 'network of utopian conspirators' — arthur röing baer and the pseudonymous gvn write the miniverses essay, register the gmbh, and run collective livestream experiments.
- 2017trust foundedtrust is founded in berlin by calum bowden and arthur röing baer — a member-restricted discord and leuschnerdamm project space described as a 'network of utopian conspirators.' moving castles will later be described as 'another infrastructure project incubated at trust.'
- 2021-08-03the miniverses manifestothe founding essay 'moving castles: modular and portable multiplayer miniverses' (gvn & arb) appears on trust.support — 'an organisational metaphor and real-time media type' with four principles: collective, portable, modular, interoperable. the name nods to howl's moving castle; the essay is later anthologized in the dark forest anthology and other internet 2018–2024.
- 2021-08moving castles gmbhmoving castles gmbh is registered in berlin — amtsgericht berlin-charlottenburg hrb 265203 b, leuschnerdamm 13, kreuzberg, the same block as trust's project space. the registry shows a single managing person; arb's linkedin dates his ceo role from august 2021.
- 2021the mascot streamsthe mascot streams — unreal engine + twitch livestream experiments in 'collective agency' formats, including mascot stream 3d — run under trust, alongside arc one, streamed experiments co-produced by trust × moving castles.
- 2021the clearnet paranoia essaythe 'clearnet paranoia' essay — 'a deep angst towards the rise of a parasitic, hyper-centralized metaverse' — is published; the original text is no longer reachable and survives through the later godot adaptation's description. recorded as a gap.
the autonomous worlds residency2022
the 0xparc/lattice autonomous worlds residency in london turns the essay into a game: eat drain arson, a tragicomic npc survival sim built on mud.
- 2022-03-28the kabk lecturegvn908 and arb lecture on moving castles for the kabk i/m/d programme in the hague — the project still framed as art-school material, months before the residency.
- 2022the london aw residencythe first autonomous worlds residency — twelve weeks in london, ~45 participants, hosted by justin glibert's lattice/0xparc team with travel and housing stipends. moving castles builds eat drain arson, 'a tragicomic npc survival sim,' on the mud engine; the hsieh brothers build primodium in the same cohort (a co-resident project, not an mc one).
- 2022-11-23the github orgthe moving-castles github org is created; the eat-drain-arson repo opens the same day. the org will accumulate ~20 public repos across the games and the later ml work.
- 2022-12-04eat drain arson playtestedeat drain arson gets a discord playtest — the residency prototype shown to the scene it came from.
the onchain games2023–2024
the shipping years: go.lem in five days, network states with small brain games, and this cursed machine — the body-horror fulfillment-center sim that launched on redstone and ended as a devcon post-mortem.
- 2023go.lem in five daysgo.lem — an onchain team-vs-team 'governance fighting' game with 2,000+ procedurally generated 3d characters and a default 'big democracy' mode — is built in five days at an early-2023 autonomous worlds hackathon, on mud2.
- 2023-03-11de balie, and a roster snapshotthe studio speaks at de balie's 'art in the age of the metaverse' in amsterdam; the billing lists the studio's composition as 'pwr, manus nijhoff and agnes cameron' alongside the co-founders — the last public roster snapshot.
- 2023-04the mud2 migrationthe studio announces migration to mud v2, lattice's rebuilt onchain game engine.
- 2023-05-16the wired featurewired's 'autonomous worlds aim to free online games from corporate control' covers the london residency and eat drain arson — the studio's largest mainstream exposure. baer: 'you start in a constrained world that facilitates the emergence of it, but it's not constrained by it long-term.' gvn appears under his pseudonym.
- 2023-06the siena reading groupthe 'siena reading group' — gvn and agnes cameron's research on how siena's urban fabric is shaped by games and rules — runs as studio research.
- 2023-07-29this cursed machine startsthe this-cursed-machine repo is created. mechanics had been designed 'last summer' per cameron; her overnight terminal text-interface prototype 'changed the game' and became tcm's ui direction.
- 2023-08-09the three eras essay'three eras of world generation: worldbuilding, worlding, world-weaving' (gvn & arb) publishes on aw.network — originally in the autonomous worlds n1 anthology. interaction without rule-change rights leaves players 'in a confined sandbox'; 'how we design autonomous worlds… ultimately becomes a political question.'
- 2023network statesnetwork states — an onchain game co-produced with small brain games and 0xhank — ships alongside a cross-discord channel bridging the two communities from september 2023.
- 2023-11-15aw assembly, istanbulautonomous worlds assembly at devconnect istanbul — ~500 attendees, reportedly three times oversubscribed. tcm playtests publicly; the studio gives three talks — gvn on emergent storytelling, arb + 0xhank on llms as myth-making mechanism, arb + agnes cameron on 'bugs in, sludge out' — and gvn sits on the decentralised narratives panel.
- 2024-05-01redstone mainnet, tcm aboardredstone mainnet goes live — lattice's op-stack 'plasma mode' l2 — and this cursed machine is among the launch titles. lattice calls moving castles 'an indie studio based in berlin.'
- 2024-05-03this cursed machine livethis cursed machine is 'now live' on redstone — 'live in the pod, fulfil orders, get bugs.' players are surgically enhanced 'stumps' reverse-engineering material trees for $bugs erc-20 rewards; the multiplayer competitive version launches may 4.
- 2024-06the mirror interviewa mirror interview with arb and alex declino — now 403, surviving through a chinese translation — describes tcm as a 'sci-fi horror warehouse-management rpg' and credits cameron's terminal prototype with setting the direction.
- 2024-11-13the devcon post-mortemarb presents 'this cursed machine: onchain game post-mortem' at devcon sea in bangkok — how 'bot attacks, exploits and player corporations' were folded into the world's narrative rather than patched out.
the survival year2025
the scene deflates and the studio keeps shipping: the clearnet paranoia godot game, an unreleased sybil.gg, and rat.fun — an llm-driven roguelike on base.
- 2025-01-09rat.fun startsthe rat.fun repo is created — mud contracts plus an llm server (anthropic api), sanity cms, and replicate image generation. a second repo, sybil.gg, follows january 24 and is never released.
- 2025clearnet paranoia, the gameclearnet paranoia — a free html5 godot game adapting the studio's own 2021 essay, tagged 'no generative ai was used' — releases on itch.io; players exit a 'parasitic, hyper-centralized metaverse' through 'three wretched game worlds' ending at a teknival-esque moving castles rave.
- 2025-01aw n1 in translationautonomous worlds n1 — the metalabel anthology carrying the studio's 'three eras' essay — gets a traditional chinese edition from nowhere publishing, taipei.
- 2025-12rat.fun launchesrat.fun launches on base — 'a slop machine able to induce powerful remote-viewing trips in test subjects.' player 'operators' send rats into player-authored, ai-interpreted micro-dungeons; the $rat token runs a buy-in/liquidation loop on base, positioned for farcaster-miniapp distribution.
the daemons pivot2026–
the pivot: the daemons manifesto reframes the lab around 'new subjectivities,' pyranoid ports a 1972 paranoid chatbot, and zero — a character in the weights, not the prompt — ships as mc001.
- 2026-03-10the nanoclaw forkthe studio forks nanoclaw, a containerized claude-agent assistant — agent tooling arrives in the org months before the pivot is announced.
- 2026-07-01the daemons manifestomc000 'daemons' — the manifesto that reframes moving castles as 'a research and development lab for new subjectivities.' a daemon is 'a composable character, an assemblage' of drives, memories, life-cycles, organs, sensoria, relations, secrets, interaction surfaces and boundaries. against the frontier labs' 'single god, the world-eating assistant': 'many new selves, spiky subjectivities we must navigate, rather than command.' the lab is hiring engineers in berlin, in person.
- 2026-07-18the zero weights repothe movingcastles/zero hugging face repo is created — weeks before the report that would explain it.
- 2026-09-02pyranoidpyranoid — a python port of kenneth colby's parry, the 1972 paranoid chatbot that 'argued with eliza in rfc 439,' rebuilt 'routine for routine from the original mlisp source' on recovered 1974 stanford waits data. character-simulation archaeology, thirteen days before zero.
- 2026-09-15zero (mc001)mc001 'zero' ships: a full training report plus open weights — qwen3-8b-base fine-tuned (synthetic-data sft, then grpo/dapo rl) to embody a single 'limited, anti-servile' character: a nameless man living inside a white plastic box, after kōbō abe's the box man. self-reported headline: hard character breaks in 2.8% of conversations vs 45.2% for a system-prompted qwen3-8b-instruct, llm-judged on a held-out harness. 'zero is not a daemon' — it is 'the core component of an agentic assemblage: the model.'
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.