An annotated guide to the primary sources on Lucasfilm's Habitat (1986–1988), read with a question from 2026 in mind: what a massively multiplayer community would face if it were federated across many independent operators, and if some of its inhabitants were driven by large language models.
Read it: https://mvandewettering.com/habitat-resources/ (also served at https://brainwagon.github.io/habitat-resources/)
This is research, not a plan. No system is being built. The point is to understand a complex system from the beginning of this field well enough that its lessons can sharpen thinking about a newer problem.
| File | |
|---|---|
artifact.html |
The page content. Canonical — edit this one. |
index.html |
Generated by ./build.sh. What GitHub Pages serves. Don't edit by hand. |
build.sh |
Wraps artifact.html in a standalone HTML document. |
CONTEXT-HABITAT.md |
Glossary of Habitat's own terms, as the sources use them. |
CONTEXT-2026.md |
Provisional vocabulary for the modern question. |
CONTEXT-MAP.md |
Why those two glossaries are kept strictly apart. |
docs/notes/ |
Working notes on open questions. |
deep-research-report.md |
The Google Deep Research report this began as, unedited. |
artifact.html is a fragment with no <head>/<body> because it doubles as the source
for a Claude Artifact, which supplies its own wrapper. Run ./build.sh after editing it
so the published page doesn't drift.
Every outbound link was checked on 26 August 2026. Where a source is fragile, an archived copy is linked beside the original; where one blocks automated access, it says so on the page.
The Deep Research report is included because the page's provenance section refers to it, and because publishing it makes the claim checkable rather than asserted. It is not a source — it's the starting point whose 49 citations were audited. Several were cut, and the page says which and why: two Grokipedia entries (LLM-generated), two login-walled ResearchGate links, and four scan-hosting sites for copyrighted books. One factual correction was made against the primary texts.
Quotations and figures were verified verbatim against Douglas Crockford's hosted copies of The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat and Habitat Anecdotes.
Issues and pull requests welcome, particularly on anything where the page asserts more than its sources support.
The writing is © Mark VandeWettering, released under
CC BY 4.0. Linked sources belong to their
respective authors. deep-research-report.md is machine-generated output, reproduced for
provenance.