Production direction · 22 October 2026
Places, not stages
This is an architectural reconstruction and playable vertical-slice overhaul, not a claim of RDR2-scale content, exact archaeological plans for every property, or finished AAA character performance. Source-supported history governs dates, building use and events. Undocumented dimensions, street arrangements and ordinary private conversations remain labeled interpretations.
1. The new architectural contract
- Every principal domestic interior has an exterior shell, real openings, a roof, a route out and back, visible windows, a garden or yard, fences, roads and surrounding settlement or woodland.
- Floor height, walls, doors and stairs share navigation data. Story markers and actors must sit on the correct floor. A downstairs player cannot trigger an upstairs interaction through the ceiling.
- Third-person cameras avoid solid walls; roofs can cut away when the player is inside, while first person retains an enclosed room. Free camera remains available for inspection.
- Named locations have silhouettes, materials, density, terrain and occupations that differ by region and decade. Manhattan is not a generic Palmyra village, and Palmyra is not Manhattan.
- Readable shop signs, domestic furnishings, gardens, river landings and working printing equipment supply exploration beyond the main objective. Decorative buildings are not all complete interactable simulations.
- Bounded, authored playable neighborhoods come before infinite generation. Distant procedural scenery can extend the horizon without misrepresenting an invented endless street grid as an authentic historic map.
2. Location and evidence ledger
| Location | Historical anchor | Reconstruction direction |
|---|---|---|
| Childhood sickroom | The family lived in Lebanon, New Hampshire, during Joseph's illness and surgery. Do not place the 1813 episode in the later Palmyra log home. Church history. | New England timber house, sickroom and kitchen, lane, woodpile, fencing, regional forest. The room layout is interpretive, not an extant blueprint. |
| Smith farm, 1820–1823 | Log home and wooded farm; Moroni's encounter in an upper room. The frame home was occupied later, 1825–1829. Official historic map. | Log walls, lower household room and sleeping loft, a usable stair, crop ground, orchard edge, split-rail fences and a wooded approach. Separate spatial identity from the childhood sickroom. |
| Harmony translation | Church accounts describe interpreters and a seer stone, including use of a hat to exclude light. Do not portray the work as ordinary character-by-character decipherment. Translation essay. | Inhabited kitchen/workroom with paper, quill, hat, stone and wrapped record; nearby river landscape, garden, fence, road and neighboring farm. No exposed glowing plates for every episode. |
| Kirtland | Distinct Ohio gathering place, Whitney store, temple and mixed economic/religious life. Church history. | Timber commercial fronts, buff plaster, store shelves and provisions, garden lots, wetter greener landscape. Temple completion must not be implied in an early-1831 scene; interpretive construction state is dated. |
| Nauvoo | Riverside settlement, brick and timber architecture, civic and religious institutions. The Expositor was a real newspaper and press with a legal history, not a generic villain's prop. Expositor history. | Warm red and buff masonry, shops, domestic interiors, named press, planted lots and a river approach; the Expositor's block placement is interpretive pending surveyed-map verification. Golden color means buff masonry/warm light, not literal gold historical buildings. |
| Manhattan, October 1832 | Joseph's letter from New York documents the visit and his response to the city. It does not by itself establish the exact soapbox speech requested. Letter to Emma. | Separate urban study: brick rows, wharves, workshops, handbills and pedestrians; no skyscrapers, automobiles or modern transhumanist terminology in attributed historical dialogue. A speculative resonance can be conveyed through theme and editing. |
| Carthage, June 1844 | See dedicated floor-plan study. Do not borrow Liberty Jail's basement dungeon. Do not change the late-afternoon attack into a historic torchlit night. | Two-storey jail with navigable stair, downstairs domestic/custody spaces, upstairs cell and bedroom, yard, street, town context and daylight tension. Optional lantern/torch atmosphere must be labeled artistic rather than evidence of the attack's timing. |
| Future Zion | See primary-plat study and the user's linked article. Joseph's plat is a planning source, not a surviving futuristic metropolis. | White neoclassical temple districts, large boulevards, gardens, water, city-scale horizon and walkable public halls. Futuristic material/light treatment is explicitly imaginative. |
3. Character substitutions
At the user's request, available Whitmer-family rigs replace missing male models and Louisa Follett replaces missing female models. Their true story-role IDs, names and voices remain intact; the Characters journal states which visual is borrowed. A Whitmer-shaped mob extra is not an assertion that the historical Whitmer was a mob member. No arbitrary skin-texture repaint is treated as a researched likeness. The user separately authorizes temporary procedural figures for Elijah Able, Walker Lewis and Jane Manning while their dedicated rigs are prepared.
4. Scene and cinematic acceptance
- Elijah's ministry and Walker's independent Lowell community have full scene briefs, personal motivations and concrete acts of participation before recording. Walker is not secretly given an undocumented Joseph encounter.
- Translation scenes distinguish different accounts and periods, identify the scribe, and keep the Three Witnesses' angelic encounter separate from the Eight Witnesses' physical examination.
- The election shows a changing campaign and real political alternatives. Polk's nomination belongs to late May 1844; membership in Masonry does not establish one unified partisan conspiracy.
- Cinematics are player-controlled framing and authored staging first. Final facial animation, finger contacts, crowd behavior and tightly directed performances remain production work; adding architecture does not automatically deliver those systems.
- Test an actual walk from street to room, upstairs, back outside and back to the objective. Then test all chapter flows, model replacement, subtitles, save restoration, free camera and narrow-screen layout.
5. Implementation order
- Write source-led Carthage, Zion and Black Saints/election reports.
- Build shared enterable architecture and regional surroundings; integrate specialist Carthage and Zion builders.
- Preserve actor IDs and chapter IDs; remap stage markers to architectural rooms and floors; add model fallback policy and safe resource cleanup.
- Rebuild generated content and test navigation, all objectives, aliases, geometry and browser errors. Capture in-engine views rather than representing concept paintings as runtime screenshots.
- Record remaining limitations honestly. Follow with site-specific surveyed reconstructions, crowd staging, animation and bespoke cinematic passes—not an unsupported declaration that all forty locations are now AAA finished.
6. Implemented pass and remaining production work
| Area | Implemented in this pass | Still required for the intended finished experience |
|---|---|---|
| Homes and translation | Roofed shells, working door openings, surrounding farm landscapes, furnishings, covered-record/hat/stone workspace, sleeping-loft stairs and revised interaction sequence. | Site-specific measured reconstructions where evidence exists, seated dictation and scribe hand contact, facial acting, cloth/prop animation and recorded performances. Gameplay still uses text-led interaction rather than finished cinematics. |
| Carthage | Two accessible floors, cells and bedroom, stairs, window, well, courtyard, town context, unnamed rigged mob stand-ins and sourced floor schematics. | Directed mob movement, weapons/impact choreography, timed attack and fall, detailed town survey, final sound and acting. Crowd stand-ins are not yet a simulated attack. |
| Nauvoo and Kirtland | Enterable shops/homes, red/buff/timber distinction, gardens, press location, river context and dated architectural differentiation. | Surveyed historic block placement, larger districts, richer building-specific interiors, NPC routines and civic-event blocking. Not every building or chapter is a fully researched replica. |
| Manhattan and Lowell | Separate documentary chapters, urban rows, wharves, shops, Walker's barbershop and a distinct player viewpoint. | Denser city life, period transport and occupation animations, fine-grained streetscape research and bespoke conversational acting. |
| Black Saints and election | Elijah's four ministry beats, Jane's arrival/friendship encounters, Walker's six-beat chapter, expanded campaign with dated Polk news and script/source labeling. | Dedicated Black Saints rigs, local voice recordings, historical/community review and performance lock. The user authorized their temporary procedural figures until rigs arrive. |
| Future Zion | Twenty-four enterable temple halls, large avenues, civic pavilion, pools, gardens, outer housing/colonnades and extended camera range. | Population, services and varied civic interactions, a target-hardware performance pass and final environment art. This is an imagined city informed by historical plats, not a claim that Joseph designed every modeled facade. |
| Older location families | Original grove, river, hill, wilderness and Liberty-family environments remain playable; shared cameras, stand-in policy and scene progression continue working. | Further bespoke site reconstruction. In particular the older Liberty/archive interiors are not brought to the same connected-building standard by this pass. |
Validation: 48 browser checks cover all 42 chapter flows, cameras, save/continue, journal, portals and mobile layout. Separate actual-WASD tests cover Carthage courtyard-to-bedroom-and-back, house exits and reentry, and the sleeping loft stair. These are complementary checks: teleport-assisted objective tests do not establish cinematic quality. Structural, story and asset-alias tests also pass. Headless Zion captures showed roughly 6–11 animation frames per second in that software-rendered test environment, not a certified target-hardware benchmark or a 60-FPS guarantee.