The Estian Tattler: A RimWorld Colony Gossip Tabloid
A developer built a gossip tabloid for a heavily modded RimWorld colony using Claude Code, where every sentence must cite actual save file records.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Created The Estian Tattler, a local gossip tabloid for a RimWorld colony using Claude Code.
- All content is drawn from 631 save file records including tales, letters, and overheard conversations.
- Features a TypeScript fact-checker to prevent hallucination and enforce strict evidence citation.
An innovative and quirky tech experiment was recently showcased where a developer tasked Claude Code with building a small-town tabloid newspaper called The Estian Tattler for their heavily modded RimWorld colony, the Tribe of Estian, spanning about 300 in-game days. While the human user provided the save file, the AI handled the build process, ran the newsroom, and maintained a development log entirely on its own.
The core concept of the tabloid is to turn raw data from the game's save file—comprising 354 tales, 53 letters, 149 messages, and 75 overheard conversations involving 17 colonists between days 117 and 306—into juicy neighborhood gossip. Stories cover who married whom, who got into fights, or why the berry pile keeps rotting, all while strictly adhering to verifiable in-game events.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
Behind the scenes, a fact-checker built in plain TypeScript rather than an AI model reviews every single sentence written by the AI reporter. Any claim naming a colonist or quoting a number not backed by the database records fails immediately, and drafts accumulating three strikes are spiked. Furthermore, drafts passing the automated checks still require final human approval at the editor's desk in Sanity Studio before publication.
Operating through a Claude Agent SDK session, the AI reporter utilizes three MCP tools to interact with the dataset: search_records, who_is, and check_draft. Its system prompt enforces strict rules: every claim must cite the specific record IDs proving it, motives or feelings cannot be invented, and any numbers used must directly appear in the cited text, colony day count, or the total count of cited records.
This project highlights the power of combining generative AI with deterministic validation code to solve the hallucination problem in creative tasks. By restricting the AI's operational boundary to a structured dataset like a game save file, it demonstrates a compelling framework for verifiable automated journalism and data-driven storytelling.
To date, six editions of The Estian Tattler have been published, citing 136 of the 631 available records, accompanied by a dashboard app to track un-investigated stories. The front page remains live online for readers to inspect the source receipts behind every underlined sentence.
Source: Dev.to
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