NPC's that help you out

I would love it if, once NPCs are ready, players could decide very early on whether they want an AI companion or NPC for company.

Why?

Since this game already requires a modern-tier graphics card, it could run a local AI model trained on game data. Nothing too advanced, but

enough to analyze player requests and decide whether compute is needed or the regular NPC AI can handle it on its own.

If a player asks an NPC something like "Hey, why is this not working?", the local model would semantically search through a guidebook bundled

with the code -- which also doubles as a manual/wiki for players who prefer reading over videos -- and cross-reference the grid, running

scripts, and so on to identify the issue the player is describing. Once the model reaches a conclusion, the NPC talks to the player about the

problem and how it could or should be solved.

A setup like this would be incredibly beneficial. Someone who has never written scripts before but always wanted to could be guided through

the process step by step.

The local AI wouldn't need to be very advanced. It would be far more enjoyable if it could debug or analyze large structures and hand the

player an optimization hologram or blueprint, for example.

Regular NPCs could also become much more enjoyable if they had at least some semantic understanding of their surroundings (unauthorized NPCs

should not be able to scan your grids and analyze them for obvious weak points, for obvious reasons).

If NPC behavior were ~25% semantic and 75% regular NPC scripts, that would be incredibly cool for atmosphere, random behavior, and trading.

It should also be deactivatable on PCs without good performance or by the player themselves if they don't want it -- a small model like

gemma4:e2b or even smaller would suffice.

If there are any comments or questions, I'll respond as best I can!