I have been building Horde Studio around one question:

What if chat was only the surface of the experience—and there was an actual persistent simulation underneath it?

SillyTavern set an incredibly high bar for flexible character chat. Horde Studio takes a different route: it is trying to become the most complete simulation-first frontend for LLM roleplay—one app for traditional chats, ongoing virtual people, and worlds that remember what happened.

Version 12 is the biggest step toward that idea so far.

Three ways to play

Chat Library is the familiar mode: characters, group rooms, lore, memory, personas, regex, rerolls, branching sessions, and per-character model configuration. V12 also adds optional right-hand HUDs, status text, and custom meters, so a normal chat can track trust, suspicion, health, investigation progress, or anything else without exposing raw model markup.

Virtual Humans are designed to feel like people who exist between messages. They have their own timezone, schedule, mood, memories, availability, private life, and evolving relationship with you. They can notice when you texted, recognize that you disappeared for days, reply late because they were busy, double-text, refuse a request, send a situation-aware photo or voice note, and continue across persistent or forked timelines.

Worlds are persistent sandbox simulations. The engine tracks locations, characters, schedules, agendas, factions, law, reputation, quests, shops, clocks, weather, clothing, dice mechanics, and world state per timeline. Starting Lives let the same world begin from radically different positions, while procedural growth can introduce grounded people, places, and consequences as play expands.

New in V12: Horde Labs

Horde Labs is an optional local cognition layer for Chat, Worlds, and Virtual Humans.

It can connect to a tiny local model through Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, KoboldCpp, or another localhost OpenAI-compatible server—or install an Embedded Tiny Brain directly inside Horde Studio. The small model is not expected to write the story. It handles narrow support jobs such as continuity hints, actor-scoped intent, state proposals, social cues, and memory salience.

The important part is the architecture: the tiny model proposes; Horde Studio validates; the existing engine stays in control. You can begin in Shadow mode, inspect receipts and validity, and only enable Assist when you trust the results. If the model times out, fails, or returns malformed data, Horde Studio silently falls back to its normal behavior.

That means your main creative model can stay on OpenRouter, GPTProto, or a local server while a much smaller private model helps maintain the illusion underneath it.

Media and provider freedom

Text, images, and voice are configured separately. You can keep OpenRouter for text and use GPTProto, ComfyUI workflows, compatible local image servers, or connected MCP media tools for visuals. Virtual Humans support distinct profile and generation-reference images, context-aware camera logic, photo styles, voice previews, calls, and voice notes.

Horde Studio is local-first and portable. Your projects live in your browser profile, can be exported and backed up, and cloud requests only go to the providers you choose. A local OpenAI-compatible endpoint can keep text generation on your own machine as well.

Why I think this is special

Most frontends are excellent at presenting an AI response. Horde Studio is trying to make the response part of a system that remembers who is where, what changed, who witnessed it, what time it happened, and what should still matter later.

It is ambitious, experimental, and still evolving—but I genuinely think it is becoming one of the most capable LLM roleplay frontends available if you care about persistent simulation instead of disposable chats.

I would love hard feedback from experienced SillyTavern users, especially on long-session continuity, provider compatibility, the creator flow, and whether the local cognition layer improves immersion on lower-end hardware.

Source GitHub: https://github.com/ddkhan24/hordestudio
Horde Studio 12 release: https://github.com/ddkhan24/hordestudio/releases/tag/v12.0.0
Discord: https://discord.gg/9eyjcMbsST

GITHUB REPO: https://github.com/ddkhan24/hordestudio
Discord: https://discord.gg/9eyjcMbsST

Hey everyone,

I’ve been building Horde Studio, a local-first creative platform for people who want more depth and control from AI roleplay.

Most tools I tried handled one part well—character chat, worldbuilding, or companion simulation—but these systems rarely felt connected. I wanted one place where characters could exist inside persistent worlds, remember what happened, form relationships, follow schedules, and continue evolving beyond a single conversation.

So I built Horde Studio.

What it includes

Characters & Group Rooms
Create detailed characters, personas, and multi-character conversations. Use lorebooks, author notes, long-term memory, alternate replies, summaries, presets, and imported character cards.

Persistent Worlds
Build playable settings with locations, NPCs, factions, quests, inventories, shops, relationships, travel, weather, time progression, and ongoing world events.

Virtual Humans
Create more grounded AI people with moods, routines, commitments, relationships, memories, clothing, locations, sleep schedules, separate timelines, autonomous messages, photos, and voice notes.

Local-first control
Your characters, conversations, worlds, and simulation data remain stored locally. You choose which models and services to connect.

Horde Studio works with:

• OpenRouter
• Ollama
• LM Studio
• KoboldCpp, llama.cpp and other OpenAI-compatible endpoints
• ComfyUI and supported image-generation services
• SillyTavern character cards and presets

This is not meant to be another thin chat interface. The goal is to create a genuine story and life-simulation engine where the world continues to remember, react, and change.

It is still an evolving project, and I’d genuinely value feedback from people who already use AI roleplay, local models, character cards, or persistent-world systems.