Games Like Wookland

It starts with a field. Build your own camping music festival in the woods: the stages, the campgrounds, the gates and the porta-potties. Then do it for 45,000 people, and keep every one of them fed, watered, on time for the headliner and alive, from Wednesday load-in to the Monday exodus.

Terraform the land, lay roads and footpaths, zone campgrounds and parking, and place stages, fences, gates, medical and Main Street. Start with a Bass Shack and work up to The Mothership, book the lineup to the minute and sell premium wristbands for the nicer camping.

Then decide where 15,700 cars are going to go. Not everyone drives: run shuttles from the hotels, and lay out walk-in tents, bell tents, cabins and RV pads. At the gates, a thorough search catches the contraband and makes the line long, and a long line makes a pushy crowd. Ticketless wooks wait for a miracle, then look for the stretch of fence your perimeter posts can't see.

Every one of them is simulated. They pick sets from the lineup and plan the walk: set changes are mass migrations, headliners pull everybody, and at close everyone leaves at once. That's the real test. GUESTS ARE THINKING shows what's on their minds, and every festival ends with an A-to-F grade, the three things that cost you most and a fix for each. If someone died, the best you can get is a C.

Every guest comes with a rave fam, a cooler and a plan for the headliner. A carload is a family, and about one in ten flies a totem. A totem is visible from 70 metres and a face from 12, which is how friends get lost. "Stay behind the shrimp. The shrimp knows the way."

Porta-potty banks with real queues, tanks that fill and a honey wagon on its rounds. Everyone wakes up needing to go at once, and too few banks by the stage means a line that misses the drop. No loo in reach means a wild wee behind the nearest van.

Food-truck lines, the cereal bar, $85 hoodies that sell themselves at 3 a.m. Sleep debt, sun-baked tents and rave dads practising pancake diplomacy. By day three the ice is gone. After the music, renegade sets take over the lanes: a speaker on a cooler, decks on a folding table, and a packed lane between parked cars you may have to shut down.

Crowd crushes are real, and they are preventable. Wookland uses the numbers event-safety planners use:

Planning rules after the Purple Guide, the Event Safety Guide and ANSI ES1.9. The density heatmap is one key away.

A DRUG-AWARE CROWD

Every guest has a plan for the day, and for a lot of them something is in it: alcohol, cannabis, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, ketamine, cocaine, nitrous or GHB. Click anyone to see what they took, when, and where each one is on its curve: coming up, peaking, coming down, or not what it was sold as.

Nobody gets judged. Everybody gets water. Medical outcomes are written seriously, never as a joke.

Build on real land made from elevation data and OpenStreetMap, from Stonehenge at the solstice sunrise to an Antarctic ice shelf where the sun never sets, each with its own weather and its real sun and moon, or start from a blank field. Run time from x1 to x1000, or let the auto-play bot build a well-run festival (or a badly run one) and watch.

Wookland is

Wookland is not

Build your dream festival. Keep the wooks alive. Happy Wookland! Wishlist to hear when the gates open.