What Flexweave Is

Flexweave is a Rust library for building deterministic mechanics without tying an application to a particular genre, engine, content format, or scheduling model. It provides the domain-neutral pieces that mechanics systems tend to share: stable objects, typed attached data, numeric attributes, tags and queries, ability and effect lifecycles, clocks, lifecycle facts, and signals.

Mechanics and Meaning

The central design choice is a boundary between mechanics and meaning. Flexweave owns the shape of mechanics state and its transitions; the consuming runtime decides what those pieces represent and how they are orchestrated.

An object might be a character, item, or encounter. An ability might represent an attack, spell, card, or command. A clock unit might be a turn, tick, or slice of real time. The caller chooses those meanings, loads the active definitions, applies consequences at lifecycle boundaries, and maps Flexweave's facts into its own events and adapters.

Deterministic Foundations

Given identical primitive inputs, Flexweave preserves object ids, iteration and query order, lifecycle facts, and results. That makes the library useful for tests, simulations, replays, debugging, content validation, and server-side command processing.

Flexweave does not attempt to make an entire application deterministic. Scheduling, concurrency, external state, and ordering outside the library remain the runtime's responsibility.

A Toolkit, Not an Engine

Flexweave does not prescribe a game loop, load authored content, or automatically route events. It gives higher-level runtimes predictable mechanics building blocks while leaving product-specific policy at the boundary. This makes it a mechanics toolkit rather than a game engine or content system.

Main Example

The guide builds from one compile-checked example:

cargo run -p flexweave --example rpg_combat

Read Create Combatants when you are ready to start building it piece by piece.