The wiki writes itself
Every game wiki starts the same way: someone types out a table of build costs, and six months later it is wrong. Not because anyone was careless, but because the game moved and the table did not.
Cobnuts is data-driven by design. Every building, item, creature, biome and tech is a text file the game loads at startup. The base game ships as a mod called core, and a mod that changes a value changes the game. That is a modding decision first — but it means the authoritative description of the game already exists in a machine-readable form.
So the wiki is generated from it.
What that actually buys#
A small Rust program in the game repo loads the content through the game's own loader and writes it out as JSON. That detail matters more than it sounds: the export is validated by exactly the code the game uses, so it cannot describe content the game would reject. If a definition is malformed, the export fails the same way starting the game would.
The current export is 1,169 entities across 161 categories. Then the interesting part: walking each definition for references to other definitions turns up 1,911 connections — a build cost pointing at an item, a recipe at a workstation, a skill at the attribute that governs it.
Those connections are why the wiki is useful on the first day, before anyone has written a word of prose. Invert them and every page gains a "referenced by" section for free. The Wood page lists all sixteen buildings that cost wood, the three plants that yield it, and the sixteen recipes that consume it — not because someone maintained that list, but because the game data says so.
Nothing here is curated. A new relationship in the game data becomes a link on the wiki with no code change. Only the labels are hand-written, and an unlabelled connection still shows up under a generic heading rather than silently vanishing.
What generation cannot do#
It cannot tell you whether something is any good.
Of 1,169 entities, 257 carry a written description in the game data, and they cluster where the writing was already load-bearing: every one of the 73 thoughts a colonist can have, every one of the 45 advantages, all 19 biomes. Those read as articles already. The other nine hundred-odd have names, numbers, and relationships — a reference, not an article.
A generated page can tell you the Cobnuts board costs two wood and seats eight. It cannot tell you to keep it out of a corridor because it blocks movement, or that the ten-percent cross-train into Shooting is far too weak to plan around.
So pages have two halves. The facts are generated and get overwritten on every sync. The prose is written by hand, lives in a separate place, and is never touched by a regeneration. They are joined when the page renders.
Keeping those apart is the whole design. A wiki that lets people edit generated facts eventually cannot regenerate them — and then it quietly documents a version of the game that no longer exists. Making the boundary physical rather than a rule people are asked to follow means that failure simply cannot happen.
The part that surprised me#
Writing that first page by hand, I got two things wrong in the draft. I said the board was safe to place in a corridor; it blocks movement. I said it cross-trains thrown weapons; it trains Shooting, at ten percent.
Both were caught by reading the definition sitting right there on the same page. Which is a decent argument for the split: the generated half keeps the written half honest.
Cobnuts is a persistent colony sim crossed with a procedural dungeon-crawl delve. It is in pre-alpha, the art is placeholder, and it is not yet playable publicly.