Companions

A handful of companions, no supplies, no second chance: claw a settlement out of hunger, thirst and cold until it can carry itself — then send the one or two you can spare into a vast map of finds, secrets and dangers, while the larder back home still has to keep filling without them.

Where the build stands: the survival half and the self-running settlement are playable today. The far map is generated and worth crossing to look at — biomes, rivers, caves, landmarks — but its payoff is not built yet: outposts, hidden finds, unique gear and regional danger are Milestone 6 and 10.4 in ROADMAP.md. Today an expedition costs you a pair of hands at home and brings back map knowledge, not loot.

Living document · the long form of the in-game F1 reminder, plus the developer reference · describes build v0.19.0 · last revised 2026-08-22

This build is not downloadable — only the newest release is kept. Get the current version →

Two halves: the Player Guide is everything you need to play. In the game itself F1 is deliberately only a reminder — the keys, the rules that kill, one line each — and this page is where the long form and every number live. The Developer Reference below it maps each mechanic to its files, seams, tunables and console commands.

What changed in v0.19.0 short form

Everything this build brought, one line each — so this page says what it is before it says how the game works. The long form, with every reason and number behind them, is CHANGELOG.md in the repository.

v0.19.0 this build 2026-08-22

Added

• Fog, and air you cannot see through
• Every workshop shows itself, moving, in its own window
• tests/title_playback.gd — frame times on the title screen, bucketed by how many video streams are actually running, so…

Changed

• The beds are made properly now
• A shower can now pass over in half an hour
• Walls are slimmer, and a wall now knows who stands beside it
• Staking a blueprint is no longer an order — NOBODY BUILDS UNASKED
• Roads lost their kerbs
• Antialiasing starts at 4x again
• The title screen's twelve background clips are re-recorded at 1920x1080, Theora q9, from a 3840x2160 render with 4x multisampling

Fixed

• The loading screen's failsafe no longer pulls the overlay off a load that just began
• A builder walks to a place, not to a point on a rectangle
• The rain has a strength, and the ground remembers it
• Free time — off duty is something a companion DOES
• C / T / V / K opened the companion window on somebody the game had not selected
• A sleeping companion was drawn on top of the one walking up to them
• Action.TREAT had no label
• A release can no longer be dirty

Overview

What the game is, and the shape of a run.

You control a party of three companions from an RTS-style top-down view: box-select, right-click to command. There is no player avatar — the three are equals, and the party grows to at most eight by taking in wanderers you meet (see Your party). Every one has the full set of survival stats and can die individually; losing one is meant to feel tragic. On the hardest difficulty that loss is permanent (see Difficulty & saving). The only threats are nature — food, water, temperature, weather, seasons and distance — plus reactive wildlife that may defend itself. Nothing ever attacks your base.

A run is a cycle of three phases

1. The manual opening — everything by hand, no automation. Scout for a viable site, live hand-to-mouth off what you find.
2. The automated base — buildings unlock jobs, each companion's rule program runs the day, the settlement hums.
3. Exhaustion → migration — the land wears out, the party packs what it can carry, treks, and starts over stronger: skills, equipment and recruits persist, the place does not. Each year winters bite harder.

The 512×512 map is budgeted for roughly 3–5 settlement cycles — that is the designed run length. Phases 1 and 2 are playable today; phase 3 is not built yet — nothing yet forces you off a working settlement, so a run ends when you stop, not when the land does.

Build your party before the world exists

Play does not drop you on the island. It opens the three companions you are about to take there — and you can press Start the run the second it appears.

The party you get without touching anything is already complete: three named, differently coloured people with rolled bodies and rolled dice. Everything below is optional.

Every attribute now bends something, and 6 is the average — a roll of 6 is worth nothing either way, and the spread between your three companions is the whole point. The range is 2 to 10. Nothing here is a party-wide bonus: a party of average people plays exactly the numbers this page quotes everywhere else.

Willpower is the one to read carefully: it does not let anybody sleep less. The Tiredness bar, the alerts and the sleep debt all behave exactly as they do for everyone else — only the drag on speed and work is lighter.

• Eleven hair silhouettes, six complexions, three marks. The marks — freckles, a scar across the brow, spectacles — stack, so their arrows walk the eight combinations (nothing, each alone, each pair, all three). All of it is cosmetic: no look on this screen changes anything a companion can do, and none of it says what they have survived.
• Six faces, and nobody smiles. The trait you pick is the face they wear when nothing is wrong — see Reading a companion for what happens on top of it when something is.
• Skills are not on offer. Everyone starts unskilled and learns by doing, exactly like a recruit who walks in later.
• Retry after a wipe comes through this same screen. When the party dies, you do not get three strangers the dice rolled — you build their successors, and the new run claims its own save slot instead of writing into the dead one's.

Move & look WASD · F · Tab

• WASD pans the camera (free look). The view stays where you put it — selecting or commanding never yanks the camera.
• F centres the camera on the selected character and follows it (a group is framed at its centre). Tab does the same while switching companions.
• Right-click commands every selected character (see Command); a green ping marks the ordered spot, and a green circle snaps briefly tight around the object you gave the order on. Hold right-click to steer continuously — the selection follows the cursor until you release.
• Dense forest and loose sand slow walking to 80%.
• Mouse wheel or +/- zoom; M snaps to the widest zoom. Mouse at a window edge scrolls the view (tune speed/width in Esc → Settings → Gameplay). Over a panel the wheel scrolls that panel — it never zooms the map underneath it.
• There is no minimap and no overview map — you never see the whole island at once. Reading and remembering the land is part of the game.
• The time-warp bar sits top right (pause, 1–10×). Switch on Esc → Settings → Graphics → Show FPS and the frame rate appears directly under it — green above 50, amber above 30, red below. It updates four times a second on real time, so time warp and pause do not change how it reads.

Your party 3 → 8 companions

• Characters are moved by right-click only. There is no keyboard steering — WASD always pans the camera, never a companion.
• Left-click a character to select it (green / blue / orange; a white ring marks it). Exactly one selected = it is "yours": E-gather and build use it, and it walks your right-clicks at full speed.
• Drag a box to select several and command them together.
• Left-click empty ground deselects — observer mode; everyone just runs its jobs.
• The bottom-left panel follows the mouse and is purely a mouseover readout — it names whatever is under the cursor and says what it means for you. See What the mouse tells you.
• Tab switches control to the next companion; 1–8 select directly (tap twice to also centre the camera). Hotkeys are fixed for the run — a dead companion's number stays vacant, and the survivors keep theirs. The roster in the corner stands in that same order and never re-sorts itself, so a companion's place there is as fixed as its number: you learn where to look instead of re-reading the list. What needs you is said in colour on the row, not by jumping to the top.
• Companions learn by doing — walking, each trade, building, herb-work and reading the sky each grow their own skill, and nothing else does (the eleven skills and what each buys). A run's veterans are made, and they are what you carry to the next settlement.
• Strangers come knocking. Every so often a wanderer walks in out of the wild and waits a few days at the settlement — the event log names the direction they came from, which is your only warning to go and look. Left-click them for their panel: name, body, base attributes — and nothing else, because a recruit arrives unskilled. Take them in or send them on; wait too long and they leave. The party is hard-capped at eight — a roster you can still hold in your head — and a new pair of hands eats before it earns.
• A newcomer brings a map, not just hands. Join one and they tell you where they came from — one line in the chronicle naming a direction, never a distance — and a patch of far-off ground stops being blank. It is marked explored, not visible: you get the lie of the land out there, not what is standing on it right now. That is a second reason to take somebody in even when the larder is tight — the next settlement has to be found before it can be built.
• Not everyone means it. Some wanderers are false companions: they work slowly, help themselves to the stores, and one night they are gone with whatever they could lift. Nothing on the panel gives it away — the event log does, over days (someone at the stores after dark; a day's work that came up short). A companion with Perception 8 or better names the culprit outright; below that the log only reports the deed. Expel anyone who joined from their character sheet (C) — and be wrong at your own cost.

Reading a companion at a glance

The figure on the map is not decoration. Four things can be read off it without opening a single panel — who it is, what it is carrying, what it is doing, and how badly it is doing.

• Who. The identity colour is worn loud on the scarf and the sleeve band (the coat only tints with it) and is the same colour as the selection ring and every swatch that names them in the interface. Beyond it, no two companions look alike: hair silhouette, hair colour, complexion and any marks are fixed by who they are — chosen in the creator, or dealt by the dice for everyone who walked in later. Grey hair means age, nothing more.
• What they carry. Carrying is equipping in this game, so the figure wears its own pack: an axe over the shoulder, a bow and quiver on the flank, a bedroll lashed above the shoulders, a rope at the belt, a straw hat, a lit torch — and the waterskin everybody has. Whoever is holding the only axe can be spotted across the camp.
• What they are doing. All fourteen kinds of work have a pose of their own — an axe swung overhead, a pick struck at the rock face, a hoe, a hammer, a two-handed saw, a knife, a ladle stirring, a rope hauled hand over hand, a rod held out over the water, a bow carried low, bare hands feeding a fire — each with its tool drawn into the hands and taken off the back while it is used, and the worker turned to face the thing they are working on. The useful half: the pose runs on the same clock that pays for the work, so a tired, sick or unpractised companion is visibly slower at the swing. If a figure across camp looks sluggish, it is not the animation.
• How they are doing. Every companion has a permanent expression, and trouble paints over it. The face on the map and the portrait in the party row are the same drawing, so the two can never tell you different things.

The thresholds are the same ones the HUD bars colour by, so a face can never disagree with the bar above it — see Buffs & debuffs for the numbers.

Command — right-click RMB

Right-click sends every selected character; what happens depends on what you click. Your word is absolute — a character never breaks off an order, even to save itself. It posts a red warning when critical and carries on; abort the order yourself if you want it to live.

Every click flashes a green ping at the ordered spot, and when the order was given on something — a tree, a bush, a stack lying on the ground, an animal, a fire, a stockpile, another companion, a cave mouth — a green circle snaps tight around that object for a moment. Feedback for the eye: on a crowded tile you can see what the party understood you to click, not merely where the cursor was. A plain walk onto open ground has nothing to ring and gets only the ping.

Selecting a companion shows where they are going next. A bright line inside a pale white frame runs from their feet over their whole order chain — every waypoint a bright dot in a paler ring, the last one bigger — stands for up to two seconds and fades. It comes back every time you hand out orders, so a Shift-queued chain can be checked the moment it is laid down.

• It draws the real route, and for every leg rather than only the next one: the walk bends around rivers, walls and cliffs exactly as the companion will take it. That is what makes it worth reading before a long trek — the way round a lake is the walk you are actually ordering.
• It lasts no longer than the plan it draws: the moment they arrive, finish or are called off, the line goes. Two seconds is a ceiling, not a wait, and a companion under no orders draws nothing at all.
• Several selected companions each get their own line, all in the same white, each starting under its own companion's feet. The two seconds are real seconds — time warp does not shorten them.

You can only order what you can see. On ground the party has never explored, a right-click means walk there and nothing else — no drink ring over a lake under the black, no harvest on a tree nobody has found, no left-click panel on a store or a fire out there, and no blueprint staked on unseen ground: choosing where to settle is meant to be scouting. Ground you have explored answers everything even when nobody is looking at it — the map does not forget where the water is. Wildlife is stricter still: an animal can only be clicked while its cell is in live sight, because a remembered deer is a deer that has long since wandered off. Walking into the dark is never gated; that is how you scout.

Clicking the same job again does nothing — on purpose. A right-click on the work a companion is already doing (the bush they are picking, the site they are building, the fire they are boiling at, the animal they are hunting) is ignored for that companion instead of cancelling the order and starting from zero, so the half-done work keeps its progress. It counts while they are still walking there, too, which is when the impatient second click usually happens. A group is decided companion by companion: click one bush with three selected and the two elsewhere set off while the one already picking is left alone. Anything else still redirects instantly, and a plain walk order is deliberately exempt — clicking the ground again re-paths, because that is the reflex for somebody who looks wedged. And if one really is stuck the no-op lifts: once a companion has actually been going nowhere for two seconds, a repeat click is obeyed and paths them afresh — so clicking again can never be a dead end. The click still flashes its green feedback and redraws the waypoint line, so the gesture confirms the order rather than doing nothing visible.

Shift+right-click queues the order as a waypoint. A plain right-click replaces the whole queue. Nobody looks after themselves at all — drinking, eating, warming, sleeping and taking medicine happen only on your order or through the rule program (T).

A bed someone else has claimed refuses the order: it is dropped with a warning rather than silently ignored, so a sleep command that "did nothing" is worth a look in the event log.

An order with the materials nowhere is refused at the click. Build, repair, craft, light a fire or feed one: if what it needs is in neither that companion's pack nor any store the settlement can reach, the order is turned down where you gave it, the reason goes to the event log, and nobody takes a step. It is asked per companion, so ordering three onto a site sends the ones who can carry something and tells you about the ones who cannot. It refuses only what is genuinely nowhere — a wasted walk is a small price, an order wrongly refused is not. Queued waypoints (Shift+right-click) are never refused: they are a plan for later, and today's empty stores say nothing about it.

What a left-click opens

Right-click orders; left-click a building to look at it. The panel opens without touching your selection, so you can read a fire while a companion keeps working. This is also the only place the ranges below become visible.

What the mouse tells you

The bottom-left panel is the mouseover readout and nothing else — it says what is under the cursor, never what you could press. The headline is the thing you are pointing at: a tree, a fire, a stockpile, a companion. The ground only gets the headline when nothing stands on it, because "plains" is rarely the answer to the question you were asking. There is no grid coordinate — a cell number was never a decision.

• One key line, then the reason. The first line is the decision, short enough to read without stopping (60 characters at most): „Undrinkable — the sea is salt“, „Burning — 4 h of fuel left“. Underneath it, smaller and dimmed, is what that means for you.
• Exactly one word is coloured, and it is the word you are there for — the count, Undrinkable, Burning. When a tile has nothing to report, the line is plain grey: the absence of colour is itself the reading.
• A hovered companion's name wears their own identity colour, so the readout and the roster agree about who you mean.
• It quantifies what it names. What felling this tree will leave behind, how far a fire or a pile reaches and who it serves, how long a worn patch needs to come back, what a road is actually worth in walking speed — and that a wanderer is not yours until they join.
• A remembered tile says so. Explored ground you are not currently looking at reports what you last saw, and the readout labels it a memory rather than passing a stale count off as a live one. Unexplored ground says only that nobody has been there.

• A campfire — the same window a companion walking over opens (see the fire window): the fire drawn at the top, which of the three states it is in, how much longer it burns, its three slots, and a Light it button on a cold pit. It draws two circles on the map: an amber action ring and, well inside it, a smaller red warmth circle. Warmth is the small one — standing in the amber ring does not thaw anybody, and in bad weather that circle pulls in further still (the panel draws the pinched circle, not the fair-weather one).
• What the fire's window no longer shows. Two blocks were taken out of it: the listing of the tasks it posts (a fire still calls for refuel and boil — nothing in the game prints a posting any more) and the night watch. That second one matters, so read the night arithmetic below and do it yourself: a campfire filled to the brim burns about 7 in-game hours, a night lasts 12, a straw bed gives no warmth of its own, and a sleeping companion does nothing at all — so a party that all lies down around a fire on a cold night wakes up short a companion. Load the fire at dusk. The standing keep the night watch order still exists and still works (hold position in the warmth, feed the flame all night, end at first light, pay for it in tiredness the next day), but it can only be given from the dev console for now.
• A well — what it serves and its action ring.
• A stockpile — what lies on it, how full its tiles are, and its acceptance rules.
• A construction site — materials delivered so far, progress, and the Cancel button; cancelling drops everything already delivered on the spot as loose stacks, so nothing is lost.
• A room (left-click inside it) — its comfort and its furniture, see Furnish a room.

Merely hovering a building draws its action ring too, without opening anything.

Gather — hold E E

Hold E next to a target; a ring fills over its harvest time. Gathered items go into that character's carry, limited by weight (~40 kg, raised by Strength).

• Trees → wood: each forest tile is one tree; the whole wood stock comes down when it falls (the tile turns to grass) and the pack takes what it can. Strikes are banked — stop and finish later. Four species by shade: birch (10 wood), pine (20), spruce (25), oak (35).
• Rocks → stone and fishing take ~10× ordinary work — plan whole days; a mason's yard / fisher's hut put workers on them around the clock.
• Herbs, berries, roots regrow in place, but never in winter, and slowly enough to plan a walking circle around: herbs ~3 days, a berry bush ~2 days for the 5 berries it holds, hemp ~5 days. Foraging fatigue (below) stretches all three by up to 4×. Bird nests (spring only, gone for good when robbed), mushrooms (summer+autumn, forest edge), hazel nuts (all year, never rot, but a cleared bush is finished and the next grows out of sight), mussel beds (salt coast, year-round, spoil fast).
• The land wears out where you pick it. Berry bushes, herb patches, root beds, hemp stands and mussel beds remember being stripped: each unit taken leaves foraging fatigue on that patch, and a worked-over patch regrows up to 4× slower. Hover it to read the state — "picked over (40%, regrows in 3.2 days)". No dice: the wear fades on its own over about a week, in every season, so it is a tally of recent pressure, not a scar. Forage in a circle, not in one spot — and the longer a base stands, the further you walk for a full pack.
• Free ground pickups (a half-second stoop, gone once taken): twigs & leaf piles at the forest edge, loose stones on the plains. One node is one item — a campfire is three twig nodes, and they are everywhere.
• Wild hemp → plant fibre — grows only on damp ground beside fresh water (river banks and lake shores; never the salt coast, never inland). Tall fanned stalks, regrows in ~5 days outside winter. Fibre is not string: spin it into cordage on the Crafting tab, and cordage is what a bowstring and a fishing line are made of. No hemp in reach → no bow and no rod, so it is one more thing that makes a settling site good or bad.
• Hunting takes a bow (craft one once a Hunting lodge stands). Deer & pigs flee faster than you walk — you shoot them: embody a hunter, hold H, a swaying reticle rises, lead the moving animal, release to loose. A hit is aim, not luck. A shot spooks the prey — one clean opening shot, then it bolts. The Hunter rule shoots the same way on its own, and with nothing in sight it takes a stand instead of falling through to the next rule: it walks to the nearest known forest cell (failing that, anywhere outdoors — never under a roof) and waits there, reading "No huntable animals in sight - waiting". Hunting is mostly waiting.
• Fishing takes a rod (a pole plus a line of cordage; craft one once a Fisher's hut stands). The hut grants the fishing right to its water, the rod is the tackle: no rod in the pack → the companion will not fish, the Fisher rule stays blocked, and the hut's call for hands is left for whoever is equipped. Rods are per companion — three fishers need three rods.

Eight creatures roam: deer & pigs are the herds you live off; pigeons & crows fly where you cannot follow; beavers keep to fresh water; badgers are slow enough to corner; wolves and bears hold their ground (a bear is the biggest meat on the map). Wolves belong to the tundra — the cold north is where they start, which is exactly where you go looking for hide. Nothing out there hunts you — yet.

Some things on the ground glitter. A find wears a breathing halo and a few sparks that flare and die around it, and from the second tier up the stack casts real light — which only shows once it is dark. It glitters in every place an item is drawn: on the ground, in a pack slot, in a panel row, on a stockpile tile. What glitters is the discovery, not the goods: the wood cached beside an old camp's cold hearth shines because finding it mattered, and it is ordinary wood the moment you carry it home. Half a screen away on dark ground, that is the difference between a landmark and nothing at all. The brightest thing you can find is a word: the scraps of automation grammar lie out there under the same sparkle.

Game leaves a settlement. Every wandering step a herd takes leads to the quieter of the ground it can see, so deer and pigs drift off your built-up walking circle over the seasons. It is a drift, not a flight (they bolt only from a companion at close range), and it is not the same for everyone — pigeons and crows do not mind a settlement at all. Hunting turns into an expedition: one more reason for the waterskin, the bedroll and, in time, an outpost.

Stay alive

Health, Thirst, Hunger, Tiredness and Temperature drain over time; Mood is a secondary, non-lethal stat. Every companion is one row in the top-left shelf, and the row is built so you never have to read it — only notice it:

• The hotkey digit, the portrait, and the name.
• The one word the companion's whole state comes down to — well, thirsty, starving, freezing — backed by that stat's symbol. The gravest thing wins, by what kills soonest.
• A second line: what it is doing right now — the rule it is running, the order it is carrying out, the need it broke off for. It turns yellow when the answer is no work — and it distinguishes the two cases: automation off reads "Off duty", while a running program in which nothing applies reads "Free time (no rule applies)", naming the gap in the program, which is the half you can act on. Either way they are at free time and strolling, not frozen. An idle companion is still a lost day, and this is the line that says so.
• Six pips on the right, the whole stat set at a glance. They fill in one neutral grey and a stat that runs out turns its pip into a solid red block — the emptier the stat, the more red there is. Temperature's pip is a marker that rides up and down, because it has a cold end and a hot end.
• A stripe down the left edge carrying the same warning as the word: dark while all is well, yellow once a companion would break off work for a stat, a pulsing red — and a red frame — when life is at stake. A calm party is a shelf of plain grey rows.

Hovering a row unfolds it to the six full bars, underneath the row rather than in place of it, so the line you were reading stays put — and hovering is the only thing that opens a card, so the corner never rearranges itself when control moves. The rows stand in hotkey order and never re-sort. Buff/debuff badges beside the card say what is on a companion — green = boon, red/magenta/violet = malus. A red cracked heart is the one that means somebody is dying right now: it is on for exactly as long as something is taking Health off them, and hovering it names both the cause and the one thing that ends it (see Buffs & debuffs). When any Health falls into the red, the whole screen sounds the alarm (red rim, heartbeat) so an off-screen death can't be missed.

A body mends itself only while nothing at all is wrong with it. Health then climbs on its own — awake as well as asleep, bed or no bed — as long as every bar sits over half, the body is comfortably warm and no sickness is on it. That trickle runs at 30% of a good bed's healing rate, and it never adds to a bed's: a sleeper mends at the bed's pace, not at both. Sleeping in a proper bed is still how somebody actually gets well; the waking trickle is what stops small damage from being permanent before there is a house to sleep in. Hover a hurt companion's Health bar and it says which of the two it is doing — the promised climb, or the one thing blocking it ("Thirst below 50%", "too cold", "sick") — and a green heart with a rising arrow joins the badges while it mends.

What hurts you doesn't let you heal: an empty Thirst/Hunger bar, or a freezing/ overheating body, suspends even a bed's healing — the sleeper rests off tiredness but wakes no healthier. Winter is the exam: farms lie dormant, plants stop regrowing, no animals are born. Stockpile in autumn; nuts, fishing and mussel beds work year-round.

Read the temperature bar before it bites. It shades its comfort zones — blue too cold, a dark neutral for all right, warm brown too hot — and carries two marks: the thick one is the body temperature that actually damages Health, the thin pale one is what the body currently feels and is drifting toward. When the thin mark runs into the blue well ahead of the thick one, you still have time to do something about it.

Buffs & debuffs — the exact numbers

Every condition a companion can carry, what it really costs, and how to end it.

Conditions show as badges beside the HUD card and under the portrait in the character sheet (C). The colour tells you the kind before you read anything: green = a boon, and magenta / blue / violet / red = something is wrong. Every slowdown below multiplies with the others: soaked, exhausted and ill at once is a companion barely moving.

Work & trades — how each one resolves

Gathering, felling, mining, fishing and hunting are not one mechanic — they cost different time and need different things.

Every trade trains its own skill by doing it, and the skill multiplies the pace back: +8% per level, so ×1.8 at level 10 — but a level is slow, and a companion who does nothing else reaches about level 6 in 150 days, so the pace you play with is the pace on this page. Nothing is picked at the start and nothing is taught — a companion only knows what it has done. Work driven by a rule still trains the skill (that is different from cards, which a rule never earns). On top of the skill sit the two attributes that never change: Dexterity multiplies every work clock in the table above, and Intelligence decides how fast the skill itself grows.

A shift at a workshop — and a tree felled by hand

Felling one tree and working as a lumberjack are not the same job, and the difference decides whether the wood ever reaches your camp. Three contexts, and they behave differently on purpose:

• They finish what they started. A shift picks the tree that is already furthest chopped, not the nearest one. A shift broken off by a night or an errand used to come back to whichever tree was closest, and the wood filled up with half-felled trunks nobody was ever going to finish.
• A full pack within reach of the trade's own yard is a walk, not the end of the shift — they empty it and carry on.
• Neither carries on to a stockpile. A shift ends at the yard; yard → stockpile is a haul, and a job of its own — see below.

The hauler — somebody to carry the yards in

Every workshop keeps a 20-unit yard of its own produce, and a yard with no room left stops the trade that fills it. The WORK: hauler rule makes emptying them a job: walk to a yard with something in it, fill the pack to its ordinary weight limit, carry it to a stockpile, come back.

• No workshop unlocks it. There is no hauler's hut — the yards it empties are buildings you already had to raise. The card is the whole gate, and it is bought with ten stacks picked up off the ground by hand. As with every card, work done by a running rule earns nothing.
• Its round is 30 tiles — and a painted zone manages it. Stand a hauler inside a zone (Z) and that zone becomes its round instead of the 30 tiles: smaller, larger, or any shape you like, and several overlapping zones count as one area. Stand it outside every zone and it is simply the 30 tiles all round. This is the first thing in the game that reads the zone layers at all.
• A load already in the pack always goes home, zone or no zone. Nobody is left standing about holding goods because a stockpile sits one cell outside a painted line.
• It takes from yards only and puts down in stockpiles only, so a hauler can never shelve its load in the next workshop it walks past — and a pile still only takes what its rules allow. Food keeps its age on the way, exactly as it does when you carry it yourself.

Tools & clothing carried, not worn

Gear is the thing that survives a migration. Three pieces exist so far — an axe, a coat and a hat — and all three are made at the crafting bench (K).

Clothing insulates — it does not heat

Worn warmth is added to the temperature you feel, but only up to 20 °C: it can lift a freezing companion toward comfort and can never push a warm one past it. So a coat is never a liability you cannot shed — it does nothing at all in a summer desert, and a roaring fire still beats it. Wearing a cloth coat and a hat is +8 °C, which is roughly the difference between a clear autumn night and a survivable one; fur and a hat is +16 °C, which is the difference between the tundra and the tundra with a plan. Carrying a spare coat does not double the warmth; only the warmest piece per body slot counts.

An axe wears out, and is mended where it was made

Chopping wears the axe down — deterministically, never on a dice roll: it lasts 400 seconds of real chopping, which is about nine in-game hours of it, a full working day at the trees. The sheet's carry slot shows the condition as a percentage that runs green → red, and the break itself posts one line to the event log. A broken axe simply stops helping — you chop by hand at the ordinary speed until it is mended; nothing is lost and nothing is destroyed.

To repair it: right-click the lumber camp with the worn axe in the pack. The companion walks over, pays 1 wood — out of its own pack, or fetched from the stores like a builder's materials — and the axe is full again. Repairing is deliberately far cheaper than crafting a replacement: that is the reward for keeping the workshop standing.

Wear follows the companion, not the axe. Hand a worn axe to a mate and it is fresh in their hands; take it back and your own wear resumes. So a shared axe is not a shared supply line — don't plan one around it.

The bow and the fishing rod are still pure gates rather than gear: carrying one is what lets you shoot or fish at all, but neither speeds anything up or wears out yet.

Moving goods — the one hand

There is exactly one hand in the game, and every window fills it the same way.

Pick a stack up in the character sheet's carry grid, in the transfer window, or straight off a stockpile tile on the map (Shift+right-click it — reach is what decides: standing on the pile or right beside that tile the stack comes into your hand, from any further off the same click is a queued order to walk over and open the exchange there. The same is true of a workshop's yard) — it is always the same hand, so a stack can only ever be in one place. Closing a window keeps the stack in hand, which is exactly how it gets out onto the map: carry it to a construction site, a fire's hearth, a pile or a companion and left-click it down. Esc on a clear screen puts it back where it came from.

Taking reaches exactly as far as putting down: the tile beside you, or any tile of a stockpile you are standing in. Two cells away the goods are out of reach and the refusal names the gesture that walks somebody over — what you can drop onto, you can always lift back off.

Something in hand is carried where you point. Left-click any receiver that makes sense — a construction site, a stockpile, a workshop's yard, a fire, another companion — and the carrier walks over and puts the stack down there, doing exactly what the click would have done had you been standing next to it. Only the walk is done for you. The load rides in the hand for the whole trip, so Esc calls the errand off and the goods go back where they came from.

Open ground still refuses at arm's length, and that is deliberate: a misclick on empty grass can never send somebody across the map. And a refusal lands at the click, not twenty cells later — „this site doesn't need stone“, „the fisher's hut won't take wood“.

A fire is still the richest of these: on arrival the fire exchange window opens with your stack still in hand, so one click on a slot puts it in, and it opens wherever you happen to be looking, even if you deselected that companion while it walked.

Tell each stockpile what it accepts

Every pile has its own acceptance rules, set from its panel: the presets Everything, Food only, Materials and Nothing, or a tick per item kind. This is how you sort a settlement — food at the fire, wood at the building site, ore at the mason's yard.

• A hauler only walks to a pile that accepts what it is carrying. If no pile in range does, the load has nowhere to go and you get a red alert.
• Rules never touch what already lies there, and never block taking things out. Setting a pile to Nothing is therefore how you drain one: it keeps serving, stops receiving.

A pile set too narrowly is one of the quieter ways to stall the whole automation, and the panel is the only place it shows.

Every workshop keeps its own yard

A job building — fisher's hut, lumber camp, farm, mason's yard, hunting lodge — holds a store of its own beside it: 20 units of that trade's produce and nothing else (fish at the hut, logs and boards at the camp, stone and cut stone at the yard, vegetables at the farm, meat at the lodge). Left-click the building to read it.

• Produce lands there only while the worker is standing at the building. Work a tree forty tiles into the woods and it fills the pack exactly as it always did — nothing teleports home, which is a quiet argument for siting the camp where the work is.
• The goods count towards the settlement's stores: edible, spendable, haulable, and standing at the workshop counts as standing at the stores.
• But haulers never dump anything there — it is an out-tray, not a shelf, and it accepts nothing but its own trade's produce.
• One tile, one kind: twenty logs leave no room for boards until somebody clears them. With no free tile left, an incoming load does not vanish and does not block the trade — it folds onto the batch of its own kind, and the heap takes the average age, weighted by how much of each is in it. One fresh fish dropped on a nearly-spent pile barely moves it; a big fresh load moves it a lot. The guarantee that matters is kept: goods arriving older than the heap keep their own date, so nothing is ever laundered into keeping longer. It is why a one-tile yard no longer jams at a single fish — and why a day's catch is no longer written off because one old fish was lying in the tray.
• When the yard fills — or the worker's own pack does — the shift ends and the event log says which of the two ran out, because clearing a yard and bringing a load in are different jobs. That is the normal end of a shift, not a fault. A farm ordered out of season says so too, rather than standing there mute.

Getting the produce out — on the map. A yard stands where the work is, which is usually nowhere near you, so it answers the same two gestures a stockpile has always answered: Shift+right-click the building takes the stack lying in its yard straight into the hand, and right-click it with one companion selected offers Take produce on the context ring — that walks the companion over and opens the exchange window on the yard. The ring only appears when something is actually lying there, and a plain right-click still means work the trade.

Or from the building's own panel. Left-click the workshop and press Open the yard: the store opens beside the pack of the companion standing at it, in the same two-column window a stockpile uses — click a row to move the whole stack, Shift+click for a single unit. Where a pile shows its editable storage rules, a yard shows the trade's fixed fence instead: it is not yours to loosen. Putting goods back in is allowed as long as they are that trade's produce — the yard does not judge whether shelving them there is clever, and they age and spoil in it like anywhere else, so a yard used as a larder is a yard that will block the work.

Or let the settlement clear it. Two rules do that, and either is enough: the hauler trade, which does nothing else all day, or Take a task — a workshop whose yard is over three quarters full calls for it to be cleared, and a taker carries the produce to a stockpile, load by load, until the yard is empty. While a yard is full, nobody takes that trade on at all: there would be nowhere to put what they made. This is the usual bargain — by hand it always works, unattended it has to be earned.

“Full” is the worse of two things: how much the yard holds, and how much room is left in it. A yard with one crowded tile and nothing else free is full even though it holds almost nothing — which is the honest answer, because that is exactly when the work stops. The yard fill sensor in a rule reads the same number, so it hits 100 % precisely when production would block.

A fire is three states, not a fuel bar

A heat source is Burning, on Embers, or Cold, and the difference decides whether it can save somebody. Fuel is not the flame: wood thrown onto a cold pit just lies there.

The fire window — one window, two ways in

Left-click a fire, or right-click it with one companion selected: you get the same window. The left-click reads it from anywhere on the map and draws its circles; the right-click walks a companion over first and hands you their pack and waterskin beside it, so goods can actually change hands. Everything else — the picture, the words, the slots, the sizes — is identical, because it is one fire.

The fire is drawn at the top, live, in the state it is actually in. Read the picture before the words: flames mean it is burning and their height is how much fuel is left; glowing coals with no flame are embers, which still catch a log by themselves and cost no tinder; grey wood in a grey pit is laid and unlit; a blue sheen on that wood means the pit is too wet to take a light at all; and a bare ash heap is a dead fire with nothing in it. Embers and a dead pit used to look alike at a glance and they are not alike at all.

Under it the window says two words and a number, and nothing else: Burning / Embers / Laid, unlit / Cold, and then how much longer it burns, drawn large and coloured — the flame's amber while it is comfortable, yellow under a quarter of a load, red under a tenth. That is the one number you stand at a fire to read, so it is the one thing drawn big. Everything the window used to spell out — what tops it up, how many twigs make a log, why the pan is not moving — is in the tooltip of the thing it is about. Hover the bar for the fuel arithmetic, hover a slot for what it takes.

Then the hearth: Fuel on its own row with Pan and Ready under it, drawn half again the size of a pack slot — this window is worked at a distance, not squinted at. The pan's own caption carries its progress ("Pan · 40% · 12 min", or fire out when nothing is burning). On a cold pit a Light it button sits above them; on a soaked one it refuses in place and says why.

Nothing is loaded for you. You drop things in yourself — one click, and you decide how much. Carrying nothing that fits, the companion still walks over and the window says so in red, because "I have nothing to burn" is exactly what you went there to find out. Everything moves by the same gestures as the transfer window. A fire is worked from right beside it: an order sends the companion all the way onto the pit's own cell, not merely into its warmth. Boiled water taken off the Ready slot goes into the waterskin, never into the pack.

Build — press Space Space

You start with nothing. Space opens the build ring (radial menu): a ring of categories — Workshops, Structure, Supply, Demolish. Left-click one and the categories step aside: the ring now holds that category's entries and nothing else. Hovering any entry spells it out in the info panel below the circle, cost per material included (green = affordable now, red = not). Place it, and the blueprint goes down and waits: staking a plan is not an order, and nobody walks over to it. R rotates the ghost before placing. A right-click while a ghost is up puts the ghost away and gives that order in the same click — so the blueprint you have just laid down can be ordered built immediately, with no Esc in between.

The centre always goes back one ring, and closes the menu on the top level — the same thing right-click and Esc do, so there is one rule for the way out. Space closes it from any depth. Only one ring is ever drawn, and inside an open category the back button grows to fill the whole middle — a target you cannot miss, carrying that category's icon and name above ◀ Back, which is now what tells you where you are. The entries keep exactly the band they always sat in, so every label stays the size it was; only the middle changes. Greyed entries come in two kinds that must not be confused — a padlock is a player goal (the workshop that unlocks it does not stand yet), a dashed outline is a planned placeholder that does not exist in the game yet.

The cell raster appears when you need it. At rest the grid over the world is barely there — the island is meant to look like land, not graph paper, and there is no minimap to consult either. The moment you place anything — a building, a wall run, a room, a floor, furniture, a road, or the demolish tool — it snaps to full strength, because that is the moment knowing where one cell ends is information rather than clutter.

There is no ready-made house. Every house is designed out of walls, doors and floors, and is whatever shape you enclose. Job buildings stay simply placed and the farm stays drag-to-size — a workshop is equipment, not architecture; only the home is the player's design.

Every building is drawn as the thing it is, so a settlement can be read from across the map without hovering anything: the lumber camp is a lean-to over stacked logs with a sawbuck beside it, the fisher's hut hangs its catch on a drying rack, the mason's yard is an open working yard of dressed stone, the hunting lodge pegs a hide out on its frame, the smokehouse vents its two plumes, and the planning table carries the settlement plan. The storage box and the water barrel used to be told apart by tint alone; they no longer are.

One gesture is one order — and nobody builds what you did not ask for

Staking a blueprint is not an order — nobody moves. Committing a ghost lays the plan down and leaves it standing there, however many companions you had selected when you placed it. Right-click the site with them selected to put them on it; that click is the only thing that starts a build by hand. (The right-click straight out of the ghost does both in one gesture, which is why laying a plan and ordering it built still costs you two clicks and no Esc.)

A build order belongs to the commit that laid it. A wall run, a painted floor area and a stamped floorplan all stake many sites at once, and a single command still raises the whole thing — including a wall drawn leg by leg, corner after corner, until you end the chain. The distance between the pieces does not matter, so a wall with a gap in it goes up in one go.

• A blueprint from another order is left alone, however close it lies. Builders used to hand themselves on to the nearest site within eight cells once their own was finished — any site, from any order, staked by anybody. That is over: to send a second pair of hands at a particular job, right-click that site, and they join that order rather than raising one segment of it.
• Building on its own is still there — it is earned. A BUILD rule (T) and a claimed task both look for work across the whole settlement, exactly as before. What ended is building as a habit.

Materials come from the nearest store to the site. A builder delivers what is in its own pack first; for the rest it walks to whichever store lies closer to the site — yard or stockpile, with no preference for either kind. A mason's yard full of cut stone right beside the wall is the wall's supply, instead of counting as "we have it" while the builder trudged to a stockpile across the camp. It also stops a builder loading up at the pile it happens to be standing on when a nearer store sits by the site: the walk with a load on your back is the one worth shortening. All three ways a site gets built — your order, a BUILD rule, a claimed task — shop the same way.

And when an order is dropped for want of materials, it says which of the two problems it is: there are none anywhere, or they lie out of the site's reach and the site wants a stockpile near it. The second is a siting mistake, and it is the one you can fix.

And a site nobody can walk to is dropped, not ground against. Every build walk aims at a cell a companion can actually stand on; when no such cell can be reached, the order ends with can't reach the build site in the log instead of a builder shuffling against the wall between them until a watchdog cancels it. The usual cause is a piece staked inside a sealed room — finish the door before you furnish it.

The workshop craft queue

A workshop used to be a token: it unlocked a trade and posted a task, and nobody ever stood at it. Since 19.1 the lumber camp, mason's yard and smokehouse carry a craft queue — left-click one and tell it what to make.

Every workshop shows itself, moving, at the top of its window — and the picture is a readout, not decoration. It is the same yard you see standing in the settlement, in one of three states: idle (nothing ordered, nothing curing, an empty yard — a still picture), ready (there is work here — an order on the queue, produce in the yard, food on the rack — but nobody has moved it: the tool lies ready and the picture only breathes) and working (the saw saws, the mallet strikes, the plume rolls). Ready is the one worth reading: it answers "is this bench stalled?" without counting queue rows. The portrait hangs in both windows a workshop can open — the bench-and-yard panel, and the pile-style window a smokehouse or drying rack raises.

The crafter fetches the inputs itself, and it shops in one order: the workshop's own yard first, then its pack, then the settlement's stores. Logs lying in the lumber camp's yard become planks on the spot — nobody walks across the camp for wood past the wood, and nobody carries the difference home again. A cost the yard can only half pay drains it and takes the rest off the pack; only when the two together come up short is there a trip to the stores. It then works at the bench and pockets the output. Progress belongs to the order, not to the worker: two companions at one bench stack their effort, and someone called away mid-craft loses the seconds banked and never the materials. Carried kits — the axe, bow, rod, bedroll, cordage, coat and hat — are not made here: they are made in the hands, at the crafting bench (K).

Two prices for one building. A buildable may list alternative costs — the campfire's 3 twigs or 3 wood. Twigs lie on the ground everywhere, so the first fire of a run never has to wait for a felled tree; one twig node is one twig, so that is three stoops at the forest edge. The build ring lists both, each material coloured by what the settlement holds, with an or between them; a blueprint commits to one of them (whichever it can cover, primary first) and shows only that on the site. As long as nothing has been delivered yet it re-picks by itself, so a site that asked for wood asks for twigs the moment twigs are within reach; once the first material lands, the bill is settled in it. Demolishing refunds half of what the building was really paid for — a fire raised from kindling salvages kindling — and the salvage goes into the dismantler's own pack first, a stockpile in reach second, and only then the ground.

And two fuels for one fire. The same reasoning carries past the build: a fire that can be raised from twigs can be fed with them. But a twig is kindling, not fuel: roughly 10 twigs to the log, and a twig node yields one twig, so a night fed on kindling alone is a great deal of stooping for very little heat. Kindling raises a fire; wood keeps it. Logs are always preferred where there are any — every fuel run shops the list in order, so the party falls back on kindling only when the woodpile is empty. Everything that feeds a fire goes through the one list: the right-click order, the REFUEL rule, a claimed task, holding E at it, the world hand and the panel's FUEL slot (which counts in logs but takes either).

The crafting bench — made in the hands K

Everything you carry — axe, bow, fishing rod, bedroll, cordage, torch, coat, fur coat, hat, handcart — is made at the bench, the Crafting tab of the companion window. It used to hand you a placement ghost for a 1×1 craft spot on the ground, which builders then walked materials to. There is no such site any more: the bench is a pair of hands and a pack.

Pressing Craft is an order like any other, not a panel animation. The companion stands still and works, the progress ring sits over their head, and the same things that slow every other trade slow this one: tiredness, illness, and how practised they are (it trains the building skill). Closing the window does not stop it; any right-click calls it off, and so does a pack emptied out from under the work — which says so out loud.

What a kit costs in time ranges from a torch at 3.6 s to a handcart at 25.2 s, with the axe at 12.6 s and a fur coat at 19.8 s — each kit's own figure stands on its card in the tab. Double-clicking either picture of the thing (the big one at the top, or the tile at the end of the arrow) starts a run; an unaffordable kit still opens, so you can read what it would take before you go and fetch it.

Draw walls, close a room

There is no ready-made house, so this gesture is how you get shelter. Walls are straight runs, not freehand:

• Left-click plants an anchor.
• Move the mouse and a straight run follows it — it snaps to whichever direction you have pulled furthest, so you cannot draw a diagonal by accident.
• Left-click again fixes that run and starts the next one from its end: that is how you turn a corner. Fixed runs stay put, and a corner is exactly where a door goes.
• Right-click ends the chain. Esc discards only the run you are currently dragging, never what you already fixed.

Buildings go on grass or sand only. Water and mountain refuse; a forest tile has to be felled first, and the grass it leaves behind then takes a building.

Furnish a room — left-click inside it

A self-designed house is not an object you can click, so the furniture panel hangs on the room: left-click any cell of an enclosed room and it opens, reading the room out (cells, shelter warmth, how homely it is) and listing the furniture that may go in it. Pick a piece and the ghost only accepts cells inside those walls — otherwise it is an ordinary construction site: builders fetch the materials and raise it. Click inside the same room again, or press Esc, to close. It resolves last of all map clicks, so anything with a panel of its own (a pile, a fire, a construction site) keeps the click.

The two beds are told apart by their labour, not by their price — and, since 0.19.0, at a glance: a built bed is carpentry (rails, a headboard, a turned post at each corner, boards laid under it), a straw bed is plainly a heap of straw lying straight on the ground. Their materials are nearly identical: a straw bed is five seconds of somebody's evening, a proper bed is nearly six times that. Nothing in the game is instant any more — an emergency bed at dusk costs a companion a moment, which is little, but it is not nothing. Helpers shorten both; the entry's tooltip quotes the time.

A room is not yet a home. Its comfort is the average over its cells of the floor laid on them and the furniture standing in them, and that comfort lifts Mood while a companion is inside — doubled while asleep. Over-furnishing simply finishes the room; it is capped, never an exploit.

Taking it down is work — and it is how you leave

Demolishing is not a click any more. Pick Demolish and drag a rectangle: every building inside it is marked with a red cross, not removed. A companion then has to walk over and take each piece apart, and half the materials go straight into that companion's pack — what the pack cannot hold goes to a stockpile in reach, and only what neither can take is left on the grass. Right-click a marked building to send your selection at it, and one order chains on to the next mark within 24 tiles, so marking a whole settlement and clicking once dismantles all of it. Drag over an already-marked run to take the mark off again. Marks are also posted as tasks, so a party running Take a task packs up on its own. Construction sites are still cancelled outright — nothing has been raised yet.

This is the gesture the migration is built on: mark the camp the evening before, and leave in the morning carrying it.

Remember a floorplan, stamp it down again

In the build ring, Remember records a room you already built — hover it, click, and its walls, doors, floor and furniture are kept together as one plan. Stamp lays that plan down at a new site. It stakes out construction sites, not buildings: the materials and the labour are still owed, exactly as if you had drawn it by hand. Pieces that do not fit are skipped, so a plan laid over a boulder gives you the house minus a wall rather than nothing at all. The plan rides along in the save.

Record your house before you leave, and the next settlement goes up without you redrawing it — which is the whole point of a cycle that starts over stronger.

Zones — write on the map Z

A zone is a name, a colour and whatever ground you paint into it — "North woods", "Winter camp", "Do not touch". They cost nothing, block nothing, and may overlap as freely as you like: a cell can belong to every zone at once and none of them owns it. This is the map as a notebook, not as a rulebook.

Z, or the Zones sector of the build ring, opens a full-screen overlay: the world fades back and the zones come forward in their colours.

• The list on the left names every zone with its colour and its size, and clicking one flies the camera to it.
• The bar along the bottom is grouped as ZONE · TOOL · COLOUR · CLOSE: make, rename, recolour (ten hues) and delete.
• Pick up the brush or the eraser. Both are buttons you can see — and the right mouse button always does the other one, so painting and correcting are one gesture. Free-hand strokes come in four widths, or drag out a rectangle.
• The eraser takes back only the cells you drag over, and shows you which: it crosses out the ground it would actually lift and leaves the rest of that zone — and any zone underneath it — alone.
• Only explored ground can be zoned. The fog is not a map to draw on.

Zones belong to the settlement, are saved with the run, and stay behind when the party moves on. They replace the pinned name-and-radius markers that were pulled out in July for not being good enough.

One thing reads them so far: the hauler. A companion running that trade while standing inside a zone works that ground instead of its ordinary round — so a zone is how you say "clear these workshops and no others". Overlapping zones count as one area, and the fence only applies while the hauler is standing in one: a zone drawn right across the map is no use to somebody who never sets foot in it. Everything else on the map still ignores them; this is a notebook that has begun to be read, not a rulebook.

Console: zone (list, new, name, color, paint, erase, tool, del, go, at, open/close) — every branch presses the same buttons the overlay does, the fog refusal included.

Automate — press T T

Automation is built, not switched on. Write each companion a program — an ordered list of rules reading WHEN condition(s) → DO action UNTIL release. Order is priority.

• WHEN — sensors: the body's bars (Health & Mood too), Wetness, Sickness, the clock, the season, precipitation, city stores, the own carry, the waterskin, fire fuel, a waiting site, a workshop's yard fill, Sky turning (harsh weather coming — through that companion's own eyes) — and, if you find its card, the daylight left today. Conditions AND together — and every other way of joining them is a found word: OR, is not, UNLESS, ANYONE.
• DO — actions: the trades (fell, fish, farm, quarry, hunt), drink, eat, sleep, warm/cool, tend fires, build, draw water, boil water (carry the skin's pond water to a fire and boil it clean), haul the carry to stores, fetch items into the carry, take herbs (one dose against whatever they have caught, from their own pack), read the sky (the hour-long vigil, written down as WHEN Clock 08–10 → Read the sky), hauler (empty the workshop yards into the stockpiles), take a task — the nearest thing a building in the settlement is asking for — and free time, which is what a companion does when nothing else applies (below).
• UNTIL — the latch: "fell wood UNTIL stores ≥ 60" keeps a rule going past its trigger so companions don't ping-pong at the threshold. ONCE is the opposite end: at most one run a day. Both are found, like all grammar.
• Nothing happens that nobody asked for: no companion carries its load home on its own. A full pack stops the work that would fill it further (harvesting into a full pack destroys the node for nothing) and the rest of the program runs on. Bring it in by right-clicking a stockpile, with a WHEN Carry full → Haul rule, by taking a task — a task's goal sits in the city stores, so delivering is the last leg of it — or by putting somebody on the hauler trade. Any haul keeps a ration of every food kind and of drinking water: the load goes, the lunch stays.
• Blocks are budgeted: a rule costs 1 block, +1 per extra WHEN, +1 for an UNTIL; the whole settlement shares one budget (base 12, +6 from a Planning table). Rules past the budget don't run — top rules are paid first.

Every word is a card — and every companion earns their own

You cannot write a rule out of words the companion does not own. Each sensor, each action, each trade and each piece of grammar is an automation card. A deck belongs to the companion, not to the party: what one of them learned, the next one still has to learn for themselves — a second lumberjack serves the whole apprenticeship again. Nothing is unlocked at the start of a run, for anybody.

There are exactly two ways a card is had, and the rim says which: a bronze card was worked for — doing that thing by hand, so many times — and a gold one was found, lying out in the world. The symbol and the writing say what kind of word it is: amber WHEN, blue DO, violet grammar. All violet is gold: grammar cannot be worked for at all.

The deck, and reading a locked card

The Cards tab (V, beside Automation in the companion window) is where a deck is read and spent. Every card is there at full size, locked ones included — because the locked half is the part worth reading:

• A shut card is dashed and grey, and where an open card prints its block cost it prints how to get it instead ("Sensor · by hand"). Under the symbol runs a tally, one stroke per deed with every fifth struck through, and the count again in figures at the foot.
• One card at a time burns amber — the one closest to opening. Never two, so a glance at the deck answers "what is nearly mine?" without counting.
• A card that can only be found lies face down: a padlock, its name, and the line saying where its kind tends to lie. That is the whole map you get, and it is enough.
• Found a scrap of grammar? Hand it to whoever should have it (the transfer window), then spend it here: one confirmation, and that companion knows the word for good. The paper is used up.

Picking one up off the ground is a moment too — and it stays sealed. Lift one of the eight legendary grammar words and the card climbs out of the world into the middle of the screen, face down, in a well of light, with the finder's name under it and a sound of its own. It never shows the face. A find is a promise, not the payoff: the word is still sealed, still has to be carried home and spent in the deck (V), and the card turning over is what pays that off at the shelf. The envelope says where it was found and that it still has to be learned. A click sends it early, it never blocks an order, and a second copy of a word the party already speaks is lifted in silence — a duplicate cannot be learned.

Earning one is a moment. The card turns over in the middle of the screen to a fanfare, the world dims around it, and the name of whoever learned it stands on a plaque underneath. A learned card stands for about 6.6 seconds and a found one for 8 — long enough to read the rule and the flavour line; a plain look is 4.5 s and lifting a find off the ground 5.7 s. It never takes the screen away: orders still go through underneath it, and a click sends any of them early.

And the moment is not one-shot. The line the event log writes when a word is won is inked in that card's own colour — amber for a WHEN, blue for a DO, violet for grammar — and hovering that line stands the whole card back up above the log window, silently, until you move off it. A card you missed on a busy screen is never lost. Those lines also count as ordinary news rather than chatter, so they survive the quieter event-log verbosities.

What each card costs in deeds

The counts follow how often the thing happens, not how important it is. A companion drinks three times a day and sleeps once, so twenty drinks and five nights are the same week of living. One sunrise buys the Clock, so nobody's deck is empty after the first night.

Grammar is found, and only found

Buildings ask for hands — Take a task answers

Every standing building watches its own needs and calls for somebody: a fisher's hut calls for a fisher while stores hold under 20 fish, a burnt-down fire calls for tending, a fire calls for boiling while the stores hold under 10 litres of clean water (a taker draws pond water, boils it and barrels it), a workshop whose yard has filled calls for it to be cleared onto a stockpile, open construction sites and demolition marks post themselves. One 1-block Take a task rule goes and does the nearest of them, so a new recruit is just one more pair of hands — and doing one does earn cards, unlike a rule of your own. Workers only seek what the party has already discovered.

The rule needs a Planning table to run — the card is what lets you write it down, the table is what makes the settlement organised enough to answer. Without one the rule simply reads blocked and waits.

Read the program while it runs

The editor is also the debugger: every line shows what it is doing right now, and time keeps passing while you read it.

"Why is she just standing there" now has two answers, and they look different. A companion who is strolling a few steps about one spot is at free time — the program had nothing to say. One standing perfectly still is blocked, despondent, warming at a lit fire, or a hunter holding a stand. Watch the feet before you read the editor.

A small program that keeps somebody alive through a winter looks like this:

Free time — off duty is something they do

A companion with nothing on their plate does not stand like a fence post any more: they stroll a few cells around the spot they stopped at and stay there. It is the same state whether automation is switched off or switched on with no rule that applies right now — there is no third state between working and off duty, and both bank the hours.

• At a lit fire nobody moves at all. If you parked them at the campfire, that is where they stay.
• Leisure never crosses a threshold. Indoors they stay indoors, outdoors they stay outdoors — house, cave or the open sky, and a roof counts as the same place as the room under it. Nobody wanders out of the shelter you put them in, and nobody wanders into a house either.
• An errand suspends free time, it does not end it. Only a need is an errand: after a drink, a meal, a warm-up, a cool-down or a dose they come back to the same spot and the afternoon reads as one afternoon. An order, a work shift, a haul or a night in bed moves the spot — so where you send somebody is where they idle, and an errand that ended outdoors starts the next stroll outdoors rather than marching back in through the door.
• Write it last. As a written rule Free time is how you schedule an evening off — every rule above it still wins, so a thirsty companion goes drinking (the line says so) and then walks back. It takes no UNTIL on purpose: a latched fallback would refuse to give way to the rules above it.
• A rule that is running and deliberately holding still — a hunter waiting on a stand — is not idle and does not stroll.

Its card is the one the party earns by not working: 5 in-game hours spent off duty, and no rule can farm it for you, because a program that fires cannot also be doing nothing. And it is not a safety net — see the warning above.

Console: rest (bare: who is off duty and how long they have banked), rest <hours>, rest here.

Time & world

Read the land — wind, water, coast and soil

Every island has a wind, and it decides where the green is. The weather comes in off the sea from one direction, drops its rain as it climbs the high ground, and arrives on the far side wrung out. So the windward side is wooded and well watered and the far side of the high ground is dry — that is where the sand and the desert are. The direction is rolled fresh for every island, so it has to be read each run: walk up onto high ground and see which side the forest is on. There is no minimap, on purpose — this is what replaces it.

And high ground genuinely sees further. A companion's sight radius grows with the height of the ground under its feet — about double on the highest walkable ground, on a curve that gives most of the gain near the top, so a real climb is worth it and a low rise is not. The fog lifts in exactly the circle you can actually see, so climbing a ridge is the scouting move: walk up, look, walk on. Height costs you warmth while you are up there (see below) — a viewpoint is not a camp.

The island sheds its own water. Nothing is placed: rain runs off the high ground, threads gather into streams and streams into a few trunk rivers that widen as they go and empty into the sea, and water stands in the hollows as lakes, most with a brook draining out of them (one that would drain into the desert has none — see still water). A river is still deep and impassable — the only way across is a bridge — but where one is still a thread you can often walk around it, so following a river uphill makes the crossing cheaper.

The coast is not all the same. A beach (pale sand at the water) is open, buildable ground. A sea cliff (dark banded rock) is a wall: it cannot be climbed, built on, or come down to the water at, and about a seventh of the shoreline is cliff — so walking the coast is a real route choice. A marsh (dull grey-green, pooled with dark water) forms only where a big river empties into the sea: wadeable at little over half speed, never buildable, and rare enough — a handful of river mouths on the whole map — that the one you find is worth remembering.

Steep ground costs time everywhere. A hillside slows a companion to half pace at its worst, whether you are walking it yourself or a rule is walking it for you. A flat way round a hill often beats the short way over it.

The ground under a farm matters. Fertile bottom land is flat, wet, and has a lot of country draining through it — a floodplain. A farm there works at better than twice the pace of one on a dry slope. Hover any buildable tile and it says which you are standing on: bottom land, good soil, heavy going or barren. With water and wood, that makes three things to weigh when you pick where to settle.

Woods are thick or thin. Growth follows rain, height and steepness, so there is closed forest on the wet side, open groves inland, clearings, and a treeline above which nothing stands (and it sinks as you go north — cold means bare earlier). A tree in the wet lowland carries several times the wood of a stunted one at the treeline, and the crowns are drawn to match — so a wood worth walking to looks like one, and where a lumber camp stands is a real decision. Species follow the place too: oak in the warm wet lowlands, spruce in the cold heights, birch out at the thin edges, pine in between.

You are not the first party here. Out in the unexplored ground there are old camps — a cold ring of fire-blackened stones — and cairns stacked on the passes through the mountains. They are not scattered at random: a camp sits exactly where you would have settled, at fresh water with wood in reach, so finding one tells you the ground around it is good — and whoever left it usually left something behind on the ground to pick up: a cache that glitters, because a stack of wood on dark ground half a screen from the hearth is otherwise invisible. A cairn marks the one flat way through a range, which can save a long detour. Both are named the moment you see them and go into the chronicle (J).

Day/night and seasons pass; the clock, temperature (°C) and weather sit top-centre. Speed controls (or -/.) run pause / 1× / 2× / 5× / 10×.

Weather follows the seasons, in spells of 0.5 to 5.4 in-game hours — a shower can be over in half an hour — while the two long skies are the exceptions (a storm runs 6 to 12, a fog 4 to 9), and every sky but one is worth planning around. Roughly how much of a season is wet — rain, snow or hail — is 32% in spring, 17% in summer, 34% in autumn and 42% in winter — with fog on top of that, commonest in autumn (about an eighth of it), so a good half of a winter is weather you would rather be indoors for. Wet clothes dry fastest at a campfire or under a roof (~4 in-game hours from soaked through) and outdoors only as fast as the sky allows — the pace per sky is in Buffs & debuffs.

Two skies take your sight, and they take it twice over. A storm and a fog both pull the explored circle in — and they also thicken the air itself: colour and local contrast drain out of the whole picture. A lake is still obvious; berries, twigs and leaf piles stop standing out from the ground long before they leave your sight radius. So the cost to plan around is not the walking, it is that foraging in either is close to hopeless — and a thick fog washes the colour out harder than a storm does.

How hard it falls matters as much as whether it falls. A shower runs anywhere from a drizzle to a downpour and shifts inside its own hours, so watch the rain rather than the word. Everything the rain does scales with it: how fast it soaks you through, how quickly a barrel fills, how badly the ponds are churned — and above all how long an open fire survives, where a drizzle barely troubles a pit and a downpour drowns it in under an hour.

Puddles are a warning, not a water source. Standing water means the sky is putting down more than the ground can drink — a drizzle never leaves any, however long it lasts, and light rain only a little; sand drinks it, which is why the desert stays dry. When you do see puddles, the ponds are at their worst to drink from right now, and the water goes on lying there for hours after the sky clears. You cannot drink it, fill a skin from it or put a fire out with it — it only tells you what the weather has been doing.

There is one wind, and it is alive. Beyond the island's fixed prevailing quarter above, the weather carries a live wind with a direction and a strength that drift rather than snap — it wanders around the prevailing quarter instead of jumping about, so what you learned an hour ago is still roughly true. Each sky blows its own way: a drought is dead still and so is a fog — wind is what tears a fog up, so a still air is part of why it lies — while hail and a storm blow hardest. The clock at the top of the screen names it in a word — a breeze, windy, blustery, a gale — beside the temperature.

Wind chill is worth up to 9 °C, and the thermometer does not show it. A body standing in the open feels the wind on top of the air temperature: the effect ramps in below about 14 °C and is at full strength by 12 °C, and it only ever makes cold worse — it takes nothing off a hot day. The reading at the top of the screen is deliberately still the air, so a −4 °C snowfall and a −4 °C gale look the same up there and are not: check the wind word, not just the number. Any shelter stops the wind entirely — the same cover that stops hail and takes the edge off a drought. A wall on the right side of a fire does the same job for the fire.

Snow on the ground slows everybody down — from the first flake, with no threshold to stay under, up to 35% slower when the world is fully snowed in (and bare ground takes about two and a half in-game hours of snowfall to get there). It costs the companion you are steering exactly what it costs one working on its own, so a deep winter takes real hours out of the day: get the stores in before it lies. It is also what finally makes roads worth their price — a laid path saves you from ground that has got slower, so it is worth more in January than in July. The desert never snows and a cave has no sky, so both stay bare and fast.

It does not rain on the desert. The sky is one sky for the whole island — the clouds and the falling rain you see are unchanged — but a rain, snow or hail spell reaches nobody standing in the sand. Out there nothing soaks you, hail cannot cut you, and no snow ever lies, in any winter. That cuts both ways: the desert is the one country where a hailstorm is not a reason to run for a roof, and the one where you can never count on the sky to refill anything.

Water has a quality as well as a salinity. Water that stands — a lake, a pond — is still water: drinkable, and every gulp builds the drinker's dysentery load — nothing on its own, but the pond you keep going back to breaks out as the illness. Running water is clean, and so are wells and hot springs. A lake stays still water even though a brook drains it: what matters is that the water sits, not where it eventually goes — so follow the outflow a little way downhill and you are drinking from a stream instead. Unless the outflow runs into sand: a lake whose drain would cross the desert keeps no brook at all — the water sinks instead of running — so there is nothing downhill to follow and boiling is the only answer. The green country just upstream of the desert is where most of those sit, and it looks like the best water on the map. A waterskin filled at a lake carries pond water with it until it is drunk dry. Choosing between a lakeside site and a river (or a well) is the point.

The cure is a fire. Right-click one and pick Boil water: with one companion selected it walks over and the fire exchange window opens on the hearth — pour the waterskin onto the Pan yourself, and take the clean water back from the Ready slot (it goes into the skin). With a group selected the unattended order runs instead: it pours, waits and collects by itself, and empty-handed simply collects what is already boiling. By hand it works too: right-click the tool slot in the character sheet (C) to pour the skin into your hand, then set it down on a fire (the whole skinful goes in), on a barrel, or on another companion to fill their skin.

Boiling costs time, and that is deliberate. A full waterskin — 5.0 litres, which is exactly what the pan holds — takes one in-game hour on a campfire; a stone hearth is three times faster at everything it cooks. The pan boils unattended while the fire burns, so you load it and walk away. A companion drinks 2–3 litres a day, so one fire keeps a small party in clean water and no more — and it cannot sear fish while it boils. Boiling is the stopgap at a pond; a river or a well is the answer.

The land itself has a climate. Most of the island is temperate, but three kinds of country are not: tundra (−10°C) on the high northern fringe, desert (+8°C) in the dry south, and swamp (soaks you like rain, and a fire can't dry you while you stand in it). The seasons turn both extremes inside out — knowing which half of the year a country is survivable in is worth more than avoiding it. Each is one connected region, but its edge wanders — lobed and ragged, never a ruled line — so where a country ends is something you find out by walking it.

And height is cold on its own. Ground loses warmth as it rises — up to 9 °C across the climb, so the highest walkable ground sits near −5.5 °C against the day's reading, on top of whatever the country and the season are already doing. It is not marked and it is not announced: a pass that was fine in summer is a different proposition in autumn, and a mountain camp is colder than the valley you can see from it. The north and the heights stack, which is why the tundra ridges are the hardest ground on the map — and why the fur coat exists.

In a drought, shade is a resource. A roof, an enclosed room, a cave or simply the forest canopy takes about 6 °C off a baking sky — usually the difference between a summer afternoon that costs Health (the heat band starts at 35 °C) and one that merely feels awful. It is the same cover that stops hail, so a good spot is worth remembering twice. Shade never makes anybody cold — it will not pull the air below 22 °C, so there is no season in which standing under a tree hurts you — and it is not a substitute for water: a lake or a well still cools far harder. What it really changes is where the day's heavy work goes: in a drought, work the woods.

There are two crater lakes on an island, and one set of hot springs. A run is meant to settle three to five times, and the most reliable water on the map being a single point made one of those settlements obviously right and the rest obviously second-best. Two of them means the good site you left behind is not the only good site there was. The standing stones are no longer only scenery: an automation card lies among them — the one that lets a rule ask how much daylight is left.

Read the sky O

The game knows what the next sky will be — the next spell is rolled the moment the current one starts — and no panel is ever allowed to tell you. The only path from that knowledge to you runs through a companion who has learned to read the weather, and who can be lost.

The world leans before it turns. For the last hour and a half before a change, three things say something is coming — and never what: the cloud shadows gather ahead of the rain and thin ahead of the sun, drifting in on the island's own prevailing wind; the birds go quiet and the wind gets up when something wet is close; and the temperature slides into the coming weather's offset so that it lands exactly at the turn — the cold arrives before the snow, and the thermometer never jumps. Learn those three and you know to get under a roof. Naming the sky is a person's job.

The vigil. Select a companion standing under open sky and press O: they stand and watch for one in-game hour, produce nothing whatsoever, and learn. No workshop gates it — the sky is readable from the first minute of a run — and it is paid for in the scarcest currency the opening has, an hour of somebody's time. A roof, a cave or a forest canopy means there is nothing to read: the safest place on the map is the one place this cannot be learned, and a vigil that ends up under cover is paid nothing (it does not even use up the day's learning).

• Dawn and dusk count double — 08:00–10:00 and 20:00–22:00.
• The first watch of a day counts full, the second half, and the rest nothing. Two dawn vigils buy the first level; standing there all day does not.
• After that a companion also learns by living through a sky they have not met in that season (worth three vigils, and there are only 25 such firsts to be had in a year), and by being right: a call that lands pays a full vigil, a call that misses still pays a quarter — a miss teaches too. Both go to everyone who was out in it, not only the speaker.
• Perception decides how many minutes of warning a companion gets (about two minutes a point), and Intelligence how fast the vigil teaches them — the same two attributes that pay out everywhere else, doing their ordinary jobs here.

What a reader may say grows with them, and only a master says the word. The line goes to the event log in the reader's own name — and only the best reader in the party speaks: one line per turn however many can read, and none at all if nobody has learned. Losing that companion costs the party its forecast.

Both halves can be programmed (the rule editor). The Read the sky action puts the vigil in a rule — WHEN Clock 08–10 → Read the sky is the dawn watch written down, and it blocks itself under a roof or in the dark. The Sky turning sensor lets a companion act on their own forecast — WHEN Sky turning → Warm up — and it reads through that companion's own eyes: somebody who has not learned reads "no" however black it gets, and it takes level 3 before it can fire at all. A rule is worth exactly what its reader is, and no card in the deck buys clairvoyance.

Caves bring a light

Mountains are not only a wall to walk around: search a mountainside for a cave mouth — a dark hole with a pale lip of broken stone and rubble spilled out below it. Right-click it, or walk onto it, and the party goes in; every rock cell touching the opening counts, corners included, so a near miss cannot set anyone mining the doorframe. Inside is a map of its own, and the way back is an arch of daylight in the wall. The world above keeps running the whole time — clock, weather, animals, everyone you left up there — so a scout can go down while the rest of the party works.

The mountain tells you how big the cave is — a lone rocky knuckle holds a fissure you cross in a few dozen steps, a proper range a warren, a gallery or a pillared hall. Size the massif up from outside before you spend a torch on it. Mushrooms and stone wait deep inside, always a good walk from the entrance, so a cave pays only the party that explores it properly. Nothing lives down there; the danger is the dark and the walk home.

Some caves hold water — a still pool of seeped snowmelt, drunk from or filled at like any river. Because rock has no weather it never freezes and never dries up, which can make a known cave the most reliable water on the map in exactly the seasons that close everything else. It is standing water, so boil it. Wet ground above means more of it: swamp mountains are wettest, desert caves bone dry.

Rule programs keep running underground. A companion you send into a cave still follows its plan, and when a rule wants something the cave has not got — a drink, a meal, the stockpile — it walks out through the mouth by itself, does the errand up top, and is free to be sent back down. You never have to fetch anyone out by hand.

And a cave counts as part of the settlement it opens into. Whatever you carry inside stays reachable from outside: a builder working at the mouth fetches timber from a stockpile you laid down in the cave, a tired companion claims a bed you unrolled in there, and a thirsty one walks in to a pool it has already seen rather than trekking to the river. The rule is simply that a cave is as far away as the walk into it — the mouth, plus however many steps deep the thing sits. So a pile just inside the entrance is practically next door, and one at the far end of a rambling warren is a real errand nobody will make automatically. Put your stores near the mouth if the camp outside is meant to use them. Only what the party has actually seen counts: an unexplored cave offers nothing, and neither does a pool in a corner you have never lit.

Sound Esc → Settings → Sound

Sound in this game is information, not decoration: where the camera is, what the weather is doing, whether the settlement is working, and how much fuel is left in the fire. It is built to be listened to rather than left on.

World sound is gated on the zoom. Pulled far out you hear the beds and the music and nothing else; zoom in and the work, the footsteps, the fires and the animals come up. So the detail you hear tracks what you are actually looking at, and eight companions never turn into a wall of noise.

Five sliders, one switch — Esc → Settings → Sound: Overall, Music, Ambience, World (work, footsteps, fires, animals) and Interface (clicks, windows, alarms and the mortal-danger heartbeat), plus a Silence switch that mutes everything and greys the sliders out. They are four genuinely different questions: before v0.10.0 one "SFX" slider carried the rain, the work loops, the heartbeat and every click at once, so turning the interface down turned the weather down with it. Turn Interface down, not World, if the clicking is what bothers you — and note that the heartbeat rides Interface, so muting that mutes your death-warning too.

Interface & keys

The game opens on an intro: three companions walk out of the dark, stop and turn to face you, the title fades in above them, and the whole picture dissolves into the menu that was standing behind it all along. Any key or click skips it, and it plays once per launch — quitting a run back to the menu does not replay it. The engine's own logo is gone; the window opens straight onto the same leather the title screen and the loading screen stand on, so there is nothing to sit through before it. The people in it are drawn by the painter that draws the map, so they change when the companions do. It has no sound yet.

The companion window holds everything you do to one companion, as four tabs — each key opens its own tab (press again to close; Ctrl+Tab walks the tabs). All four are about the companion you're steering — and pressing one with nobody selected now claims that companion, so Tab advances from them, F centres on them and a right-click orders the one whose sheet you are reading. A box-selected group is left alone, and closing the window claims nothing back.

The top-left corner is the roster and nothing else. A running list of everything the settlement owned used to sit under the cards; it is gone. It answered a question nobody standing in the world can ask — it totalled every pile on the map at once, from anywhere, through fog, while the goods it counted are real things lying in one place somebody has to walk to. What you have is answered by the thing that holds it: left-click a stockpile for its panel, right-click it with one companion to open it beside their pack, and the build ring still tells you what you can afford.

Only one window is ever open. Opening any of them — the companion window, a building, pile, site or room panel, the transfer window, the build ring, help, the chronicle — closes the one before it, so nothing overlaps. A stack in hand survives the switch: it is only ever put down where you put it down.

A window wears the moment it is opened in. The panels are tanned hide and bone ink, and the frame reports on the companion you have open without a word: a tallow glow after dark, rime creeping in from the corners below freezing, rain running down it while it rains, soot on the top rim while that companion stands at a fire or under a roof — and the frame pulses red when that one companion is in mortal danger, which is the one layer worth acting on, because the party alarm cannot tell you which of them it is. Every layer reads a number the simulation is already acting on; none of it is decoration you have to interpret.

The event log — and the red alerts

Bottom right, a live feed of what the settlement is doing: arrivals and deaths, buildings raised, illnesses, level-ups, the traces a false companion leaves, season turns. Drag it by its top-left corner to move it.

A worker that cannot work says so, too. No tree in reach, no rock face, no farm, no water to draw, no bow or rod in the pack — the companion posts one red line naming the reason and stops, rather than standing there looking busy. It comes once per reason, so a new problem is never buried under a repeat. A farm in winter stays quiet on purpose: dormant fields are the rule working, not a failure.

How much it says is up to you: Esc → Settings → Gameplay offers Everything, Only what matters and Fewer. Verbosity only filters the live feed — the chronicle (J) always keeps the full history.

Achievements — yours, not the run's J

Thirty-five achievements across six shelves: the opening hours, surviving the year, the companions, the rule programs, the map, and a small set that is Brutal's own. The point of them in a game you are meant to lose is where they are kept — they live in your profile, beside the settings, and survive a death, a new world and a deleted save. Losing everything does not lose these.

The chronicle (J) has a second page for them, with a tally per shelf and a bar on the counted ones. Four rows stay nameless until they happen, because naming a hidden place is the spoiler. Nothing is ever awarded for time served, and losing a companion is marked quietly and hidden — it is a thing that happened to you, not a to-do item.

Twenty of the thirty-five are watched today; the rest are waiting on a signal each. The list, and which is which, is in docs/achievements.md.

Difficulty & saving

Difficulty is chosen on the title screen, per run, and it decides what a mistake costs.

Each run gets its own named slot: the Esc menu names, overwrites and deletes them, the title screen loads any of them. The autosave interval is in Esc → Settings → Gameplay.

A save keeps what everyone was told to do. The standing order rides along with what it was aimed at, the work already banked, and the whole Shift waypoint chain queued behind it — so you can plan a march across the map, save, and load into a party still walking it. A batch craft keeps its kit and its materials, an hour of vigil stays stood, and a watch that has already seen the night fall knows it. Saves written before this carry no orders: that party loads standing idle, which is worth knowing before you wonder why nobody moved.

Where the files live. Saves and settings sit in %APPDATA%\Companions (~/.local/share/Companions on Linux) — the game keeps its own folder rather than one under the engine's name. If you played an older build, its folder is copied across on the first start and the original is left untouched, so an existing installation carries on either way.

While the prototype is being tested, manual saving is left enabled on Brutal too.

Settings worth knowing about

Esc → Settings, four pages. The ones players actually miss:

• Gameplay — event-log verbosity, autosave interval, edge-scroll speed and border width (0 switches edge scrolling off).
• Graphics — resolution, window mode, anti-aliasing, quality, the FPS readout, and the scale of the whole interface. A fresh install opens at 1280×720; 1280×800 (the Steam Deck's panel) is in the list on every machine, not only on one that happens to be 16:10.
• Sound — five volumes (Overall / Music / Ambience / World / Interface) and a Silence switch. Which one to reach for is in Sound.
• Keys — every binding above can be reassigned.

Architecture & conventions

Engine, layout, and the ground rules the codebase holds itself to.

• Engine: Godot 4.x, 2D top-down. GDScript only (no C#).
• Language: all identifiers, comments, node/scene names in English — no German anywhere in code or the scene tree.
• Naming: snake_case for vars/funcs/signals/files; PascalCase for classes/nodes/scenes; class_name for reusable scripts.
• Data-driven: tunables live in .tres Resources (resources_data/) and @export vars — not magic numbers. Numbers should be tunable without touching code.
• Decoupling: cross-cutting state lives in autoload singletons; systems talk through signals where it decouples them.
• A freed object compares == null as TRUE. So node != null short-circuits and never catches a freed one — is_instance_valid() is the only safe test. Any registry that outlives a scene teardown (cells → nodes, caches) must prune or skip stale entries with it.

Autoload map

The singletons every system reaches. Persistent autoloads must reset in WorldGenerator._ready (a reload doesn't re-instantiate them).

World generation & terrain

A cell has five orthogonal per-cell layers: terrain (what it physically is — world/terrain_types.gd: PLAINS/WATER/FOREST/MOUNTAIN/SAND/SHALLOW plus CLIFF and MARSH, the coast's own sorts), biome (its climate — world/biome_types.gd: temperate/tundra/swamp/desert, grown as one region each), landmark (world/landmark_types.gd: crater lake / hot springs / standing stones, and the traces somebody left — old camp / cairn), cave (world/cave_types.gd: where a cave opens — its mouth; the rooms behind it are their own map), and height (world/height_layer.gd: elevation, slope, rainfall and soil fertility — the physical field and what is derived from it per cell).

Caves

A cave is one cell on the world map — its mouth — and a map of its own behind it (world/cave_interior.gd, generated by cave_interior_generator.gd and owned by the CaveManager autoload). The mouth cell keeps its MOUNTAIN terrain, so the terrain renderer, the spawn rules and the walkable tally — and with them every spawn density — are exactly where they were.

How many: cave_count (18 since 2026-07-26, raised from 7) is a request, not a headcount — _carve_caves opens at most one mouth per mountain massif, so a world gets however many massifs clear cave_min_massif_cells (70) and cave_min_spacing (55): measured across five seeds on the 512² map, 13–17. Performance is not the limit and the number was set to saturate the land: an entered cave costs ~40 navmesh polygons (+0.5%) and ~1 MB. It used to cost ~4.5 ms on top of the wall-build freeze as well; since that freeze was traced to the navigation map's free-edge merge and switched off (2026-07-26), a wall costs ~21 ms with every cave in the world open — down from 1278 ms (tests/cave_scale_probe.gd, tests/nav_edge_probe.gd).

Each interior is laid out in a reserved band of world coordinates east of the island rather than in a separate scene. That is the whole trick: one World2D, one navigation map, one physics space, so nothing is unloaded and the surface simulation keeps running while the party is underground — and selection, right-click orders, the camera and every autoload work down there unchanged. TerrainManager stays the one map seam: is_walkable, is_underground, is_cave_dark, is_buildable and cave_sight_radius route off-grid cells to CaveManager, so no caller needs to know which side of the ground it is asking about. The band's one recurring trap (paid twice, 2026-07-26): GridManager covers only the 512² surface and answers “neither empty nor floor” for every band cell, so any predicate built on it silently rejects the whole underground. That is what made building impossible down there and destroyed a stack dropped in a cave (GroundItemManager._find_drop_cell found no cell and the caller threw the item away). Both now branch on is_underground and read the building/site dictionaries, which are keyed by world cell and have no bounds at all. Buildable.stands_underground() is the separate question of what may stand there: interior_placeable or stockpile. An interior is generated deterministically from the world seed and the mouth cell, so an unvisited cave costs nothing and still comes back identical.

The layout (re-carved 2026-07-26). The interior is scaled against the mountain massif behind the mouth — CaveManager._massif_cells flood-fills it lazily on first entry — on the square root of its cell count: 70 cells of rock give ~80 floor cells and ~29 steps of depth, 290 give ~275 and ~51 (tests/cave_layout_probe.gd, 200 seeds each). The same weight picks the cave’s form (fissure / warren / gallery / great hall), which drives its proportions, chamber count, corridor width and name; both axes are still drawn independently, so the ratio remains deliberately unrelated to the world’s. Chambers are wobbling ellipses, passages wander, two cellular passes smooth the result, dead-end spurs go nowhere on purpose, single rock pillars are left standing in the halls, and the interior is then trimmed onto what was actually carved. Pools (CaveInterior.Tile.WATER) are laid deep in the cave and draw back wherever they would cut a passage; TerrainManager routes is_fresh_water / is_still_water / is_drinkable_water through CaveManager.is_water, so underground water is real water to the drink order, the waterskin and the HUD — still, and never frozen or dried. Finds sit at least 8 steps along the walk from the exit (CaveInterior.depth_at, a BFS), and the renderer shades the floor with the same measure.

The doorway is one shape, drawn from both sides (world/cave_doorway.gd, 2026-07-26). CaveRenderer cuts it into the mountainside and CaveInteriorRenderer draws the same opening from within full of daylight, so walking in and looking back shows one door. It carries a rubble fan, a stone lip shaded from near-black to nearly white as it turns toward GamePalette.mountain_light, two or three chips out of the rim, an uneven doorstep and a darker throat behind the opening — everything hashed off the mouth’s own cell, so no two caves share a doorway and nothing is stored or seeded. It was tuned against screenshots, and the constants carry what the screenshots ruled out: too much rim wobble stops reading as a doorway, chips that reach too far in become fangs, and a bright stroke over the lit half is a smear of paint (hence a shaded band).

Key tunables — scripts/world/world_generator.gd

Rendering: world/terrain_renderer.gd (per-cell texture), terrain_snow.gdshader, tree_canopies.gd (crowns draw over walkers at z 4; _apply_walkers feeds the reveal+sway shader), room_floor_renderer.gd, fog_overlay.gd. All world colours live in resources_data/palette.tres via GamePalette. Nav: walkable_navigation_region.gd; collision: terrain_collision.gd.

Resources & animals

Companions

The companion rig is scenes/player/Player.tscn / class_name Player, instanced three times as nodes Character1/2/3 (a node name is a save key — rename via SaveManager.RENAMED_CHARACTER_NODES). Behaviour is split across small controllers on the rig.

How a companion is drawn — scripts/player/companion_figure.gd 2026-08-06

One painter, one look. CompanionFigure.draw(canvas, feet, unit, look) paints the figure in cell coordinates, and everything calls it: the map figure, every CharacterPortrait (HUD row, character sheet, transfer window, companion window — framed on head and shoulders), and the character creator's previews. Player draws nothing itself. The portrait's old private bust, with its own hair pools and its own beard rule, is gone — that is what let the party row stop looking like the companion on the ground.

A drawing change is only reviewable if it can be seen: tests/figure_sheet.gd renders every face, kit piece, view, silhouette, tone and mark into one PNG, and tests/creator_shot.gd renders the creator panel. Both want a real display (DISPLAY=:1). Console: look, expression.

Recruiting — scripts/world/wanderer_spawner.gd

A wanderer is a companion rig (Player.tscn) that has not joined — not a second kind of person. That is the whole design: its identity, carry, drawing and save entry are the ones every companion already has, so recruiting is PartyManager.recruit() → rename onto a free Character<N> (a node name is a save key) + Player.join_party(). A stranger is frozen while it waits (Player._halt_survival) and reveals no fog. Leaving runs the other way: Player.leave_party() attaches a fresh controller in LEAVING and the rig walks off the map and frees itself — expulsion and desertion share that one door.

Spawner knobs: first_possible_day (6), min_days_between (6), arrival_chance (0.22/day), linger_days (3), renegade_chance (0.3), approach_cells (45). One stranger on the road at a time; a full party is sent nobody. Console wanderer [spawn [renegade]|here|panel|recruit|send|desert].

Equipment — scripts/player/loadout.gd (17.1)

items/equipment_def.gd (.tres in resources_data/equipment/) is the data seam: id, slot (TOOL/VESSEL/HEAD/CHEST/HANDS/LEGS/FEET — append-only, a slot is a save key), applies_to (the same StringNames the skills use), work_multiplier, max_durability/wear_per_work_second, repair_workshop/repair_cost, warmth, and defense (shipped inert for 4.6). EquipmentCatalog registers them. A new tool is a .tres plus one preload line — the same rule animals and buildables follow. Today: axe (×1.5 lumberjacking, 400 durability, mended at the lumber camp for 1 wood), coat (+6°) and hat (+2°).

Carried = equipped (there is no equip gesture yet), so has_tool() reads the pack and worn gear is just carried items with tool: true in the ItemCatalog — which is what keeps a haul from shelving someone's coat. Warmth is applied by TemperatureController right after the biome offset as insulation (clothing_comfort_cap 20°): it lifts a cold body toward comfort, never past it, so carried gear is never a liability you can't shed. Wear rides the raw delta on the exact tick that reads the bonus, so it is deterministic — no dice, the contamination-load principle. Repair is Command.REPAIR (right-click the matching workshop). Console equip, durability, warmth.

The big tuning surface — scripts/player/job_runner.gd

Movement/work: move_speed, work_seconds, mine_seconds, fish_seconds. Needs/thresholds: need_trigger_ratio/recover_ratio, emergency_ratio, warm_seek_below/cool_seek_above, despondent_below. Automation: base_rule_slots (12), dev_self_care (re-enables the dormant self-care tiers — tests / a future easier difficulty). Hunting: hunt_range_cells, hunt_base/min/max_hit, hunt_giveup_seconds. Fatigue penalties live on player/player.gd (fatigue_walk_penalty, fatigue_work_penalty, mood_work_penalty).

The bedroll is a bed, not a charm 2026-07-26

Until 2026-07-26 JobRunner.has_bedroll() was the mechanic: carrying one upgraded a rough night from inside the pack. On the user's decision it must be placed first, so rough_rest_factor()/rough_metabolism_scale() no longer read the carry at all and has_bedroll() now means only “there is one here to unroll”. Everything else goes through the ordinary bed path — it is claimed by reserve_free_bed, walked to, slept in, saved and demolished like any bed.

Placing and packing up. BuildingManager.unroll_bedroll(character, container) lays one out on the nearest free cell within 4 (both orientations tried, since it is 1×2), paid straight from the carry (payable_from_carry) and stamped with BuildingNode.unrolled_by — the companion's node name, because that is what the save file already keys characters by. JobRunner._release_bed() is the one place a night ends, so the pack-up hangs there: self_unrolled_bed() gates it, so a companion rolls up only what it laid out itself and a bedroll the player placed stays put — that is how you tell an automated companion where to sleep. pack_up() calls remove_building(node, false): no half-cost salvage, because half of a one-item bedroll is nothing. Player-facing it is JobRunner.Command.PACK_UP on the right-click ring beside Sleep. Console bedroll.

The night watch — JobRunner.Command.WATCH 2026-07-28

The arithmetic behind the warning: a campfire filled to max_burn_seconds (324 s) burns 7.2 in-game hours and the night is twelve, so a party that all lies down around one on a cold night wakes up short a companion. Cold is the whole gate — the reading is taken at 03:00, the coldest hour, through WeatherManager.get_effective_temperature() asked about a future hour, because a watch is set at dusk while it is still mild. The order itself holds position inside the heat radius and refuels on every tick the fire will take, ends at first light (not at the next dawn edge — a watch set at dusk must not end immediately), and costs the watcher a night's sleep, which lands as ordinary sleep debt the next day. Console watch.

Sleeping and mending — player/vitals_controller.gd 2026-07-29

Buildable.sleep_metabolism_scale was deleted rather than set to 0.5 on every bed (2026-07-29, user decision): four beds each carrying their own copy of one number is how they came to say 0.5 / 0.6 / 0.75 / 1.0 in the first place. A bed now pays in rest, warmth, shelter and healing only. The waking trickle never adds to a bed's rate — _process applies the shortfall, so a sleeper mends at the bed's pace and 30 % cannot quietly become 130 %; a bed that heals less (the laid-out bedroll heals nothing) is topped up to it instead. Temperature is the only thing that still moves a sleeper's burn: the cold-hunger and heat-thirst terms keep running, scaled by the same half. Console regen.

A worker that cannot work says so — JobRunner._report_no_work(reason)

Until 2026-07-27 only the fisher announced it; a lumberjack with no forest, a stonemason with no rock face, a hunter with no bow and a water carrier with no source returned zero velocity and stood there, which from outside is indistinguishable from working. A farm in winter stays silent deliberately — dormant fields are the rule working. drop_work() now really does drop every alert latch, including _danger_reported, which had been swallowing the first mortal-danger alert of the next episode. The full tick order and the four layers are in docs/automation-and-jobs.md.

Automation internals

Work actions are gated by standing workshops (Buildings) — except SLEEP, FREE and HAULER, which is_job_unlocked returns true for unconditionally: there is no hauler's hut, so the card is the only gate. Old saves migrate a painted schedule into time-window rules on load. Console: rules, prog, tasks, shift, hauler, auto, cards, deck.

Buildings & construction

The workshop yard, and working a building by hand 2026-07-29

The order is WorkerCommands._cmd_work, and it deliberately owns none of the doing: it walks the worker in, latches reported for duty — it has to latch, because each trade's own search sends the fisher to the water and the lumberjack into the trees, so “am I still at the hut?” reads false a second after arriving — and then hands every frame to run_job, the same WorkAction the rule program and the task board drive. One implementation per trade. It resolves below REPAIR and CRAFT in CommandController, so no click that meant something yesterday means something else today. Console yard.

Items, inventory & storage

Time, weather & temperature

Temperature damage: cold below 4°C / heat above 35°C (temperature_controller.gd). Pacing: the 18-minute day and ×1.8 task lengths; HARVEST_TIME_SCALE is the harvest seam.

Audio & the sound library

Before v0.10.0, eighteen audio files carried the whole game and every path was a constant in sound_manager.gd: building, dying, hunting, fishing, tending a fire, crafting and every footstep were silent, and the sound of the game could only grow if somebody opened GDScript. It is now 225 rows across nine banks in resources_data/audio/, each with a plain-language description, and filling one is dragging a file into stream. Full write-up: docs/audio.md.

The nine banks: music (moods + stingers) · ambience_beds (place · weather · settlement) · ambience_spots · work (every job: start, loop, impact, finish) · footsteps (nine surfaces) · creatures · buildings · ui · world. Naming is bank/subject_variant — work/chop_impact_oak, amb/bed_forest_night. Use an AudioStreamRandomizer for variations and an AudioStreamPlaylist for a mood; both are Inspector-only. tools/gen_sound_banks.gd regenerates the banks from its table and never overwrites an assigned stream; rows that vanish from the table are reported, never deleted. docs/sound-checklist.pdf prints all 225 rows with tick boxes as a shopping list.

The mix — five buses, five sliders, one Silence

Master
├── Music      moods, stingers
├── Ambience   the three beds, the spots
├── World      positional: work, footsteps, fire, animals
│   ├── effect 0  low-pass   — the roof
│   └── effect 1  reverb     — the cave
└── UI         clicks, windows, alarms, the heartbeat

There used to be two buses and three sliders, one of which ("SFX") carried the ambience beds, every work loop, the heartbeat and every UI click — so turning the interface down turned the rain down with it. A pre-v0.10.0 audio_settings.cfg migrates: the old SFX value seeds Ambience, World and UI. Ducking is a tweened number, not a side-chain — a stinger names the buses it pushes down in its ducks field and SoundManager.duck() lets them back up over duck_release_seconds; a number is something a headless test can assert, and it does. Room acoustics are bus state, not sounds: underground the reverb comes up to 0.5 and the outside beds fall 12 dB, under a roof the low-pass closes to 4 kHz and they fall 7 dB, both owned by AmbienceDirector._set_room() off TerrainManager.is_underground() and BuildingManager.is_indoors() on the camera's cell.

The six layers

UI & panels

Save / load

Load order still matters, and is kept explicitly: _apply_saveable(key) places the order-sensitive members by hand (terrain before buildings, the task board after them, weather last) and an order-free tail sweep catches every other member — so both halves are safe against a newcomer nobody remembered. Members register with the literal group name, because SaveManager autoloads last, after them all. Session meta, CityInventory and the tree-walk collectors stay hand-written on purpose.

Node names are save keys (see Companions). Since recruiting (5.4) _collect_characters walks the tree, not a fixed name list, and _rebuild_character builds the rigs a fresh world doesn't have. Restore obeys a rank order (ground → structures → fixtures). A slot shorter than a stored Variant's 4-byte header (MIN_VARIANT_BYTES, checked in _open_for_read) is skipped without being read: a save interrupted mid-write leaves a 0-byte file, and get_var() on it prints an engine error GDScript cannot catch. Difficulty (Hard = free save/load, Brutal = suspend-only + slot wipe) is picked on the title screen. Console: saves, save, load, delsave, difficulty, orders.

Standing orders ride the save too (2026-08-16): the active JobRunner.Command, where it was aimed, the work already banked, the whole WorkerCommands.queued waypoint chain, and the few things a command cannot read back off the world — a batch craft's kit (by resource_path) and its latched cost, an hour of vigil already stood, a watch that has seen the night fall. An exchange travels by name and a hunt by position, because neither node identity survives a load. Saves written before this simply carry no orders, which is a load into an idle party, not an error.

Console commands

Every command the dev console knows, what it does and one example each.

F12 opens the console (debug builds only); Esc or F12 closes it and the game pauses while it is open. Handlers live in scripts/ui/dev_console.gd — help inside the console is the authoritative list, and every new mechanic ships a command here.

Most commands act on the selection: the companions currently selected, or the whole party when nobody is. select 2 is therefore usually the first thing you type.

Companions & stats

Windows, items & the hand

World & terrain

Time & weather

Resources & animals

Building & automation

Sound

Saves, meta & staging

Testing & tools

Godot binary for this environment: ~/Downloads/Godot_v4.7-stable_linux.x86_64. After adding a class_name, rebuild the class cache before headless tests. Claude cannot see the running viewport — visual work is verified through the screenshot harness or by the developer.

Versioning

One number, one source, and the two things it is deliberately not.

The game's version lives in exactly one place: application/config/version in project.godot — the engine's own field, so an exported build carries it in the PCK for free. Everything in the game reads it through GameVersion (scripts/main/game_version.gd), a static class like BuildCategories: GameVersion.string() gives "0.5.0", GameVersion.label() gives "v0.5.0" — the one spelling every screen uses, so no label re-types the "v".

A release is not a build. The number only moves when a release is cut, so between two of them every build wears the same one — twenty-three commits and three features once all reported 0.5.0. Since 2026-07-26 the class answers both questions: GameVersion.string() is the release, build_id() is this build — <commits>.g<sha>, plus .dirty for an uncommitted tree, and empty when the build is the release. build_string() puts them together as 0.5.0+23.gb81e6d1. It is derived from git, never typed, and never a gate — pure provenance.

Scheme: plain semver. While the prototype runs at 0.x, MINOR goes up per completed feature batch and PATCH for fixes; 1.0.0 is reserved for the release that closes the run arc (ROADMAP Milestone 10, the migration cycle). Milestone-derived numbering was rejected — milestones complete out of order, so the version would have run backwards.

Where it shows: the title screen's bottom-right corner, the pause menu, every save's header, the console command version (which also prints the engine build and the save format), the Windows executable (mirrored into export_presets.cfg), and the line at the top of this page. The first four show the build — a save header carries build_id beside game_version, so two runs saved a week apart under one release number no longer read as the same game.

Cutting a release (full steps in CHANGELOG.md): bump project.godot, mirror the number into export_presets.cfg and this page, write the changelog section, run the headless suite, commit, then git tag -a v<version>. The suite fails if the three copies drift apart — that check is what keeps the mirrors honest.

A MINOR release costs more than a PATCH. Only x.y.0 freezes its own wiki archive — both languages plus a re-shot copy of every screenshot, roughly 10 MB per release. Paying that for a one-line fix is what made a bump a ritual, and a ritual that expensive does not get performed, which is how a whole day of work ended up sharing one number. A patch release therefore rides on the archive of its minor line: needs_wiki_archive() and release_line() are the seam, the suite checks a patch against v<major>.<minor>.0, and wiki/snapshot.sh declines to freeze a patch while still rewriting the version picker.

Publishing the build — one .exe, always the newest

The download button at the top of this page links companions_<version>.exe sitting next to index.html on the server, and exactly one build exists there at a time. Publishing is the last step of a release, after the tag:

What an exported build actually is — none of it visible in the editor, which is why all of it had been wrong for a year. The .exe no longer carries the test suite or the wiki (the export filter shipped 59 test files and every screenshot: 157.5 MB → 147.5 MB, and the living wiki/ gained the .gdignore its archives always had). It says who made it and wears its own campfire icon, written from one geometry by tools/gen_icon.py so icon.ico and icon.svg cannot drift apart, and there is no companions.console.exe beside it any more. The game also keeps its own user directory (use_custom_user_dir): the UserDir autoload runs first of all and copies an older installation's folder across once, never deleting it — this had to land before the first Steam build, because Cloud file patterns are written against that path. tools/export.sh --linux builds for two platforms, and tools/steam_upload.sh pushes a build to a SteamPipe depot (it refuses a working-tree build, refuses --live unless asked, and reads the ids from an ignored tools/steam.env). It is deliberately not part of cut_release.sh: cutting is not publishing.

The link is a mirror like the version number — cut_release.sh rewrites it and the suite fails if it drifts. It has to be strict: this vhost answers a missing file with this page and a 200, never a 404, so a link to an unpublished build would hand a reader HTML under an .exe name rather than fail visibly.

The wiki archive — one frozen page per release

This page is a living document: it always describes the build in development. So that it can also say what an older build did, every release freezes a full copy under wiki/v<version>/ — both languages and their own copy of the screenshots, because an archived page showing today's pictures would defeat the point of archiving it. The picker in the sidebar reaches every frozen build; a frozen page wears an amber banner and links back here.

Release order, and it matters: edit both pages for the release → wiki/shots.sh (so the frozen set is this build's) → bump project.godot, export_presets.cfg and both pages → wiki/snapshot.sh → changelog, suite, commit, tag.

Keeping this in sync important

When a player-facing mechanic changes (a control, a building, a gather target, a survival rule):

1. Edit HelpPanel.HELP_TEXT in scripts/ui/help_panel.gd — the single on-screen source of player help (its nav is derived from the section headers, so keep the [font_size=17][color=#9ec1ff][b]…[/b] header format).
2. Write the changelog entry under ## Unreleased. That section is this page's to-do list — see the next callout.
3. At the next MINOR release, update the matching Player Guide section here, and — if the change touches code structure (a new file, seam, tunable or console command) — the matching Developer Reference section, re-shooting the screenshot where it shows.

The developer reference is derived from the seam catalogue in the project memory index (memory/MEMORY.md), where each system names its one seam — the fastest place to confirm where a mechanic actually lives.

Companions — prototype developer wiki. Player Guide mirrors the in-game F1 help; Developer Reference maps mechanics to files, seams, tunables and console commands. Screenshots made with tests/screenshot.gd (seed 12345).