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 v0.23.0 · last revised 2026-09-08

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 v0.23.0 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.

v0.23.0 this build 2026-09-08

Added

• Build the better material straight over the old one — the roof, the walls and the floor
• The Build sites rule takes marked buildings apart
• A wet fire pit shows a countdown to its next light
• The weather has a place — fronts instead of one sky
• The playtest personas settle where the human settles
• The Skills tab (E) (user order: "Verschiebe Attribute + Skills in einen neuen, zusätzlichen Tab")
• Category chips over the pack
• The simulation clock and the chunk layer
• The playtest personas run the supply line
• The playtest personas play the human's opening
• Tab writes the rule now
• A ROOF, and walls that no longer are one
• A roof needs bearing, and that is a real constraint
• Close a room and it stakes its own roof
• The roof is in the build menu
• A roof you draw brings its own pillars
• A roof is drawn faded, always — you never lose sight of the room under it
• Walk somebody in under a roof and it disappears entirely
• "Show roof" — a checkbox in the room panel
• Everything you build now ages
• Dev console: roof, roof offer <x> <y>, roof lay thatch|boards <x> <y>, `roof hover <x>…
• A playtest run can now be watched, recorded and walked back into
• The nightly server run plays a real matrix
• Take a thing in hand, and put it back, with the mouse
• A beaver dam is a bridge now — companions can walk over it
• Hover an animal and the corner tells you about it
• A blueprint can be staked over whatever is lying in the way, and the plot cleared afterwards
• The character sheet says what the companion is doing right now
• The build menu (Space) is one size at every level, and it sits in the middle of the screen
• Against the wall, or with a gap — [Q] while placing
• Four pieces of room furniture: a table, a chair, a bench and a cupboard
• The fish trap — the first building in the game that produces with nobody at it
• The reed basket — a store you can put down on the first evening
• Reeds grow on the fresh-water shores
• Kindling: any companion splits one log into four twigs at the bench (K)
• THE MANOR — the second hand-authored place, and it plays nothing like the first (ROADMAP 6.2, dungeon pitch p. 15)
• The compost heap: rotten food finally has somewhere to go
• A workshop's yard is now a building you put up yourself — and you decide how big it is

Fixed

• A torch you put away no longer relights itself when the game loads
• The weather readout answers for where you are looking
• A built roof can be taken down
• A sleeping companion is drawn as the companion again
• A tree standing on a staked plot could not be felled
• The exchange window could stand on the event log and off the bottom of the screen
• The room window could run off the bottom of the screen, and nothing stopped it
• The pile window's second column is gone, and so is the line telling you to walk somebody over
• The fire and workshop windows ran into the event log, and the pile window ran off the screen
• The room's furnish list was too narrow for its own text
• A companion who was already carrying something refused to work at all — and three trades refused for ever
• "Carry full — bring the load in" was four different problems wearing one coat
• Loading a companion to the +50% ceiling stranded him silently
• A Haul rule with nothing haulable stole the turn from the rule below it
• An overloaded healer gave up on the patient and blamed the settlement
• The full test suite had been dying on its timeout for five hours, and no report said why
• Three tests went red the moment the inland grew trees — and said nothing about a tree
• A staked roof could be drawn and then never built
• A lean-to over grass was staked and then refused forever
• A window surface could have silently stopped reading the sky
• The carrier gets into the cave from the cell BEFORE the mouth too
• A companion carrying a fallen one can get into a cave again
• A body is never laid down on a threshold
• The mosquito field is a function of the seed again — and a loaded save grows the same swarms as the game it was saved in
• The suite compiles again — master had been red on the server since 2026-09-03
• Time warp no longer melts the frame
• Pressing G on the new map killed the renderer
• Two lazy autoload lookups (ResourceManager._fog, FogManager._cave_manager) resolved an…
• One line named an autoload from a static function, and every review sheet under tests/ stopped starting
• ci_run.sh --self-test had an expiry date and has been failing since 2026-08-31
• Every save written by a playtest recorded "seed": 0
• A companion holding a torch could never put it down again
• A pack with more than twenty different things in it now shows all of them
• A cave's way out can always be got out from under the HUD
• An ordered drink or scoop goes to the water you CLICKED
• A construction site now always shows what it will become
• The build ghost was invisible over a wooden floor
• Furniture stands flush against a wall
• The nightly suite hung on master for an autoload written without a dot
• …and the guard that exists for exactly this missed it, so the guard was widened
• A settlement test placed a pile on a spot nobody had checked was free
• A fleeing turkey lost its wings
• A storm soaks you now — Companions caught in the open in a storm stayed bone dry: the wetness rule asked the sky by…
• A workshop's work zone can be chosen again

Changed

• A skill's bar measures the level it is working on, and lights up while it is being trained
• Working on a building trains Building — raising it, mending it and taking it down
• The roof a closed room stakes for itself now sits ON the walls
• A tree gives far less wood
• An order to pick something up is never refused any more
• A roof bearer now carries seven cells, not three
• A stockpile zone goes indoors, and steps over the posts
• The crafting bench draws its tiles at the pack's size
• The weather no longer turns in one frame
• The exchange window is one size now, whatever it is an exchange with
• THE WATERSKIN HOLDS 3 LITRES, not 5
• HEIGHT NO LONGER TOUCHES GAMEPLAY
• The four windows you open by clicking the map now look and behave like one window
• A party of animals has a SIZE, and the world stops growing into itself
• A carry that cannot heal now says so before you spend the window on it
• A big map deals MORE herds now, not fatter ones
• The dry country has lone trees now, where it used to have none at all
• A site is scored on whether there is ENOUGH wood, not merely on whether there is wood
• SAVE_VERSION is 6, and the rule behind it got wider
• A new GDScript warning now fails the build; the old ones no longer shout
• World generation now asks whether a site's water is CLEAN and whether it is there ALL YEAR
• A torch is struck in the HAND, and the "[L] Light Torch" offer appears only for a companion holding one
• An unseen, idle animal now sleeps its life clock too
• The 1024² world stands up in a third of the time
• The cactus costs a third of what it did to draw
• THE MAP IS 768 × 768 — 1024² LASTED ONE DAY
• THE MAP IS FOUR TIMES THE SIZE: 1024 × 1024 cells
• Another 20% off the water, and one crater lake and one stone ring per map
• Fixed: a landmark could be stamped on ground its own scorer had refused
• Fixed: both_lakes had become the one achievement nobody could ever earn
• Fixed: the title-screen clip captioned "standing stones" was filming an old camp
• Fixed: the run-recorder's two temperature checks were measuring the weather
• Fixed (pre-existing, not from this change): test_terrain's "a pool nobody has seen yet is not a water source" asserted its own precondition away
• A card you have not unlocked is now a clear step darker than one you have
• The map has 20% fewer rivers and lakes, and the crater lake lost its ring
• A dusk census for the playtest agents — and a night-fuel fix that measured WORSE and was reverted
• The playtest personas were measured against the current build, and most of what they reported was the instrument
• A thing in your hand goes on with one left-click
• Fishing has a bottom now, and not every cast lands
• A door costs 2 wood, not 2 planks
• Every build cost is drawn as well as named, and the workshops stopped explaining themselves
• The Character and Cards tabs fill the companion window
• The inventory tiles are a third bigger
• The character sheet's two halves swapped places
• Every bar on the sheet starts on the same vertical
• The automation cards are a fifth bigger, and their writing is a third bigger
• The tally on a card stands clear of its frame
• The build ghost shows the building, and R turns everything
• Feathers are drawn as feathers
• The arrowhead is black
• The arrow's proportions come off the arrow, not off the tile
• The manor is a third smaller, its ends are raised, and its front door is a door
• The manor stands in the temperate forest
• The bedroll costs 2 hide + 2 cordage
• Every alternative build cost is gone — one building, one price
• The wildlife is 30 % thinner: 281 animals at the start, 541 at the ceiling
• Zones are drawn only in the zone editor now
• Five per-frame costs that bought nothing are gone
• CaveManager was looked at and deliberately left alone
• A proper bed costs proper timber: 4 planks, 4 leaves and 2 twigs
• Ten felled trees buy the Lumberjack card again, not ninety
• Wild plants grow in stands now, not one at a time all over the map
• One right-click on a workshop now does both jobs: the queue first, then the trade
• The right-click ring on workshops is gone
• The "Open the yard" button is gone
• Loading a save from before this change: whatever lay in a workshop's old store is dropped on…
• A right-click on the job somebody is already doing now calls off the waypoints behind it

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 map is 768×768 cells — 2.25× the ground the run length was budgeted against, so how many settlement cycles fit on one is an open question rather than a settled number. 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.

• Eighteen hair silhouettes, ten complexions, nine hair colours — and six marks over two pickers. Marks is what is on the skin (freckles, a scar across the brow, war paint down the cheekbones); Accessories is what is worn on the head (spectacles, a brass earring, a leather eye patch). Each group stacks, so its arrows walk the eight combinations — nothing, each alone, each pair, all three. Two pickers rather than one, because six flags in a single arrow row would be sixty-four steps. 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.
• The sex is drawn — and only the dice are held to it. A man and a woman are two builds and two skulls: the coat tapers from the shoulders down or from the waist out, and the jaw is squared off or tapered. The roll follows it, so no rolled woman is dealt a beard or a crest and no rolled man a bun or twin braids. You are not held to any of it — the picker walks all eighteen silhouettes for either sex, because cosmetics are free on every difficulty, Brutal included.
• Twelve faces, four of them warm. The trait you pick is the face they wear when nothing is wrong: the six that were always here (stoic, grim, wary, weary, fierce, dour), four warm ones (kind, merry, wry, eager), a content serene and a level proud. A companion who is fine may now look it — and one who is not never will, whatever you pick here. See Reading a companion for what trouble paints on top.
• 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": the build ring and the context ring use it, and it walks your right-clicks at full speed.
• Drag a box to select several and command them together.
• ^ takes the whole living party (the key left of 1; ` on a US board) — it replaces the selection rather than adding to it, and the camera stays where it is, so it is a way of giving one order to everybody without losing the view you were looking at.
• 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: the build and the skull (a man tapers from the shoulders down, a woman from the waist out; the jaw is squared off or tapered), then one of eighteen hair silhouettes, nine hair colours, ten complexions and any of six marks — freckles, a scar, war paint, spectacles, a brass earring, a leather eye patch. All of it is 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 — every other axis a companion keeps for life.
• 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.

The Skills tab E

One window, five tabs: Character (C), Skills (E), Automation (T), Cards (V) and Crafting (K). Ctrl+Tab walks them; every key is rebindable.

Building is trained by building — raising, mending and taking down, on every route (your order, a rule, a claimed task). It also earns three times as fast per second of work than the others, and that is arithmetic rather than generosity: every other skill is fed by something that can fill a day, while a 3×3 hut is 65 seconds of hammering and then it is finished. At the shared rate the first level of Building cost about thirty raised huts.

A life before the run — and something they still want

Every companion carries a backstory and one or two wishes. Both are on the character sheet (C): the backstory as a headline with the whole of it in the tooltip, the wishes as a line each with the wish's own words. A stranger you are deciding whether to take in shows both on their panel, and "Wants: …" is the one argument there that is not a cost.

A wish is what that person wants out of this run, in their own words, drawn out of where they came from: the inlander wants to see the sea, the fisher's child wants to be a fisher worth the name, somebody who slept rough wants a bed of their own. There are 27 of them, and about six companions in ten carry two.

There is no quest list, no objective marker and no progress bar — that is a rule, not an omission. Hover the wish and it says plainly what would satisfy it, and that is the whole interface. A granted one gets a ✓, a line in the chronicle on the day it happened, and a green star badge; one being carried unanswered wears a hollow violet star.

Wishes come true by the thing actually happening — reaching a skill level, standing a building, coming through a winter, sitting out a storm, walking into a cave, laying eyes on the sea, filling a larder, the party growing. Nothing grants one on request, and the game will never send you on an errand.

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.
• A companion running its own rule program gets the line too — for one leg. Select one working under automation and you see the same white route over the walk they are on right now, which answers the question an RTS player asks first about an automated party: where is that one going. One leg is the honest depth of the plan, not a display budget — a rule program decides its next leg when it arrives, so there is no chain to show. It goes when the walk does. A stroll is not a plan: a companion on free time carries no line, or every off-duty companion you selected would trail one.
• 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 farm — the crop picker and a line saying what the field is doing, how far along and what it wants next. This is the only place the crop is chosen, and it shuts the moment the first cell is sown.
• A kitchen, or any workshop with a queue — the recipe list: one click puts one on the order book, and the building finds its own hands.
• 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 — order it right-click

Gathering is ordered, never held. Right-click the target and pick the work from the ring; the companion walks there and a ring fills over its harvest time. There is no gather key any more — every harvest target has a right-click order, and that order is the only way in. 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 (4 wood), pine (8), spruce (10), oak (14) — an average tree is a single packload, so a night at the fire eats most of a pine and the woodline retreats from a settlement fast.
• 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).
• Reeds — the poor end of a settlement is made of them. Beds stand one cell from open fresh water, tighter to the bank than wild hemp (3 cells) or wild rice (2), and never on the salt coast. 4 to a cut, 8 to a bed, and they regrow in 3 days — the fastest-renewing plant on the map. They are a material, not a food: no nutrition, no shelf life, almost no weight. They buy a reed basket (10), a fish trap (12) and a rush floor (2 a cell), none of which needs a workshop.
• Wild plants grow in STANDS, not scattered singles. The same number of plants stand together: a grain field ~10, a wild-rice reed bed 8, a hemp thicket 6, a mushroom troop 6, a bramble 4, a rock outcrop 3, flint in threes. About half the herbs and half the outcrops, a third of the hemp and a quarter of the flint still stand alone — but the two cereals never do. Regrowth returns into the stand, so a grove stays a grove across seasons. Twigs, leaf piles, loose stones, hazel, mussels, wild roots, cacti and bird nests still lie about singly. This is what makes where you settle matter more than it used to: scout before you build.
• 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.

Sixteen creatures roam. Deer, pigs and wisent are the meat you live off; squirrels, hares, turkeys and the small birds are a mouthful each; beavers keep to fresh water; badgers are slow enough to corner; foxes, raccoons and wolves are the ones you meet rather than hunt; and wolves and bears hold their ground. 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.

Most game does not stand around in herds. Only crows, pigeons, pigs, beavers and wisent live in groups; turkeys keep company more often than not, in rafters of at most five; hares and deer are alone nine times in ten; wolves are half in a pack and half alone; and bears, badgers, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, eagles and vultures are always solitary. All of them are spread evenly over the whole map — there is no herd to walk into and no empty quarter either, so plan a hunt as a walk between single animals and expect a lone wolf as readily as a pack. Every species breeds back to a ceiling of its own accord and will cross open country to find a mate, so hunting is sustainable — but a species is only ever as many as the map can hold.

The biggest animal in the game does not run from you. A wisent herd grazes the open plains and simply stands there — the only creature that never flees, so it is the one big kill that needs no bow. It pays accordingly: 8 meat and 3 hides off one animal, and the slowest butchering there is. Be careful what you take. There are few of them, a cow carries her calf for eight days, and a herd hunted out will not be back inside a season. At the other end a hare bounds — so does a squirrel — and the hare is the fastest thing on the ground: nothing on foot ever catches one, so it is the bow's quarry or it is nothing.

Every animal on the map is worth killing now, and three of them are worth killing for the skin. A carcass pays in meat, and — the birds excepted — in one of three different skins, which is what the winter is made of.

So the fastest thing on the map and the smallest are both worth a shot after all: two hares and a squirrel are a pair of mittens. And the tanning is what turned the hunting lodge into a real workshop — it has a craft queue now, and hide only becomes leather there.

You are not the only hunter, and each one hunts by name. Size is no longer the whole story: a fox takes hares, squirrels, pigeons, crows and raccoons and nothing else — the turkey and the badger sit right among those five on size and are simply off its menu. A wolf takes deer, and only within 4 cells, so a deer that keeps its distance is safe from one standing in plain sight. An eagle stoops on a hare, grabs it, carries it off and lands somewhere to eat. They hunt each other and never you, and a predator that has eaten goes hungry for three days before it hunts again, so the wood is not a slaughterhouse. It does mean the hares near your camp have somewhere else to be.

The dice fall before the chase does. The moment a predator locks on, the outcome is rolled — once, before a single step — and everything you then watch is the animation of a decision already made. A won roll lifts the hunter just clear of its quarry; a lost one pins it just under, and the prey gets away. So there is nothing in a chase to read and nothing to act on: you cannot save the hare by watching harder, and a hunter that gives up did not run out of legs. What you can see is the effort — a hunter puts on a brief burst of speed over and over through a chase rather than running flat out — and, at the end, a kill that bleeds and is eaten where it fell. Walk up on most predators and they abandon the carcass.

Something else is eating your hazel bushes. Squirrels and raccoons work a hazel bush exactly as your own hands do — one unit at a time, on a day-and-a-half cooldown apiece, and the nut is simply gone. A bush you had counted on for the walk home can be empty when you get there, and nothing tells you it happened.

Birds fly a fifth faster, and no longer at one flat speed each — the pace rises and falls within a flight, out of step from bird to bird, so a flock stops reading as parallel lines. Flee speeds are untouched: a bird was never caught by chasing it.

Beavers swim, and a beaver colony is never finished. Water is not a shortcut a beaver takes — it is the slowest walker on the map and swims at 1.4× its walking pace, so the river is how it gets anywhere. Mountain, cliff and a wall you built still stop it. Its lodge is a construction site like any other, gated by material and labour: 12 logs, carried one at a time in the mouth, and it rises only while somebody is working it. Then the colony moves: it picks a further crossing nearby, spends 8–10 in-game days raising a new lodge and dam there, and the day it moves in the old pair fades out and is gone. Then it does it again, back where it came from, and it alternates between the two sites forever.

Birds are not everywhere, and one of them walks. A turkey is the one bird that stays on the ground — it walks the plains and is worth hunting, which the little ones are not. Pigeons and crows keep to the low country, eagles to the mountains and vultures to the desert; each stays inside its own region, so seeing one tells you where you are. A bird on the wing is out of reach of anything on the ground; one that has landed is not, which is the only chance a fox ever gets.

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.

A cooked dish is food that does something afterwards. Anything off a kitchen leaves a warmth, a work-speed, a walking-speed or a sleep boon in whoever swallows it — and nothing in the game hunts for one on a companion's behalf, so a hungry companion will happily eat the stew you were saving for the person walking into the snow.

Mosquitoes summer · swamp all year

The only hazard on the map that costs you a night rather than a hit point.

You can see them, and you can walk round them. Clouds of mosquitoes hang over the land as a drifting haze with specks moving inside it — scattered at random, never round, and of every size from a patch crossed in three steps to a ragged mass nine cells one way and under four the other. They drift, slowly, so a gap you noted this morning has moved a little by evening. Nothing marks them on any panel: what you can see is the whole of the warning.

Bites add up while you walk. A companion standing in the thick of a swarm is covered in about three in-game hours; a crossing costs a fraction of that, and the fractions add. The itch then takes roughly 30 in-game hours to fade — deliberately longer than a night, so a badly chosen camp costs more than one evening and moving away pays back over two.

Smoke is the answer, and it is what a campfire is for in high summer. Stand within 2 cells of a lit fire and they stop biting outright — the one use a fire has on a hot night when nobody needs the warmth. A roof does the same. A forest canopy does not, and that is on purpose: a still wood is where they live, and a tree that stopped them would switch the mechanic off across most of the map.

The badge tells you both halves. A rose bitten badge beside the HUD card and under the portrait in the character sheet (C) says how far gone the itch is, what it is costing tonight and how to stop it. Companions say so too — a swat and a curse on walking into a cloud, and a complaint the morning after a night spent scratching.

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.

Rescuing a fallen companion the alerts warn, you rescue

At zero Health a companion collapses instead of dying — and what will bring them round is decided by whatever put them down, not by what you happen to be carrying.

A collapse is a window, not a death. The body lies there unconscious for half an in-game day — twelve hours, about 9 real minutes of play. Reach it in time and it lives; let the window run out and that companion is gone for good. The body is lootable either way: everything it carried is still in its pack, so a rescue that arrives too late is at least a recovery. The red line in the log is the only warning you get, and this section is the other half of it.

Right-click the body with one companion selected and the ring offers what will actually help. There are two kinds of rescue and the ring never mixes them up: three causes are fixed out of the rescuer's own pack, and three are fixed by moving the body somewhere. Reading which one you are looking at is the whole of this mechanic.

A cold body with an empty pack rings nothing at all — there is no verb left to offer. That is deliberate: with no ring in the way, the plain right-click just carries them, which is the right answer one click sooner.

Carrying

A carrier walks at half pace and can do nothing else. That is what makes the distance to the fire a real decision rather than a formality — pick the nearest warmth, not the best one.

While somebody is on the shoulder, every right-click means „take them there and lay them down“. No ring eats the order: a bedroll, a workshop or a mate underfoot used to answer with its own menu of verbs and swallow the click, so „carry them to the fire“ was the one order you could not give at the one moment it mattered. Point and they go.

A threshold is crossed while carrying, never laid on. A cave mouth, the pyramid's door, a stair, the way back out — right-click one with a body in your arms and it means take them through, and they are still on the shoulder on the far side. The next right-click says where to set them down. It works in both directions, in and out.

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 yard of its own produce — one you build and size yourself, 20 units a cell — 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.

The healer’s hut — somebody can be sent to help

Until this build, a companion who went down waited for you to notice and to steer somebody over by hand, and nobody could give anybody else their medicine — a sick companion had to be dosed by your own click, one at a time. Raise a healer’s hut (14 wood + 4 stone + 2 cordage, 2×2) and that becomes a trade.

The hut is also the best bed in the settlement — it heals at 1.5× the rate of a good house bed, it is warm (18 °C of shelter), and that makes it the place a rescue carries somebody to.

What the healer actually does, in that order:

• A body on the ground first, searched out to 65 cells — further than any other trade looks, deliberately. What happens next depends on why they went down: cold, heat, exhaustion → they are picked up and carried to a fire, to water, to a bed. Thirst, hunger, illness → the healer stocks their own pack from the stores first, walks over and tends until the bar is back to a third. Injury, hail, a storm → a two-hour vigil beside them. The rescue window is 12 hours either way.
• An untreated sickness second, within the ordinary 45 cells: they hand over one herbs out of their own pack and dose the patient. That is the new thing — fever, dysentery and food poisoning can now be treated by somebody else.

Tools & clothing carried, not worn

Gear is the thing that survives a migration — an axe, and then five body slots to fill: head, chest, hands, legs, feet. Everything here is made at the crafting bench (K), and the whole warm half of it is made of animals.

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. Only the warmest piece per body slot counts, so carrying a spare coat doubles the weight and nothing else.

Cloth coat and hat is +8 °C, roughly the difference between a clear autumn night and a survivable one. The full winter set is +23 °C — and that is what the tundra costs, because every piece of it comes off an animal you had to shoot first.

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.

Torches & the lantern L

Underground there is no dim — there is light, or there is nothing — and every flame you carry is a clock running down while you walk.

Do the sum in real minutes, because that is what you spend. The day is 18 real minutes long, so an in-game hour is 45 s of play. Half a torch gets you in and the other half gets you back out — and a torch lit at the base fire is already half gone by the time it reaches the cave mouth.

Putting a torch out keeps what is left in it. Snuff it and the head holds its remaining burn; light it again and it resumes from there. So snuff it the moment you step into daylight — that is how a three-minute torch lasts a whole trip, and it is the one piece of husbandry the mechanic actually rewards.

A flame is a flame. A torch lights at a burning fire, or at a companion's burning light standing beside you — nothing else. One bearer carries the flame in and everyone else takes it off them; lending costs the lender their own burn, since the light they hold is the one going down while it happens. Underground that is the whole decision: where there is no flame, there is no lighting.

L lights or douses the whole selection — the default binding, rebindable under Companions in the keybindings page. A key rather than a ring entry, because a four-companion expedition cannot be asked to open the fire window four times. Anyone who cannot light says so, and the refusals are collected into one line instead of four. Press it again and every flame in the selection goes out.

The game offers the key when the offer stands. A companion holding an unlit torch and standing at a flame gets [L] Light Torch printed beside them in the world — once, however many are selected, only while the key would really light rather than douse, and naming whatever key is actually bound. It is the only key hint the game draws in the world, and deliberately not a tutorial: it matters in exactly one situation.

Striking a light takes 2 s and draws the same work ring as any other job. It is not an errand — nobody walks anywhere — but a new order interrupts it, and the flame is re-checked at the finish, so a fire that dies mid-strike fails where you can watch it happen.

A lit torch starts a fire, and pays no tinder. Tip it into a laid pit and no twigs are needed at all — no walk to the stockpile for kindling. Only the tinder is waived: the kneeling work runs in full, the weather still stretches it, a soaked pit still refuses, and your torch burns down through every second of it. The price moved from the pack to the flame you are spending, which is the answer to a cold camp reached at dusk with nothing to light it with.

A fire you build underground gives light

Build a camp where you mean to come back to, and that chamber stays open while it burns. A campfire reaches about 9 cells and a stone hearth 13 — more than a torch, more than the lantern — and neither of them occupies a pair of hands. The pyramid's five storeys share one map, so a fire two floors down is visible from the stairs, and a lit camp at the bottom of a shaft turns the walk home into something you can see rather than something you count.

It does not soften the bargain the dark is built on. A fire costs twigs, tinder and wood carried down on somebody's back, a campfire eats a full load in minutes, and nothing relights itself. It is a camp you decide to make, never a switch that stays on — and with no fire and no flame the way out is still the daylight in the mouth and dead reckoning.

Spares, and the trap in them

The light does not end with the first torch. When a head burns out the bearer lights the next one out of their own pack off the dying stub, by itself, and the log says how many are left. Ten torches are about 30 real minutes of walking light, not three.

A lit torch is held in the hand

Hands are a resource. Striking a light puts it in that companion's hand, and while it burns the bow and the fishing rod cannot be used at all and the axe gives no bonus — all three want both hands. Whoever carries the light is not the one who shoots, which turns a torch from a piece of kit into a role in the party. The character sheet grows a Hand tile so the cost is visible rather than merely felt; press L and the hands come free.

Reading how much is left

The clock is visible in three places. The lit status badge on the companion card counts the real minutes down (green, turning amber past 40 % left); the flame drawn on the figure itself gutters smaller and redder as the head goes; and the burning torch shows what is left of it as a percent in the carry grid, in the same corner food shows freshness. Every readout in the game speaks in real minutes.

Telling them to do it themselves

Two cards put light into a rule program, both earned by handling fire like the rest of the fire family. WHEN In the dark is true while that companion stands in the pitch dark with nothing of their own burning — night on the open surface deliberately does not count, or a party of eight would burn a torch each every night for light they mostly do not need. DO Light a torch takes a torch from the pack into the hand and holds it into a flame already in reach, and never walks to one: a rule that could send somebody across the settlement for a flame would march a party that had just entered a cave straight back out of it. Written together, WHEN In the dark → DO Light a torch does the right thing at the mouth of a cave, where the fire is.

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.

Your hand is empty the moment you click, not when they arrive. The load is handed to the order, so you are free to pick something else up, open another window and keep working while the walk happens — sending a sack of wood across camp no longer costs you your hand for the whole trip. The arrival puts down the whole load, not one portion: the click already committed the stack, so there is no second click waiting to place the rest.

Nothing is ever lost on the way. Every way an errand can end — you gave a new order, the receiver refused it on arrival, the target is gone, the carrier died — puts the load back in the inventory it came out of, or the vessel it was poured from; failing both it lies on the ground at the carrier's feet. Note that Esc no longer calls the errand off, because there is nothing in your hand for it to put down — a new order is what calls an errand off.

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" means one exact thing: a building somebody works at. There are five — the fisher's hut, the lumber camp, the farm, the mason's yard and the hunting lodge — and they are the five that offer the Work here verb, unlock a trade for the rules, keep a yard, and can be given a work zone. The drying rack and the smokehouse are not among them: they cure by themselves, hand-fed or out of the stores, and nobody stands at them. They keep everything else — the smokehouse is still the bench that makes charcoal, both still open their store window, both still sit in the Workshops ring. A campfire and a stockpile are used rather than worked at, and the planning table lends its blocks with nobody standing at it.

A yard holds 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).

• 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.

Every fire sits in a closed ring of stones, and the ring tells you which fire it is. A campfire’s was gathered — round field stones of every size shoved against each other, closed but plainly not laid. A stone hearth’s was built — dressed rectangular blocks with a darker mortar joint between them. It costs nothing and changes nothing: it is there so that a glance at the map answers “is that the fire that lasts the night?” without opening anything. Both views agree, the top-down one on the map and the portrait at the top of the fire window.

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 — and it now turns every fixed-size piece (42 catalog entries, where 9 used to turn), so a bed can be laid head north, east, south or west. Painted pieces (wall, door, floor, road) and drag-sized ones still do not turn. Indoors, Q offers “against the wall”: it slides the piece flush to every wall it touches, corners included. It is purely cosmetic — footprint, cost and reach are identical — and the cupboard and the bench come out of the menu already hugging. 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.

Automation builds in the order you staked things out — first placed, first built. A companion on a BUILD rule or a claimed task takes the oldest site on the map, not the nearest. That is what makes the queue a queue: previously a builder latched onto whatever blueprint was closest and could stand there blocked because nothing in reach could pay for it, while a site two cells further out waited — and every companion on the same rule converged on the same tile. So stake things in the order you want them.

It steps over exactly two kinds of site, and both are skips rather than demotions — a stepped-over site keeps its place and is taken the moment the reason goes away:

• a tile somebody is already standing on;
• a site nothing in reach can pay for. With wood but no stone, the house you drew second goes up while the road you drew first waits for its stone.

Your own right-click is untouched. An order is still an order: it works its own commit through to the end and is never skipped by anything. It only stakes a claim on the tile, so automation steps around a hand already at work.

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).

Demolishing refunds half of what the building was really paid for, and the salvage goes into the dismantler’s own pack first, a stockpile in reach second, and only then the ground. Upgrading is not demolishing — it has its own, kinder rule; see Build the better material over the old one.

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.

A roof — because a ring of walls is not one

Walls keep the wind out. A roof keeps the sky out. A closed ring holds its 18 °C the moment the door goes in — but until you put something over it, the rain still falls on whoever is inside, hail still hurts, and nobody dries off. A roof is a piece you build, in the Structure ring, dragged out like a floor.

Close a room and it stakes its own roof. Thatch blueprints appear over every cell its walls can carry — the wall ring itself included, corners and doorway and all, so the roof sits on the walls the way a real one does instead of stopping a cell short of the eaves. A 5×5 hut therefore asks for 25 tiles, not 9. Build them like any other blueprint, or cancel them with the eraser; a cell you cancel is never offered again, and a cell that had nothing to carry it is offered the moment a pillar goes up beside it. The roof a room offers you unasked is the one exception to the rule above: it stakes no pillars, because a post you never ordered would be standing in your house.

A roof takes no ground. Build a bed, a fire or a wall under one and neither is in the other’s way; a bush, a stone or a dropped stack is not in a roof’s way either, so a lean-to goes straight over the grass it shelters.

Build the better material straight over the old one

You never tear the old piece down first. Draw the new one on top and it takes over where it lands. Three things work this way:

It only ever goes up. Boards never go back to thatch and a log wall may not be built back over stone — there is no reason to want it, and allowing it would make the eraser the wrong tool twice. A road is not a better floor and a door is not a wall: only the pairs above are the same piece in two materials, so drawing a road over your boards is still refused and a stone run drawn along a wall will not eat the doorway in it.

Everything you build ages — and is mended

A settlement carries rent. Every piece wears down slowly, whether it is used or not, and an old base carries more of it than a fresh one.

• An ordinary building is roughly seven in-game years from useless — felt by a party that turtles one site for a whole run, invisible to one that migrates.
• Thatch is the fast end of the scale: about a year. A board roof about four. A stone wall barely weathers at all, and a stone road never does.
• At 0 % a piece stops working: a workshop unlocks no job, a roof lets the rain through, a hut keeps nobody warm. It never falls down and never loses what is stored in it — it simply does nothing until somebody mends it. Open a building and its condition is on the panel.
• Mending costs exactly what tearing the piece down would have given back, and it is real work. Press Mend this building to mark it, then right-click it with a companion — or leave it, and an automated party claims it off the task board like a demolition. The mender pays out of their own pack, so somebody has to be carrying the materials.
• A roof marks itself the day it goes through: nobody is going to click four hundred tiles.

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.

Farming a field is a year

A farm is not a larder you top up. It is a year with four steps in it — drag the plot, sow it, keep it weeded, cut it before the frost — and every one of those steps has a window that closes.

Drag the plot out in the build ring. The rectangle you drag is the field: 1 wood a cell, anything from 2×2 to 20×20, and the farmhouse sits outside it so nothing you paid for is wasted on a doorstep. A 4×3 plot is 12 wood; a 20×20 plot is 400, and it will ask for four hundred of everything else too.

Left-click the farm to pick its crop — a dropdown with all nine in it, and a caption underneath that says what the field is doing and what it wants next. Pick before you sow: once a single cell is in the ground the choice is shut until the year is over, and on a perennial it never opens again at all. A right-click is the order to go and work it, not the picker.

Nine crops — everything edible that grows here can be farmed

The list is not a menu somebody chose: every wild stand on the map whose yield is food has a crop that grows it. What is missing from the table is missing because it is an animal — eggs, mussels, meat and fish are hunted, gathered and fished, and a field has nothing to say about them.

A season is 7 in-game days and a year is 28, so "11 days to grow" is a season and a half. The four annuals with a Spring and Summer sowing window — mushrooms, herbs, roots and vegetables — are the ones a single plot can bear twice in one year — that is what the fast, cheap crops are for. Wheat, rice, hemp and the two perennials get one shot at it.

Sowing costs seed — one seed a tile

The plot you drag out is also the size of the pouch you must have filled first, and nobody starts with one. Ordinary seed comes off the wild stand: forage wild herbs, hemp, wheat or rice and the seed comes back with the crop. That is the bootstrap, and it is why a first field is small.

Seed keeps forever; a carrot does not. Real seed items never spoil. The four crops above are sown out of the food itself, so their planting stock rots on the ordinary clock like any other food in the pack.

Payment is asked per cell, at the moment that cell is sown. Run out half way and the rest of the field stays bare — and a half-sown field never starts growing at all, it just sits there. The field panel tells you the bill up front ("needs 37 Wheat Seeds"), which is the number to read before spring.

Tend it, then cut it

Once the last cell is sown the clock starts, and growth is pure time, never work — nobody can hurry it. The field walks through five visible steps, sprouting → leafing → standing → heading → ripe, and it looks like each of them; "the crop stands ripe" goes into the event log.

What work buys in the middle is quality. Care runs down every day the field is left alone — fast on the greedy crops (vegetables in under 3 days, herbs in 3.3, roots 3.6), slow on the patient ones (hemp 5.6, hazel 10) — and a tended cell puts it back. Weeds are drawn on the tiles, up to three tufts a cell, so a neglected field is visible from across the map. Care locks the moment the crop ripens: after that, weeding buys nothing and the harvest is already decided.

Two crops are perennial — the frost does not take them

The Berry Patch and the Hazel Row are bushes, and a bush does not die in the winter. They go bare for the winter and come back: the plants stay in the ground, the year closes without unsowing anything, and they never ask for seed again. Sow once, in one spring, and that plot bears every year for the rest of the run. A picked patch starts filling again immediately.

The price is the ground. The plot is committed for good — the crop dropdown never reopens on a perennial, so changing your mind means tearing the farm down and building another. And neglect carries over: a berry patch you let go stays let go into the next year, where an annual starts fresh.

Who does the work

Three ways, and they are the ordinary three. Right-click the farm with somebody selected and they work whatever the field is asking for. A WORK: farmer rule does the same without being told — and since the field is often asking for nothing, that rule now declines cleanly instead of parking somebody in a fallow plot: out of season, mid growth, already cut, wrong ground, or no seed anywhere. It falls through to the next rule in the program, which is what you want. The farm also posts the work on the task board whenever the field wants something, so one "Take a task" rule covers it.

An order to work a field that wants nothing now says which kind of nothing it is — "nothing grows here this season — the field is dormant", or the field's own status line — instead of silently doing nothing.

The harvest goes into the farm's own yard, which holds 20 units of one kind like every workshop yard, and overflows into the reaper's pack. Nobody walks it to a stockpile as part of farming — that is a haul, posted automatically once the yard is 75 % full. The yard accepts every crop and every seed, which is deliberate: last autumn's seed-back is exactly where next spring's sower looks first.

The kitchen a dish does what a catch cannot

Cooking was one thing for a long time: a raw catch on a fire's pan comes back cooked, worth a little more and keeping a little longer. The kitchen is the other kind of cooking. A dish is a real recipe with two or three ingredients in it, and it leaves something behind in whoever eats it.

Raise one for 10 wood + 6 stone (2×2). It unlocks no job — there is no cook trade and no cook card. It unlocks the Cooking skill instead, the way herbalism works: trained by standing at the bench, worth +8 % a level on the work clock and nothing else. Skill never changes what comes out, only how fast.

Left-click the kitchen and click a recipe to queue one — one click, one dish. From there the building posts the cooking itself, so anybody running Take a task will pick it up and nobody needs a rule of their own; a right-click with a companion selected sends that one over instead. The cook fetches the ingredients out of the stores. The finished dishes go into the kitchen's yard — two tiles, twice the usual — and a hauler empties it like any other.

The hours are in-game hours. Whoever has eaten one wears a single green badge; hover it and it names every boon that is running, how strong it is, which dish it came off and how much is left. The four boons stack with each other — a warmed, strong, swift, well-slept companion is a companion who has been cooked for properly — but a second dish of the same kind replaces the first rather than adding to it, including downwards: a fish soup eaten while a stew is still running trades four degrees for two and a half, and says nothing about it.

The boon fires on the swallow, and nowhere else. Cooking one grants nothing, carrying one grants nothing, and it is one dish to one companion. The Warmed boon is capped like clothing: it is added under the same 20 °C comfort ceiling and does nothing at all on a mild day or beside a fire — it is insulation you cannot take off, not a heater.

Three of the four boons can be cooked without hunting or fishing. The forest bake answers the roast for work speed, and travel cakes and herb broth need neither — the broth is entirely forageable. So settle inland, settle before you have found the herds, and the kitchen is still worth building. Warmth is the exception: both dishes that hold the cold off want meat or fish, so the one boon the winter is actually about is the one an inland forager cannot cook their way to. And with the farm taking nine crops, every ingredient in these six recipes except fish, meat and eggs can be grown on purpose: a kitchen is a lottery on what the ground offers early in a run, and a supply chain with fields at one end once the base is standing.

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.

Give a job building a zone — work this wood and no other

Left-click a lumber camp, fisher's hut, farm, mason's yard or hunting lodge and pick a zone under Work zone, and that trade works inside those cells and nowhere else: the wood you marked, the quarry on the ridge, that stretch of shore. This is the thing zones were always for.

• The zone replaces the search range, it does not narrow it. A wood on the far side of the valley is worked as readily as one behind the camp. An instruction that only applied within shouting distance of the building would switch itself off at the moment it started to matter.
• It fences what is WORKED, not where somebody stands. Paint the trees, not the path to them — a miner will stand on unpainted grass beside a painted rock face. One rule for all five trades.
• "Anywhere" is the default, and nothing changes for a player who paints nothing.
• An empty fence is not a fallback. A zone with nothing left to work — felled out, out of season, across a river nobody can cross — makes the trade stop and say so, naming the zone, rather than quietly going back to the whole map. Seeing companions work ground you had explicitly fenced off, with nothing on screen to explain it, is the worse of the two.
• Deleting the zone does fall back, silently and for good: the binding is simply gone.
• The binding is per building and survives a save, so two lumber camps may each be pointed at a different wood.

The hauler reads them the other way round. 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 that 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. The difference is which end holds the instruction — the hauler reads the ground under its feet, a job building carries an order you gave it.

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. jobzone lists every standing job building and what fences it; jobzone <zone|none> binds one on the nearest.

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, and In the dark (it is dark here and nothing of yours is burning — night on the surface does not count). 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), light a torch (from a flame already in reach — it never walks to one), 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 30, +6 from a Planning table). Rules past the budget don't run — top rules are paid first. The budget is drawn as rivets punched into the window's leather — one driven rivet per block spent, green for the planning table's extra blocks, red for overspend.
• Every rule has an on/off switch — and a dark one still pays. Switch a rule off and it is skipped, but nothing below it moves up and the budget does not grow back. The switch is a thinking tool, not a discount: silence one rule, watch what the rest of the program does, switch it back without having lost the sentence.
• A new rule starts empty, and an empty rule is free. + Add rule picks nothing for you — no action, no trade, no condition — and opens its drawer straight away. Until you finish it the line reads unfinished, it costs 0 blocks and it never runs. The dropdowns list the words this companion has learned first, then a separator and a greyed still to learn section below it.

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. Cards that watch the same thing share one counter, so they arrive together — and the ladder runs from a single sunrise to a fortnight of idleness.

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.

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.

Companions go out of their way to use a road. A road has been worth a third more speed for a long time, but until now nobody chose one: they walked the shortest line and collected the bonus only where the road happened to lie on it — which stops being true the moment the road bends. Now a laid road is taken out of the way whenever the detour still arrives sooner, on your orders and under the rule programs alike. So a road that curves around a hill is worth laying, and the stone you spend on one is not wasted the moment the route is not a straight line. Walking off-road is unchanged, and a companion whose road plan turns out to be blocked simply walks the ordinary way rather than giving up the order.

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 — 3.0 litres, which is exactly what the pan holds — takes 36 in-game minutes 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.

The weather has a PLACE — fronts, not one sky

The island does not have a weather. A spell arrives as a front: a soft-edged patch with a position, drifting on the island’s own wind. At most three at a time — the one that has passed and is fading, the one standing over you, and the one already visibly on its way.

• Rain or snow is decided by the GROUND, not the cloud. A rain front reaching the tundra arrives as snow — and lands dry, because snow does not wet you.
• Snow lies where it fell. It is a field, not a switch: the tundra stays white while the base thaws. The crunch underfoot, the white on the ground and the white on the tree crowns all read the same field, so a thawed camp is silent while the high country creaks.
• A front rains itself out against the rain shadow. The island’s green side gets the whole of a spell and the lee side a share of it — the desert is simply the dry end of that rather than a special case beside it. The rain barrels fill when the rain gets there, not when the spell begins somewhere else.
• The forecast has a direction. A weather-reader at the fifth rung says which quarter the weather comes out of; at the seventh, how far off it still is.
• A party in two places needs a reader in each. The line is spoken to the group standing with the speaker, and a group with nobody who can read the sky gets no forecast at all.
• What you see is where you are. The rain thins across a front’s edge on screen; the cloud bank, the light, the ambience and the volume of the rain you hear follow the camera’s own place; the clock plate names the sky and the air temperature of the ground you are looking at; and a companion window’s pane streams for that companion’s weather, not the island’s.

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 three in-game hours before a change — about 135 real seconds of warning — things say something is coming and never what, and they now glide across that approach instead of swapping in the frame the sky turns: the light, the haze and even your sight radius slide the whole way in. The tells are 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 shifts how much warning a companion gets, and it pivots on 6 like every other attribute: an average 6 is worth nothing either way, a 10 buys about 10 extra minutes, and a 2 costs about the same. That is the whole of it — there is no bonus that keeps growing with character level. Intelligence decides 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.

Under the pyramid the one place somebody built

Every other place on the map grew. This one was drawn — five storeys of rooms, traps, hidden doors and a tank of water, with the only lantern in the world at the bottom of it — and the whole expedition is paid for in torches.

The pyramid always exists. Nothing rolls for it: it prefers the deep desert, and on a map whose sand never grew it stands in the forest instead, or on open ground — a run without a pyramid is not possible. From outside it is a step of masonry 13×13 cells across, weathered, its top course broken off and the capstone lying in the sand. There is one way in, in the middle of the south face: a gate between two pylon towers, with a flight of steps running down onto the sand. Walk onto it or right-click it, exactly like a cave mouth. A world generated by an older build keeps its door on the north flank, behind the mass — it still works, it is simply harder to see.

Inside is an order of magnitude more building than there is hill — five storeys and about 1 570 walkable cells behind a wall you can walk round in a minute. The floors are joined by stairs, not tunnels: right-click one and the companion walks over, takes it and arrives standing on the step on the other floor, which is then inert underfoot until they walk off it, so nothing carries anybody back by accident. It works from either end, and a group order onto a stair is never spread out — send all three and all three cross, one after another, on one click. A line in the log names the floor you have reached. Underground the camera stops at the walls, panning and zoom alike, so you are never looking at a screen of black rock.

Five storeys, five ideas

Each floor asks one question, and only one. Reading the table before you go in is worth a torch on its own — the building is a network and not a chain, so knowing what is where saves the climb back up.

The floors are a network, not a chain. The scarab seal lies in the Servants' Warren and the door it opens is a floor above it, in the Gallery of Kings — so finding the key sends the party back up. Eleven caches are scattered through the five floors (cordage, herbs, nuts, preserved food, torches, gold), and a share of the run's automation-card scraps lie deep inside as they do in any cave. The gold is honestly a keepsake: there is no money in this game and nothing to spend it on, so what carrying it home buys is a chronicle line and a hidden achievement.

The dark, and what the light will not do

There is no dim. Underground — here and in every cave — you are in somebody's light or you are in black. Ground you have already walked is remembered by the run, and it is never shown: a mapped pyramid goes black again floor by floor the moment the last flame dies. With no flame at all a companion gets a smudge about one cell across — enough to see where your people are standing, nowhere near enough to tell a wall from a doorway.

Traps, and the footing

A trap never rolls dice. It always fires and it always costs exactly the same — and it is drawn on the tile like everything else, so it is plainly visible in torchlight and invisible without one. That is the entire mechanic, and the whole argument for carrying light: what the building charges for is hurrying in the dark, which is a decision you made. Hover a tile and it names the floor and what the trap will do, before you step.

Finding the secrets — a draught, then a job

Walking past a hidden door does not open it any more. There are two of them, drawn as plain masonry, and a light carries only a tell: within a few cells of one, a companion with a lit light feels a draught and says so — naming the floor and the direction it comes from, never the cell. The bearing is taken from where they stand, so a few steps and a second reading cross on one wall.

How near is up to them. Perception sets the reach: 5 cells for sharp eyes, 4 for average, 3 for dull. It is a reach and never a roll — the same companion feels the same thing on every step and after every reload — so who you send down the corridor first decides what gets noticed at all. It buys noticing and not cheaper searching: the walls you actually pay for do not move.

Then you dig. Right-click any wall down there and the companion walks over and chisels at it for 25 s — with a lit light in hand, at the wall. A hidden door becomes a doorway; honest rock costs the same 25 seconds and gives you nothing but the news that it is solid. The verb is offered on every wall on purpose — a right-click that behaved differently over the secret would be the secret — and a wall the party has never had light on cannot be searched at all. Cross two bearings first and it is one wall in the entrance hall and three in the Warren, 75 s at worst, under half a torch. Guess instead and you are paying 25 seconds of flame a wall for as long as your nerve holds — which is the whole reason the draught is worth walking towards.

The sealed door is the opposite: it is meant to be seen. No searching and no chiselling — it wants the scarab seal, and it opens for anybody standing there carrying it. The seal is not used up. It lies behind the Warren's secret, one floor below the door it opens, which makes that the one search in the building nobody can skip.

The cistern valve — the one thing that does not come back

229 cells of water lie on the third floor down, and because rock has no weather over it the pool never freezes and never dries: it is the only water in five storeys and it is there all year. The way down to the lantern runs across the floor of the basin, and the basin is full. From the rim, by torchlight, you can see the stair down there — water stops feet and not eyes. Nothing has to explain the valve in the south coping; the building does.

Console: dungeon (valve, draught, pace, search <x> <y>, stairs) and cave light report every number on this page out of the same tables the game reads — developer builds only.

The Manor the second place somebody built

There is a great house with its roof fallen in on every map, standing on good open land near water, always in the temperate forest — so unlike the pyramid you do not have to cross a desert to reach it. It is 13×9 cells above ground, with two raised end pavilions and a proper doorcase whose both leaves stand open. Underneath: five storeys, 1 326 walkable cells, a flat 6 °C — colder than a cave — and it is darker than the pyramid, because it has no shaft at all. Bring light and bring spares.

It is not a second pyramid. There is no key, no seal, no valve, no sand and not one dart trap. The pyramid’s subject is a tomb somebody meant to keep you out of; the manor’s is mechanisms and decay — a house that worked, and then did not.

Six walls in the house can be read, once each, into the event log and the chronicle. They are the only account of what happened here.

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.

Lenses over the map X

X lays a lens over the ground and steps to the next one. The ring is off → Zones → Soil → Climate → Rainfall → off, so the bare map is always one press away and only ever one lens is up. A plate under the clock names the one you are looking at and what its colours mean.

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.

The clock now takes its own foot off the accelerator. A red rim and a heartbeat only ever reach a player who is looking, and at 5x or 10x the line into mortal danger is crossed between two glances at the screen. So the time warp has a brake: the moment somebody crosses that edge, the game drops itself to 1x. It slows, it does not pause — a pause would hand you a frozen board to study, and 1x hands you the emergency at the speed the game is meant to be played at, with the clock still running while you decide.

• Once per emergency. It pulls the speed down on the way into the red and then stays out of the way, so you can wind back up to 10x to send help across the map without being dragged down again every frame. It re-arms when nobody is dying.
• It never starts a game you paused. A run paused on purpose stays paused, and simply comes back on the 1x rung.
• Every difficulty, Brutal included. It needs no exception there: Brutal's refusal to pause while the rule editor is open guards the pause, and a brake that only moves the speed rung never goes near it.
• Settings → Gameplay → Slow to 1x when someone is dying, default on.

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-eight 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.

The player’s map lenses roadmap 14.5

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.

Backstories & wishes Milestone 15

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.

The field year, and the nine crops 2026-08-30

One drawing per plant — the ripe field IS the wild stand 2026-08-30

The kitchen and the healer’s hut 2026-08-30

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