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 player’s manual, plus the developer reference · describes build v0.26.0 · last revised 2026-10-28

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. There is no help screen in the game — this page is the manual, and every rule and every number lives here. The tooltips in the game are short on purpose: they name the thing, its value and the one rule that matters, and leave the rest to this page. The Developer Reference below it maps each mechanic to its files, seams, tunables and console commands.

What changed in v0.26.0 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.

v0.26.0 this build 2026-10-28

Changes

• Changed: world sounds at the normal zoom, and the silent rows made audible
• Added: the dragon — fear, death, blight and terror (B8.9)
• Added: supply lines between named bases (B3.2)
• Fixed: wildlife is wary of every companion, not only the first (B1.7)
• Added: instruments on the chart (B11.5)
• Changed: the cold eats firewood
• Added: the four rules of the wild, on a parchment
• Changed: the sound library, reviewed row by row
• Fixed: foraging sounds like what is being foraged
• Fixed: no more sound storm when a save loads or a run starts
• Changed: lianas are cut, then twisted into cordage
• Changed: short, coloured tooltips
• Added: the Tooltip Desk (editor)
• Added: the Sound Desk (editor)
• Removed: the whistling wind
• Changed: ROADMAP_BETA's summary keeps only the count
• Added: F11 shows what is sounding, and why (dev builds)
• Added: the game is heard — 165 new sounds from one library
• Fixed: the river is quieter, fades with distance and stops when you zoom out
• Added: the chart — survey the island, ink it at a chart table (B11.1–B11.4)
• Fixed: a fire that fails to light for want of flint says so
• Changed: the tutorial's night is a lesson of its own — with a task
• Changed: the tutorial's camp wants three beds and a whole roof
• Changed: the tutorial's scouting lesson says to gather on the way
• Removed: the F1 help screen — the wiki is the manual
• Changed: the tutorial shows several task groups at once — and the axe asks for wood
• Changed: the tutorial's food lesson asks for a drink too
• Changed: the tutorial explains automation properly — and sets tasks for it
• Changed: the tutorial's needs press half as hard
• Changed: the cold kills more slowly, and a body warms up faster
• Changed: a finished campfire has to be lit
• Changed: a newly learned card points at the rule editor
• Changed: arrows are quicker to make, a bow slower
• Changed: the overgrown temple looks like the jungle inside
• Changed: the wreck looks like a ship inside
• New: the Tutorial difficulty — learn the game on a small island in plenty
• Fixed: you enter a dungeon at the south end of its first storey
• Changed: a fished-out water reads red in the info panel, a thin one yellow
• Fixed: the levelled earth a closed room stakes can be built by hand
• Added: what is equipped shows in the pack; the equipment row names durability
• Changed: a workshop order no longer shuts the rule program out
• Changed: every tool carries its own condition; eating a fresher batch eats THAT batch
• Changed: companions start empty-handed; the knife joins the kit
• Changed: no axe, no tree — and the branch
• Changed: a level-up pays 3 attribute points, and you can see them
• Changed: lighting a fire fails far more often
• Changed: the gatherer's hut gathers up to a limit
• Added: big game fights back, and the wound it leaves
• Changed: bears and wisents warn at any approach
• Added: wolves shadow the party in far snow
• Changed: twigs and leaves come back
• Fixed: a companion no longer starts the run cut off on an islet
• Changed: Camp stands directly under Build in the build menu
• Fixed: Tab with a group selected steps on from the companion the window shows
• Changed: the creator of a new run is three pages; each companion may bring one start item
• Changed: every seed is its own island now
• Changed: the title screen opens on Hard; a Hard run chooses its landing and its season
• Added: the island's seed and a preview of it, on Hard
• Added: you can see a drought and a flood on the water itself
• Changed: one companion per latrine, and the rest queue
• Changed: a Free time rule sends them home
• Fixed: a scrollbar no longer touches the window's content
• Changed: the companion window is one size for all eight
• Fixed: a waterskin filled at still water came up clean
• Changed: a stack in hand can be carried to any spot on the map
• Added: the moon and its phases
• Changed: the ship in the floe and the overgrown temple are drawn in detail
• Fixed: loose ends of the closed map edge

Fixed

• The rule editor wrote the wrong sensor for Relief and Hygiene
• A rare engine error from an animal that had not been set up yet
• Rain no longer drips off a roof that is not there

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 wildlife that defends itself when hunted or crowded, helps itself to an open camp at night, and strikes whoever steps on it (the snake in the jungle, the scorpion in the desert). Nothing ever hunts the party and 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 of the first three years brings a harder winter than the one before.

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 creator — the island, the three companions you are about to take there, and what each one carries — and you can press Start the run the second it appears. The Tutorial skips it: Play starts at once with three rolled companions.

The party you get without touching anything is already complete: three named, differently coloured people with rolled bodies and rolled dice, and nothing in their packs. Everything below is optional. The creator is three pages, leafed both ways by the step row under the title or the two arrows in the footer, and Start the run stands on every page:

Every attribute 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 and its alerts 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: six sober ones (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 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 — only a recruit who joins a settlement that has already lived a while walks in part-taught.
• 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, and Shift+Tab while stepping back to the one before.
• The camera works in the pause. Behind the Esc menu and with the clock stopped the world stands completely still, but WASD, the edge scroll and Tab still move the view, and orders are still taken — planning is what the pause is for. Nothing acts on them until time runs again: a sleeper sent somewhere stays asleep, and keeps the bed, until you unpause.
• 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 you are allowed. 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.
• You zoom out no wider than life size (1.0×) — until the party grows or you find a relic. Zooming in is never limited, and inside the limit the wheel is as smooth as ever. Every companion past the third lets you zoom out 20 % further: 120 % with four, 140, 160, 180, and 200 % (0.5×) with all eight. Lose one and the view closes in again by the same step — a death, a departure, and a companion lying unconscious counts as gone until they stand up. Either change is announced large in the middle of the screen, green WIDER VIEW or red NARROWER VIEW, with the step and the new limit. Two hidden finds open the view further: a clear crystal (out to 0.5×) and a seeing stone (out to 0.2×). There is exactly one of each on a map and both lie underground — the crystal prefers a cave, the stone a dungeon — and both glitter at the brightest tier wherever they are. The wider view holds only while a companion carries the relic or a stockpile holds it: drop it in the wild and the view closes back in, with a line in the log and the chronicle either way. The widest of the three counts; they do not add up — a full party of eight sees exactly what the crystal shows, and under the seeing stone the party's size changes nothing.
• There is no minimap and no overview map — you never see the whole island at once. Reading the land is part of the game, and so is losing it again.
• The time-warp bar sits top right (pause, 1–10×). Switch on Esc → Settings → UI → 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. The zoom level stands on the line under it, behind the same switch — 1.10x zoom, a larger number meaning further in, and (widest) when you are at your limit.

The land is forgotten

The party does not remember ground for ever. Land you have left goes back under the fog — the way it was uncovered: along the route you walked, at the pace you walked it, never a whole region at once. It happens in two passes, and the first is the one that costs you.

• What grows and lies there goes first. Two thirds of the way through a memory a soft front walks your old route: berry bushes, hemp, loose stacks and carcasses fade out one after another, and the ground behind the front turns dim. Dim ground is ground whose contents are forgotten: you cannot click them and no rule finds them. The ground itself is still known — you can walk it, drink from its water, fell its trees, and its cave mouths and landmarks stay on the map.
• Then the ground. At the end of the memory the front comes round a second time and closes the dim ground to black, as if nobody had ever been there. A right-click on it is a plain walk again.
• Nothing is taken, only forgotten. A stack on forgotten ground still lies there, still rots and is still gnawed at. Walk back and it is all known again the moment a companion sees it.
• Coming back makes a memory last. Ground seen once holds for 4 days. Seen again later it holds 8, then 16, then 28, then 56 days — a year, then two.
• Each step needs a longer wait than the one before: the ground has to have been known for 10 hours before a look counts for the second step, then for 1, 2 and 4 days. So one long rest does not fix a place for a year — living there for a week does. Ground you use every day never fades; ground forgotten completely starts again at 4 days.
• Nothing is permanent except what you built. Your buildings, roads and floors, and the two cells around them, stay known for good — an abandoned base stays on the map. The land around a base does not: it is kept by being walked, not by a stockpile standing in it.
• A newcomer's tale fades like a first look — the patch of far ground a recruit tells you about is yours for 4 days unless somebody goes there.

One memory for the whole party, not one per companion: who is selected never changes what the map shows.

The chart — survey the island, ink it at a table K · N

What the fog forgets, paper keeps — as it was on the day somebody stood there and looked. The chart is one chart of the whole island, drawn by your own companions, and it is a picture, never knowledge: no rule reads it, it shows nobody’s position, and a patch goes stale while the land changes under it.

• Survey (K). A selected companion stands and studies the country round about, and carries it home as a field sketch in their head — no item, nothing to hand over, and lost if they die. It draws everything the party still knows within reach, in sight or remembered, never what the fog hides. Reach is 16 cells, widening with the Cartography skill to 32; a head holds about 6 000 cells (more with skill), and a full head refuses the next survey until it is inked. Surveying is hand-only — there is no rule word for it.
• The skill decides what goes on paper: the ground first; from Cartography 5 sea against fresh water and the fords; from 15 landmarks and cave mouths.
• The chart table (Build → Workshops → Care, 2×2, 16 wood + 4 stone, may stand indoors). Right-click it to ink the sketches you carry into the chart: 1 parchment + 1 ink per 2 500 cells of ground (at least one of each), out of the pack or fetched from the stores. Parchment is made at the hunting lodge (1 hide → 2), ink at the smokehouse (1 charcoal → 2). The order ends once the head is inked. A patch keeps its newest survey, so a sketch carried home late never paints over a fresher one. It is a trade, the Cartographer (5 inkings by hand for the card), but a companion can only ink their own head.
• The chart (N) opens for a companion standing at a chart table. Every patch shows the island as it was on the day it was surveyed and fades as it ages; hover it for the day.

Instruments. A tool strip beside the bare hand (which moves the paper): Ruler, Line, Mark, Note and Erase. Type a note’s text or a mark’s label in the box, then click where it goes. The ruler reads the distance in paces (one pace is one square of ground), the bearing in degrees from north (north is up) and the time on foot along the straight line, slowed by the woods, sand, marsh and fords the chart shows. It warns when the line crosses rock or water — the real walk is longer then — and says how much of it runs over blank paper. Ruled lines are kept and carry their paces and bearing; the ruler itself is not kept.

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 and Shift+Tab to the one before (rebind Tab and the Shift chord moves with it); 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 fifteen skills and what each buys; how they climb is under the Skills tab). 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: what a recruit knows is what your settlement hands them on joining, about 70 % of its own skills and card tallies. A wanderer who has not joined learns nothing from your camp. 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 (E) — 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. Furs are drawn too: the fur coat and the white polar coat, the fur hat and the polar hood (the portrait shows the headgear), and a burning lantern or blubber lamp is carried in the hand. 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 R

One window, five tabs, their keys in one row: Character (E), Skills (R), Automation (T), Cards (Z) and Crafting (U). Ctrl+Tab walks them; every key is rebindable, and R still turns a building while you are placing one.

Every skill has 100 levels, and a level is worth +0.8 % of whatever that skill buys — so a master is worth +80 %, and the bonus grows a little every day instead of in a few jumps. A companion who works one trade all day gains a level most days: about 19 after a week, 45 after a month, 60 after two and 98 after 300 days. The climb is steep at the bottom and long at the top, and it is slower for anybody who splits the day between trades — which is the argument for specialists.

• All skills climb at roughly the same pace. Running and Resilience are trained by simply walking and by being cold or wet, which everybody does for hours every day, so each of their levels costs twice what a trade's does; Crafting costs the same double, because one kit is a long stretch of practice. Weather-reading is the exception: it is learned from what the sky shows and stays slow on purpose (see Reading the sky).
• Going up floats over the companion like a harvest's gain — +1 Foraging (12), +1 Level (5), in green. Every skill level floats; the event log keeps only every tenth, and the last.
• Three skills are rolled, and a novice fails. A cast, a bow shot and a spark each succeed or fail on the skill behind them: a first-time fisher lands 25 % of casts, a first-time hunter hits 35 % of point-blank shots, a beginner's spark takes 45 % of the time. A master: 90, 95 and 100 %. The first thirty levels buy half of the whole way, so a companion is a trained hand after days and a master after years — and a failure teaches: a missed cast, shot or spark pays extra experience, so a novice learns fast exactly because they fail. A miss says so in red where the gain would have shown (Cast failed, Shot missed, Spark failed). Hover one of the three on this tab and the tooltip says what that companion's odds are today. Choose who learns which trade — three beginners sharing one rod stay three beginners.
• Crafting decides how sound a made tool is — a beginner's axe starts at half the durability a master's has (see Tools & clothing). Making kit by hand trains Crafting, lighting fires trains Fire-making.

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 about a minute of hammering and then it is finished. Paid at three times the rate, a builder climbs at a lumberjack's pace.

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 (E): 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 (Fishing 50), 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.

One order leaves the program's errands running: work at a workshop. Every other order overrides the whole rule program until it ends. Right-click a workshop (a trade's building, or a bench with orders on it) and the order overrides only the program's work — its errands still fire as they would off duty: drink, eat, warm up, cool down, a herb, a torch, the latrine, a wash. The bench waits underneath and the companion goes back to it when the errand is done; the activity line says so (Rule 2: Drinking — working the trade waits). It is the program, not self-care: no drink rule, no drink — with Auto off, or despondent, they work the bench until they drop. Sleep is not an errand and stays with the order.

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 and still remember answers everything even when nobody is looking at it. Memory has two edges, though (see The land is forgotten): on dim ground the water, the trees and the cave mouths still take an order, but a bush, a patch or a stack that stood there does not — and ground that has gone black again is unexplored again. 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.

A companion who cannot see takes one step per order. Two places are blind: underground with no light, and the thick heart of a fog bank on the surface. There a click far away does not walk anybody out — every order carries them one cell toward the click, at a hand's pace, and a rule's walk is held the same way. A short red line over the companion says why (“Thick fog — one step at a time”, underground “Too dark — one step at a time”), and the log names the way out once per fog. What ends it is light: a torch or lamp alight in their own hand, a mate's within its reach, or a burning fire's glow. In fog a roof ends it too, and so does the edge of the bank, which you can feel your way out to; it lifts the moment the fog is seen to thin, not hours later at the weather's turn. A thin mist changes nothing. Send nobody on a long errand into a fog without a torch in the pack.

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. On a target with several verbs — water, a latrine, a bedroll, a fallen companion — the ring opens as on a plain click and the verb you pick joins the queue (its tooltip says Queued), so “fill the skin, then empty the latrine” can be planned; a target with a single verb queues at once. A stack within the hand’s reach still takes the chord as a grab. The ring can be worked from the keyboard. 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 thing to look at it. Every visible thing on the map answers with the small tile window, and a building opens its own panel as well. 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.

Every piece that stands on its own has a window — a workshop, a fire, a well, a bed, a table, a chest, the planning table. A wall and a door have none. Clicking the same spot again walks down what is stacked there: the roof (while it is drawn), what stands there, the floor, the room — and the click after the last one closes everything. A roof tile and a floor each open a window of their own.

The tile window — left-click any thing you can see

A tree, a berry bush, a dropped stack, an animal, a carcass, a building, a construction site, a cave mouth: left-click it and a small window opens below and to the right of the pointer, a little way off, so it never covers what it describes. It is the long form of the corner readout below — and the place to look something up before you spend a walk on it.

• A portrait on top, the numbers under it. The portrait is the thing alone, drawn large on a plain plate. Under it stands the corner readout's verdict, then the thing in numbers, and last what to do with it.
• What the numbers are: what an item weighs, feeds and how long it keeps; what a bush or patch gives, how much it holds and when it grows back; how fast an animal runs, how shy it is, what it eats and whether it raids; what a building is for, what it reaches, its condition and how long before it rots; what a site still needs. A long entry scrolls; the window itself is a fixed upright card.
• A green ring marks the thing it means — around the whole building, or walking along with the animal.
• It stays where it opened. Move the mouse and the corner readout follows it; the window keeps the clicked thing and keeps its numbers up to date, so you can hold one bush's numbers beside what the corner says about the next. When the thing is gone — felled, picked up, torn down — the window closes. An animal that walks out of sight hands the window to the ground it was clicked on.
• Three ways to close it: the ✕ in its top right corner, Esc, or a left-click anywhere else — and a click on another thing opens that one instead.
• What opens nothing: bare ground (grass, sand, water, a road, a floor), unexplored ground, and anything underground, where the corner readout describes the floor only. A click on a companion still selects them, and a wanderer or a trader opens their own panel.
• It takes the Info panel size under Settings → UI.

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 — and so does ground the party has forgotten.

• 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 does not show. Two things: the tasks it posts (a fire calls for refuel and boil — nothing in the game prints a posting) 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 (hold position in the warmth, feed the flame all night, end at first light, pay for it in tiredness the next day) can only be given from the dev console.
• 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; the last layer of the click) — six coloured lines: temperature, cleanliness, comfort, roof, furniture and size, see Furnish a room.
• A lean-to (a click under a roof that has no walls, or on one of its pillars) — a Lean-to window carrying the “Show roof” switch. While it is open that roof is held solid on screen, even with the party asleep under it.
• A camp flag — the base’s name and how far its ground reaches, see the building table.

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 — 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). An order to harvest is never refused for a full pack: the companion walks over and works anyway, loads past the budget the way an ordered pickup does, and says once that they are overloaded and slower. The order only waits at the +50 % ceiling, where the legs stop — take something off and it carries on. A rule still stops at the budget.

• Trees → wood — with an axe, or not at all. A tree is felled with a usable axe in the pack or it stays standing; a right-click without one breaks a branch off it instead (with an axe the ring offers both, Fell the tree and Break a branch). Oak, kapok and mahogany want an iron axe; stone and flint fell pine, birch, spruce and palm. 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. The jungle grows none of the four: its wood is palm (6), mahogany (10) and the rare giant kapok (14).
• The deep wood opens into glades. A forest five or more cells deep is broken by small clearings of about fifteen cells, and they are where the wood's own pickings are: twigs, leaf piles, mushrooms and the odd hazel grow on open ground beside a tree, so inside a wood they stand in the glades and on the edge, nowhere else. Food there is as thin as on any forest edge — a glade is a place to light a fire and fill a pocket on the way through, never a larder.
• Rocks → stone take ~10× ordinary work and a cast of the line nearly as long — plan whole days; a mason's yard / fisher's hut put workers on them around the clock. Rust-red iron outcrops and black coal seams on some mountainsides are worked by the same right-click — what they are for is in Dig & trade.
• 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: scout before you build. The one region without stands is the jungle: its plants stand singly, scattered evenly from edge to edge, and regrow in every season, winter included.
• 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): 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. Twigs and leaves come back: a storm's end litters all of them again, around your base too, and between storms a few fall every day out of sight (bare ground is fully littered again in about twenty days). Loose stones never return.
• Branches (1 kg) — the rung between twig and log, and the one wood bare hands can get. Every standing tree gives 3, one at a time, and one grows back a day; a storm also drops some at the wood's edge with the twigs and leaves. Everything that must exist before the first axe is paid in branches: the axe itself, the knife, the fishing rod, the pickaxe, the shovel, the drying rack, a pillar and the camp flag. A branch also burns, a third of a log. Walls, doors and every workshop still cost logs, so the first room waits on the first axe.
• 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, no rod and no axe, so it is one more thing that makes a settling site good or bad. (In the jungle a liana stand gives 3 lianas a cut, and the bench twists 3 lianas into 1 cordage — no workshop, quicker than spinning hemp, but three times the weight per cord, so twist it where it grows.)
• Hunting takes a bow, arrows and a knife (bow and arrows are made at the bench once a Hunting lodge stands; the knife needs no workshop). Deer & boars flee faster than you walk — you shoot them, and the kill lies where it fell until somebody dresses it. The shot, the two kinds of arrow, the carcass and what the Hunter rule does on its own are all in The hunt.
• Fishing takes a rod and nothing else. The rod is 2 branches + 1 cordage + 1 fish hook, and the hook is whittled first from 1 twig — both on the bench from the first morning, no workshop. With a rod in the pack, right-click any water that holds fish and pick Fish (on the sea, which nobody can drink, the plain right-click already does it): the companion walks to the bank and casts, fish after fish, until told otherwise or the pack is full. Rods are per companion — three fishers need three rods — and a rod takes both hands: it refuses while one of them holds a torch.
  • The fisher's hut is for the rule, not for the hand. It is what lets a Fisher rule or a posted task fish, on the one water it adjoins, and what gives the catch a yard. Without a rod the rule stays blocked and the hut's call for hands is left for whoever is equipped.
  • Read the water before you cast. Hover a water (or the Fish entry) and it grades the ground: rich (about 200 fish or more when untouched — only a real lake), good (60 and up — a river at its best, the sea), modest (20 and up) or poor, and whether it is full, thinning with the share left, or fished out — red when fished out, yellow once under 30 % of its fish remain. A thin water gives up less to every cast and needs days to come back.
  • A cast can come up empty, and for a beginner it mostly does: a first-time fisher lands about 25 % of casts into a full water, a master 90 %; rain on the water adds a little. The first thirty levels of a hundred buy half of the way, and a fumbled cast pays extra Fishing XP — a red "Cast failed" floats where the fish would have shown.

Twenty-seven creatures roam. Deer, wild boar and wisent are the meat you live off; a turkey or a hare is a small meal, a squirrel or a small bird a mouthful; 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 pelts. Nothing out there hunts you — but six of them fight back and two lie where you might step.

The boar and the deer, by name. The wild boar is dark and bristling, tusked when grown, and its piglets are striped; it runs in sounders of up to six. Deer come as stags (antlered), hinds (bare-headed) and spotted fawns. The antlers are only the picture: a stag and a hind are the same shot and the same yield.

Eleven of the twenty-seven live in the far country and nowhere else — they are born in their region and thin out toward its edge.

Most game does not stand around in herds. Only crows, pigeons, parrots, boars, monkeys, beavers and wisent live in groups; turkeys and seals keep company more often than not, in groups of at most five and four; 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. The sixteen of the home country 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 — it never flees, so it is the easiest big shot on the map: one flint arrow, or three stone ones — but the first stone arrow, or a step within about three tiles, and it charges. It pays accordingly: 20 meat and 3 hides off one animal, and the slowest dressing 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.

What an animal is worth, and what it takes to bring it down. The meat is the same whoever shoots; the right-hand column is how many hits it takes with the cheap stone arrow — a flint arrow is always one.

Every animal on the map but the scorpion is worth killing, and some of them are worth killing for what comes off them. A carcass pays in meat, and — the birds excepted — in one of four 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: two hares and a squirrel are a pair of mittens. And the tanning makes the hunting lodge a real workshop — it has a craft queue, and hide only becomes leather there.

You are not the only hunter, and each one hunts by name. Size is not 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. In the far country the lists are as short: the polar bear takes seals, the arctic fox and the snowy owl the snow hare, the jaguar tapir and monkey. 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.

No bird flies at one flat speed — the pace rises and falls within a flight, out of step from bird to bird, so a flock does not read as parallel lines. A bird is 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 boars 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.

The hunt — bow, arrows, knife and the carcass

A hunt is three things, and each can be the one that fails: an arrow that kills, a shot that lands, and a body somebody walks to and dresses. The bow (3 wood + 1 cordage) and the arrows are made at the bench (U) once a hunting lodge stands; the knife (1 branch + 1 stone + 1 cordage) is on the bench from the first morning. Every shot spends one arrow, hit or miss, by hand and on the rule alike; with an empty quiver a right-click on an animal just walks you over to it. The bow takes both hands — it refuses while one of them holds a torch or a lamp (Tools & clothing).

• You never pick which arrow to shoot. The hunter nocks the cheapest one that still kills what it is aiming at — stone into hares, flint into big game — and with only stone in the quiver, stone. The Hunter rule chooses the same way.
• A hit that does not kill wounds, and a wounded animal bolts — except the six that fight back, which turn on the archer. The wound heals a day after the last hit, so the second stone arrow has to follow the first. Hover big game and its last line says how many stone hits it still takes, and whether it is already wounded.
• The shaft needs wood — twigs will not do — so a quiver has an axe behind it, and feathers behind that.
• The bow wears: 60 arrows loosed, then it is mended at the hunting lodge for 1 cordage — a worn-out bow does not shoot (Tools).

By hand, drawing the bow is the shot. Embody the hunter and hold H; the arc round the reticle fills as the string comes back.

• Hunting skill shrinks the sway and lengthens the steady moment — to about 2.3 s at level 100.
• The line to the reticle shows how far this draw throws, with a red stub where the aim lies beyond it. A hit is aim, not luck: lead a moving animal.
• The arrow drifts downwind, and the drift builds with distance: on a long shot in a blow you must aim off, and a practised hunter drifts less than a beginner.
• Rock stops an arrow; trees do not.
• A shot spooks the game around it — one clean opening shot, then it bolts.
• Game is wary of every companion, awake or asleep, and runs from the nearest one — a deer at 5 cells. A full draw reaches further than that, so the bow is not hurt by it; what is, is a gatherer or a fisher wandering across the hunting ground and scaring the game off before the hunter is in range. Keep the other trades off the hunter’s ground.

Arrows come back, if you walk for them. A shaft comes down where it was aimed — just past the reticle, beside the animal — and lies there as an ordinary ground stack, right-clicked to pick up. It is drawn over the tree crowns with its count, so it can be found in a wood. A miss survives nine times in ten; an arrow that struck survives about two times in three. The arrow of a kill stays in the body and comes back with the dressing, unless it broke on the bone.

What the Hunter rule does by itself. An animal right-clicked by hand gets the same rolled shots, at that one quarry, and the order ends with the kill — the dressing is a second click.

• In this order: dress a kill in reach, shoot, fetch spent arrows, wait — all of it only with a knife in the pack. A carcass in reach is work with or without a bow; an empty quiver is still work while spent shafts lie on discovered ground in reach, and the Hunter collects them unasked. With no arrow anywhere and nothing to dress, the rule has no work and the program falls through.
• The shot is rolled, and the arrow really flies — the animal falls when it arrives. The hunter closes to 8 cells and looses about every 2 s. A beginner hits only 35 % at point-blank and about 23 % at the edge of that reach; a master 95 % and about 62 %. The first thirty levels of Hunting buy half of that way, and a miss teaches: a red "Shot missed" floats up and pays extra Hunting XP, so a novice costs arrows and learns fast. It cannot lead a shot or aim off, so a gale costs it up to 40 % of its hits — a windy day simply costs it arrows. A quarry not down after 14 s is given up.
• With nothing in sight it takes a stand instead of falling through to the next rule: the nearest known forest cell (failing that, anywhere outdoors — never under a roof), reading "No huntable animals in sight - waiting". A stand that shows nothing for about half an in-game hour is left for another, up to 40 cells from the first. A lodge with a work zone keeps its hunter inside the zone and on one stand.
• The kill goes to the lodge's yard when it is within arm's reach of the dressing, otherwise into the pack.
• The Hunter card is marked by the dressing, one mark an animal — not by the shot.

Stay alive

Health, Thirst, Hunger, Tiredness and Temperature drain over time; Mood, Relief and Hygiene are the three bars that never cost Health. 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 comes first, by what kills soonest — and when several things are wrong the word takes turns between them (“badly hurt”, then “starving”, then “thirsty”): a red word stays up 3 seconds, a yellow one 1.5, and a trouble that turns red jumps the queue. The turns run on real time, so they read the same at 10× speed and while paused.
• 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.
• Eight pips on the right, the whole stat set at a glance — if you switch them on: they are off as the game ships, and Settings → UI → Small stat bars on companion cards brings them back. 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. Without them the word, the stripe and the frame still say who needs you.
• A stripe down the left edge carrying the worst of those troubles, whichever word is up: dark while all is well, yellow once any bar is under 25%, a pulsing red — and a red frame — when one is under 15% and life is at stake. A calm party is a shelf of plain grey rows.

Hovering a row unfolds it to the eight 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 need bar, Mood included, sits over 15%, 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 15%", "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. And the exam gets harder for three years: each winter is 1.5 °C colder than the one before and storms come more often — up to half again as many — until the fourth winter, from which it holds. The first winter is the mildest a run sees. 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. Thin red ticks on the bar mark where Health starts to go (below 4 °C, above 35 °C).

Hover the bar and it does the sum in °C. It says what the spot feels like and adds it up step by step — the air, the land, the wind, wet clothes, clothing, a hot meal, then a fire, a heated room or water, and shade — green where a step helps, red where it hurts, and then the body's own temperature and how long until it gets there.

A body takes minutes, not seconds, to feel the cold. The thick mark follows the thin one at about 12 °C an in-game hour, so a short errand across a winter yard — the well, the stores, the walk from the fire to bed — costs no Health, while a night outdoors or an afternoon's work in the snow still kills. Coming back is three times faster than going: beside a fire a frozen body is out of the damage band in about half an hour. And the cold kills slowly — 5 in-game hours from full Health at its very worst (heat the same) — so a night in the open in deep winter is still fatal, but a companion caught out has time to reach a fire.

A Warmth rule is written in °C (−15 to 40) and reads the body, the thick mark: WHEN Warmth < 6 → Warm up UNTIL Warmth ≥ 11, WHEN Warmth ≥ 32 → Cool off UNTIL Warmth < 23.

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.

Sleep — long, in one piece, and dry

The longer a companion sleeps in one piece, the faster they recover. The rate climbs steadily from lying down to +40% after 8 hours — for Tiredness, and for the healing a bed gives. A green moon badge shows it paying, and the Tiredness bar's tooltip says the same. Being woken starts the count again from nothing, so two four-hour halves are worth much less than one night. That is the whole price of a short night for the body: there is no sleep debt, and the next day's Tiredness drains exactly as fast as any other day's. What a waking in the dark still costs is Mood — so feed and water them before bed.

Mood — what a hard life costs

Mood never touches Health. What it costs is work — and, at the bottom, the rule program.

Mood has a ceiling, and everything a companion goes without lowers it. Each deprivation is worth points, the points add up, and the ceiling is 100 minus the sum. A dry companion's Mood climbs toward its ceiling — a whole bar in 24 h — and never above it; Mood standing over the ceiling is pushed down to it at a bar in 10 h. So none of these is a hit you sleep off: each is a lid that lifts when its cause is answered. Hover the Mood bar — it lists every factor with its points and its remedy, and under Moving the bar right now every cause with its own points per hour: wet (and how soaked), ill, the latrine's smell, a homely room, being dry, a wish granted or left waiting, and the slide down to what the list above allows. The line underneath is their sum — the rate the bar itself is moving at — so you can see which single cause is worth answering first. Last comes what the Mood is costing in work.

• The factors alone never push the ceiling below 30%. Only the things that drain Mood carry a companion further down: being wet, an illness, the smell of night soil, and fouling themselves.
• Under 60% Mood the hands slow, evenly down to −25% work at Mood 30 and −50% at empty. The legs never slow for Mood, and it multiplies with every other slowdown.
• Under 15% a companion is despondent — it gives up on its whole rule program, eating and drinking included, and takes direct orders only, until Mood is back over 25%. A companion starving beside a full larder is this before it is anything else: the rule editor then marks every one of their rules despondent and names the Mood that gets the program back. Because the factors stop at 30, a neglected life costs a quarter of the work but never the program on its own.
• A sweet thing lifts Mood at once: a bite of sugar cane is worth 4 points, a cocoa bean 6. It moves the bar and never the ceiling, so a treat on top of a good day keeps and a treat instead of one is gone within hours.
• The clocks start the day a companion joins, so a recruit owes nothing for the weeks before.

Relief — everybody has to go

Relief is the seventh bar. It falls on its own and faster on everything eaten and drunk, so a well-fed working day empties it about once; a night in bed costs about a twelfth of it. It never costs Health.

• Nobody goes unasked. Build a latrine and send them: right-click it → Use it (a group simply goes), or write an Off to the latrine rule — WHEN Relief < 60% → Off to the latrine. A visit that has started is finished, whatever the rule's number says by then.
• A latrine seats one. The companion stands exactly on it; whoever arrives later lines up beside it in order of arrival and moves up each time the seat frees — and Relief keeps draining in the line, so a long queue can end in an accident. With several latrines in reach each companion picks the least busy once, on setting out — a free seat before an occupied one, an occupied one before one with a line, the nearest among equals, counting those already on the way — so a group spreads out, and an order onto a full or derelict latrine goes to a neighbour with room. A long line is answered with a second latrine.
• A visit only counts below 70% Relief. Above that the order is declined with a line in the log, nobody walks, and nothing is earned.
• The log warns once when a companion drops under 30%.
• At empty they foul themselves where they stand: a fifth of the Mood bar gone at once, 40% of Hygiene, a pile of night soil on the ground — and, indoors, a dirtier room. The bar starts again from full.
• A latrine takes eight visits and is then full, and a full one is no better than none. The night soil has to be carried to a compost heap, where two units make one fertilizer: right-click the latrine → Empty it, take it out through Open it, or leave it to a caretaker. Nothing may be put into a latrine.
• Night soil smells. Within 2 cells of a pile on the ground, or of a latrine with anything in it, Mood drains — the more there is the faster, worst at a full latrine's worth, where it would take a whole bar in 90 h. So build the latrine away from the beds and the table, and empty it before it fills. A pile in the open soaks away in two days; a latrine never empties itself.

Hygiene — bodies are washed, rooms are swept

Hygiene is the eighth bar. It runs down in about four days of plain living and faster while the hands are in dirt: stone and field work triple the pace, felling and hunting make it two and a half times, building doubles it; fishing and gathering stay clean. It never costs Health and never slows work by itself, and its bar turns yellow but never red.

• Under half, an unwashed body holds Mood down — up to 40 points off the ceiling at an empty bar.
• Nobody washes unasked. Right-click fresh water or a well → Wash, or write the rule: WHEN Hygiene < 40% → Wash UNTIL Hygiene ≥ 95%. A wash from filthy takes about a quarter of a minute.
• A wash gets you wet. Open water soaks you almost through, a well about a third — so in the cold, wash at a well and beside a fire.
• The salt sea, midwinter ice, a dried-out pond and a water barrel are no wash.

Rooms get dirty from the people in them. Every companion inside treads dirt in — half as much asleep, twice as much coming in wet, twice again unwashed — a little dust settles every day, and an accident indoors leaves a great deal at once. It shows as specks on the floor; left-click the room and its window reads it out as the Cleanliness line. Three people living in a twelve-cell room make it worth sweeping about every five days.

• Grime eats the room's comfort, share for share: a room at 40% grime lifts 40% less.
• Past 30% grime it holds down the Mood of everybody inside — up to 30 points off the ceiling at full grime, and only while they are in it.
• Sweep it: left-click the room → Clean this room sends whoever is selected. A room past 30% also posts itself as a task, a Clean a room rule sweeps the nearest such room, and a caretaker does it unasked. Sweeping costs the sweeper a little Hygiene.

Mosquitoes summer · swamp and jungle 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 (E) 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 (E). The colour tells you the kind before you read anything: green = a boon, and magenta / blue / violet / red = something is wrong. Every badge’s tooltip is coloured the same way: what it costs in red, what ends it in green, the background in grey — and the number in the head runs yellow to red as it nears that badge’s own breaking point, so a trouble that cannot kill never turns red, while a boon that is running out goes green → amber → red. 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 does not answer with its own menu of verbs. 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: +0.8% per level, so ×1.8 at level 100. Every skill has a hundred levels, and a companion who works one trade all day gains one most days — about level 19 after a week, 45 after a month, 60 after two and 98 after 300 days — so the bonus grows a little every day, and for the first weeks the pace you play with is close to the pace on this page. All skills climb at roughly the same rate; none runs ahead because it is trained in passing. Nothing is picked at the start: the first three know only what they have done, a recruit walks in with a share of what the settlement knows, and a standing school makes every hour of work earn half again the skill experience. 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. So a shift broken off by a night or an errand comes back to the same tree, and the wood does not fill up with half-felled trunks.
• 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 twenty 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 (Y) 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 gatherer’s hut — somebody to walk the wild stands

Raise a gatherer’s hut (8 wood + 2 plant fibre, 2×2, in the Workshops ring) and gathering becomes a trade: while one stands, the WORK: gatherer rule — or a right-click on the hut — sends a companion round the wild stands, picking them one handful after another.

• What it picks: berries, hazelnuts, mushrooms, roots, wild grain and rice, eggs, mussels, feathers, flint, twigs, loose stones, leaves, reeds, hemp and herbs. Never a tree and never a rock face — those are other trades. Bamboo is cut only with a knife in the pack; without one the gatherer passes it by.
• How far it looks: 45 cells from where the gatherer stands, on ground you have discovered. Give the hut a work zone and that zone is the whole reach instead, however far away it is painted.
• Where the load goes: to the hut's yard, when the pack is full or nothing is left to pick. It never carries on to a stockpile — that is a haul.
• The hut has a filter. Left-click it and untick a yield under Gather; the gatherer walks past those stands. Untick everything and the trade stops and says so.
• Every yield has a limit — the number beside its tick. Once the settlement's stores (the hut's own yard included) hold that many, the gatherer leaves that yield alone, and takes it up again only when the stores have fallen below three quarters of it. 0 means no limit. A new hut starts with limits set — food low (berries 20, mushrooms and herbs 15, eggs and mussels 10), so nothing is picked to rot and the bushes get their rest; twigs 60, stone 40, leaves 40. What the stores are shortest of is picked first: a yield under a quarter of its limit before one at half, a limited one before an unlimited one, and the nearest stand among equals. When everything ticked is at its limit the trade stops, says so, and the program moves on to its next rule. A hut from an older save starts with no limits.
• The Gatherer card costs 50 gathering cycles done by hand or by order — every picking that yields something counts. Herbs do not: they train Herbalism. And picking pays for this card alone: loose stones do not count toward the Stonemason's card, nor mussels toward the Fisher's.

The caretaker — somebody to look after what already stands

The WORK: caretaker rule needs no building: what it looks after is the settlement itself. It takes the first chore on this list that exists, and finishes it before it looks again:

1. A latrine that is full — the night soil goes to the compost heap.
2. Night soil lying on the ground after an accident — piles close together go on one trip.
3. Anything that has rotted through, or that you marked for mending.
4. A latrine that is half full.
5. A room past 30% grime.
6. Anything worn below 50% that nobody marked.

• It fetches the mending materials from the stores itself — a companion you send to mend by hand still pays out of their own pack. A repair the stores cannot pay for is not attempted.
• With no compost heap that has room, the night soil stays where it is: latrines are left alone and ground piles are left to soak away.
• The card costs 15 chores done by hand or by order — a building mended, a room swept, or a load of night soil put on the heap (Empty it on the latrine's ring counts). Chores a running rule did earn nothing.
• You do not need the card to get latrines emptied: a half-full latrine posts itself as a task while a compost heap has room for it.

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

Without one, a companion who goes down waits for you to notice and to steer somebody over by hand, and nobody can give anybody else their medicine — a sick companion has 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 holds 18 °C of shelter while a fire burns by its door, 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 — fever, dysentery and food poisoning can be treated by somebody else. A marsh fever gets fever bark instead, out of the healer's pack or the stores, because herbs do nothing for it; the same holds when the healer tends somebody who went down with it. A settlement with no bark in it has no answer to that fever, healer or not.

Tools & clothing carried, not worn

Gear is the thing that survives a migration — a knife, an axe, a pickaxe, a shovel, and then five body slots to fill: head, chest, hands, legs, feet. Everything stone, cloth and fur here is made at the crafting bench (U), the iron makes at the smithy, 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 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. The full ice set is +45 °C. What the two tiers mean on the ice: in the furs you can make at home a winter day there can be walked and the night cannot; in the ice's own furs the night can. Polar coat and hood are enough for a still night; mittens, leggings and boots are the margin when the wind gets up — and the set cannot be sewn before somebody has hunted on the ice.

A tool wears out, and is mended at its workshop

Every tool wears — deterministically, never on a dice roll. A whole stone axe, flint axe, pickaxe or shovel lasts 400 seconds of real work, about nine in-game hours of it, a full working day at the trees or the rock face; an iron one lasts three times that. The fishing rod lasts 600 s of fishing, the bow 60 arrows loosed, the stone knife 300 s of dressing and the iron knife 900. The carry slot shows the condition as a percentage that runs green → red, and the break itself posts one line to the event log.

To repair it: right-click the tool's workshop with the worn tool in the pack — the lumber camp for the stone and flint axe, the mason's yard for the stone pickaxe and the shovel (1 wood each), the fisher's hut for the rod and the hunting lodge for the bow (1 cordage), the hunting lodge for the stone knife (1 flint), the smithy for every iron tool (1 charcoal). The companion walks over and pays out of its own pack, or fetches it from the stores like a builder's materials, and the tool is mended. A repair mends the most worn tool of that kind. Repairing is deliberately far cheaper than making a replacement: that is the reward for keeping the workshop standing.

• Only the best make does the work — with a stone axe and an iron one in the pack, the iron one chops and the stone one rides along untouched — and of two of the same make, the most worn one that still works is used; the better one is the spare. A spare never stacks — two axes are not a faster axe.
• Every tool carries its own condition and quality — in the pack, on the ground, in a pile, through the transfer window and in the save. A worn axe and a new one sit in two slots, the way food splits by age, and a worn axe handed to a mate arrives worn. Every crafted tool is graded, not only the first.
• In the jungle a tool wears out in half the time — the wet rot that bills the buildings there takes the tools as well.

Two rows on the sheet, and two hands

The character sheet's Equipment section (E) is two rows, each led by a white symbol. Clothing — Head, Chest, Legs, Hands, Feet — shows what the pack makes the body wear, the warmest piece per slot. Under it Equipment — left hand, right hand, head, and the waterskin — shows what is really held, and that row is the one place a gesture decides something.

• A one-handed thing takes one hand and leaves the other free: a torch, the lantern, a blubber lamp. Two of them can be held at once.
• A two-handed tool fills both tiles: axe, pickaxe, shovel, bow, fishing rod, whatever its make. While either hand holds something else, the axe, the bow, the rod and digging refuse outright, and the pickaxe and the shovel give no bonus — that work falls back to bare hands. The knife is one-handed and is never blocked.
• The Equipment row's Head tile is for the headlamp, and it blocks nothing. It is not the Clothing row's Head: a hat and a headlamp are worn together.
• The gestures: double-click a light or a two-handed tool in the carry grid to take it in hand, or drag it onto a Hand tile; double-click it again to put it away. A stack on the cursor is put on with a left-click on the tile. Putting a burning light away puts it out.
• The pack marks what is in use. A pale white dot in the top-left corner of a carry tile means that very item is in a hand, on the head or worn — exactly one tile, so with a broken axe and a working one in the pack the dot says which one is swinging. Hover a Hand or the Head tile for the held tool's durability in colour, its quality and what a repair costs.

You only need the gesture for a light — a tool in the pack works without being taken in hand. What the row tells you is why a tool has stopped working: a torch in one hand is an axe that will not fell and a bow that will not draw.

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 light is struck at a burning fire, at a companion's burning light standing beside you, or off a flint in the bearer's own pack — 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: with no flame and no flint, there is no lighting. The flint spares you the walk back to a fire; it does not make light endless — the limit is still how many heads you carried down.

A torch burns away; a lamp is filled. A blubber lamp or a headlamp burnt dry takes the next slab of blubber out of the bearer's pack by itself and burns on, and the log says how many slabs are left. With none left it goes dark and stays a lamp: strike it again with a slab in the pack and it is filled first. So the lamp's real clock is the blubber you carry — twelve hours a slab — at one cell less reach than a torch. It is the light of a long night and a slow search, not of a quick look.

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 felt for, one cell at a time.

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 held light takes a hand — the headlamp takes none

Hands are a resource. A torch, a lantern or a blubber lamp is held in one of a companion's two hands, and while it is there — burning or not — the bow and the fishing rod cannot be used at all, nobody digs, and the axe and the pickaxe give no bonus: all of them 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. Dousing it with L saves the burn but leaves the stub in the hand; the hands come free when it is put away (double-click it), and putting a burning light away puts it out. The second hand is free for a second light — two flames do not add up, the wider one counts — or for the knife, which works beside a torch.

The headlamp is the answer for the one who works. A pickaxe takes both hands, so a digger cannot hold a torch — and digging underground needs light at the rock: a lit headlamp on the digger, or a mate standing beside them with a burning light. The second costs a pair of hands that then does nothing else; the first costs a trip to the ice for the blubber. A headlamp weighs a little more than the lamp it is made of and reaches no further.

The thickest fog is as blind as a cave

In the thick heart of a fog bank a companion with no light can only feel their way. A click far away no longer walks them out of it: every order carries them one step toward the click, at a hand's pace — the same rule as the black underground — and a rule's walk is held the same way. A thin mist changes nothing.

• What ends it: a torch or lamp alight in their hand or on their head, a mate's light or a burning fire's glow reaching them, a roof overhead, or the edge of the fog, which you can feel your way out to one step at a time. It also ends the moment the fog is seen to lift, not hours later.
• The game says why. A far order to a companion who cannot see raises a short red line over them — “Thick fog — one step at a time”, underground “Too dark — one step at a time” — and the log names the way out once per fog.
• So a torch and a flint belong in the pack of anybody you send far, on the surface too. A fog that catches a forager two hundred cells out with no light holds them there while their bars run down.
• In the dark does not fire in fog — that sensor means underground — so the rule below will not light a torch for a fogbound companion. That one is done by hand.

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, and they are earned apart. In the dark comes with the fire family, by lighting and feeding fires by hand. Light a torch has a counter of its own: five torches lit by hand — at a fire, at a lit torch beside you or off a flint; the key, the order and the fire window all count, and a torch a rule lights teaches nothing, like every other deed. 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 — or strikes it off a flint in the companion's own pack — 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 does not cost 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 does not call 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 is a receiver too. Left-click a bare spot anywhere on the map and the carrier walks there and sets the stack down on the cell you clicked, near or far. Water is the exception (it would only pour out), and a spot nobody can stand on or walk to refuses at once. 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 six — the fisher's hut, the lumber camp, the farm, the mason's yard, the hunting lodge and the gatherer's hut — and they are the six 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. In everything else they are workshops — the smokehouse is the bench that makes charcoal, both open their store window, both are built from Workshops → Larder. 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, the whole kill at the lodge — meat, hides, pelts, small pelts and feathers — and at the gatherer's hut whatever its filter lets through).

• 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 — 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 does not jam at a single fish — and why a day's catch is not 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.

A new fire is built cold. A finished campfire or stone hearth stands with its wood laid and unlit; lighting it is its own step, exactly like relighting one that went out — Light the fire in its window, fuel dropped on it from the hand, or a rule. A cold fire posts its Tend the fire task, so Take a task lights it too, and the task goes to whoever carries a flint and can find twigs — not to whoever carries wood.

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 are not alike at all, and they do not look alike.

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 else — 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: the fuel slot on its own row with the pan and the ready slot under it, drawn half again the size of a pack slot — this window is worked at a distance, not squinted at. The slots carry no words: an empty fuel slot shows a faded log, an empty pan a faded cooking pot, and the ready slot stays bare. Under the pan stands only the percent done, and only while something cooks; how long it still takes, and why a pan is not cooking (the fire is out, the ready slot is full), are in the pan slot’s tooltip. 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). The main ring is Shortcut 1 · Shortcut 2 · Shortcut 3 · Demolish · Build · Blueprints · Zones. Left-click a category and the ring steps aside: it 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 — it turns every fixed-size piece, so a bed can be laid head north, east, south or west. Painted pieces (wall, door, floor, road) and drag-sized ones 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.

Every ring has seven places. A ring with fewer entries comes up as an arc under the mouse, right where you clicked, and going back puts the previous arc where it was.

Every ring takes the keyboard — this one and the right-click ring out in the world alike. The arrows turn it (it wraps, so it cannot dead-end), Enter picks what is lit and Backspace goes one level back. Every sector also answers to the first letter of its name, underlined in the ring: W for Workshops, D for Demolish. Two names that start alike share out the next free letter (Build is B, Blueprints L), a filled shortcut takes its letter last so it never takes one from a fixed word, and an entry left without a letter is still one arrow away. The info panel spells the key of whatever is hovered out in brackets, and gives a locked entry’s reason in amber.

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 what tells you where you are. The entries keep their band and every label its size; 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. Even the storage box and the water barrel are told apart by more than tint.

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 whose own order is finished do not hand themselves on to the next site. 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 earned. A BUILD rule (T) and a claimed task both look for work across the whole settlement. Nobody builds out of 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: nobody latches onto the closest blueprint and stands there blocked while a site two cells further out waits, and companions on the same rule do not converge on one 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 stands outside the queue. An order is 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 is more than a token that unlocks a trade: the lumber camp, mason's yard, smokehouse, hunting lodge, kitchen, bloomery and smithy 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 stone axe, knife and pickaxe, bow, rod, bedroll, cordage, coat and hat — are not made here: they are made in the hands, at the crafting bench (U). The iron makes of knife, axe and pickaxe are the one exception: they are forged at the smithy and at no bench.

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, the world hand and the window's fuel slot (which counts in logs but takes any of them).

Five more things burn, and the list has an order. A fire is always fed wood first; when there is none, the weakest burn goes in first and the best is kept for last — twigs, branches and bamboo, blubber, charcoal, coal. Both fires take all of them, and a hearth gets three times the burn out of each, as it does out of a log.

The crafting bench — made in the hands U

Everything you carry — axe, knife, pickaxe, shovel, bow, fishing rod and its hook, bedroll, cordage, torch, coat, fur coat, hat, handcart — is made at the bench, the Crafting tab of the companion window. There is no craft site on the ground and nobody walks materials to one: 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 Crafting skill, which also decides how sound a tool comes off the bench). 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.

Several different kits can be lined up on one bench. While something is being made, the button on every other kit reads Queue and puts that kit behind the one in hand. A queued kit’s materials are spoken for, not paid: the button refuses only when the pack holds nothing the queue has not already been promised, and says so. On the kit in hand the button reads Cancel, and takes off that kit only — the next one moves up. A queued kit whose materials went elsewhere while it waited is skipped with a message, and a new order by right-click still drops the whole queue. The queue is saved with the run.

The queue is on the screen, not in the window. A small plate stands directly above the event log whenever anybody is crafting: one row per crafting companion, one tile per entry with the product’s picture and how many are still to come, and a bar on the kit in hand that fills as it is made. Click a tile to take that entry off — nothing is lost but the work, because nothing was paid yet.

What a kit costs in time is real time out of somebody’s day. It is counted in game time and ranges from a fish hook at 12 minutes to a handcart at 2 h 48 min, with a torch at 24 minutes, cordage at 30 from lianas or 36 from hemp fibre, the knife at 44, the axe at 1 h 24 min, a sitting of four flint arrows at 1 h 36 min, the bow at 2 h and a fur coat at 2 h 12 min — each kit's own figure stands on its card in the tab. An afternoon at the bench is an afternoon nobody gathered, so who makes the kit, and when, is a decision. 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.

Closing the ring stakes the room’s ground. Every raw tile inside it gets a Levelled Earth blueprint — dug over, raked flat, tamped down. It costs no material at all, only time: 2.4 seconds of somebody’s work a tile, so a nine-tile room owes about twenty seconds and a thirty-six-tile hall a minute and a half. A room is paid for by its inside as well as its edge — draw the room you need. A planned floor takes no ground: the bed can be staked the same minute the walls close, on earth or boards still waiting to be laid. The eraser cancels the earth like any blueprint, and a tile that is already floored gets none. To lay it by hand, right-click a free tile of the staked ground: the companion levels the whole room, the tiles under beds and the fire included (a bed or a fire on a staked tile keeps its own click). Without that, or a build rule, nobody lays it. Levelled earth is not in the build ring and is worth no comfort by itself — it is the bottom rung of the floor lane, what rushes and planks go on.

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 stops the wind the moment the door goes in, and holds 18 °C for as long as a fire burns inside it — 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, under Structure → Roofs, dragged out like a floor.

Roof	Cost a tile	What it gives	How long it lasts
Thatch Roof	4 leaves	Keeps the sky off and nothing else — no added warmth	About a year. The cheap tier is the pressure to build the better one
Board Roof	1 wood	Makes the room 22 °C instead of 18	About four years

Closing a room stakes no roof — you draw it yourself. A closed ring stakes its levelled-earth floor and nothing else; the thatch or the boards over it are yours to drag out, and a room you forgot to roof is a room it rains into. Drag the roof over the wall ring as well, corners and doorway and all, so it sits on the walls the way a real one does instead of stopping a cell short of the eaves: a 5×5 hut is 25 tiles, not 9. They are ordinary blueprints — build them like any other, or cancel them with the eraser — and the pillars a wide span needs still come with the drag.

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:

Lane	From	To	What the better tier buys
Roof	Thatch (4 leaves)	Boards (1 wood)	22 °C instead of 18, and four times the life
Wall	Wall (1 wood)	Stone Wall (2 cut stone)	24 °C instead of 18, and it barely weathers — but every block waits on a mason’s yard
Floor	Levelled Earth (free, staked by closing a room) → Rush Floor (2 reeds)	Wooden Floor (1 plank)	Earth gives no comfort, rushes some, boards far more — and boards do not tread to mulch inside a year

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 road, a path and a camp flag never do.
• At 0 % a piece stops working: a workshop unlocks no job, a roof lets the rain through, a hut keeps nobody warm. Wear never brings it down — only fire does — 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 — unless a caretaker does it, who draws them from the stores.
• A roof marks itself the day it goes through: nobody is going to click four hundred tiles.
• In the jungle everything rots at double the rate — wet rot. A thatch roof there is half a year, an ordinary building three and a half, and a tool worked there wears out in half the time. An outpost in the south pays twice the rent of the same outpost anywhere else.

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 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. It is the last layer of the click: on a cell with a roof in sight, a piece or a floor on it, click the same spot again until the room comes up. One more click, or Esc, closes it.

The window reads the room out in six lines, each coloured — green where the room helps, red where it costs — and each with a tooltip that says what it costs and what fixes it. The line under a piece of furniture standing in a room gives the short form of the same readout.

The two beds are told apart by their labour, not by their price — and 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 — 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.

Mind where the bed lies. A straw bed in a hollow that floods is soaked from below, roof or no roof; a frame or any floor under it keeps the water out — the numbers are under Sleep.

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. And a room has to be swept: grime takes its share off the comfort, and the room panel carries the Clean this room button.

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

Demolishing is not a click. Pick Demolish and drag a rectangle: what it covers is marked with a red cross, not removed — one layer at a time, top down. A drag marks the roof you can see, and only the roof; with no roof in sight it marks what stands (beds, fires, walls); only where nothing stands does it take the floor. Drag again for the next layer. A roof switched off with “Show roof”, or hidden over somebody standing under it, is skipped — so to clear a bed out of a roofed room, untick the switch first. A planned roof always draws its ghost and is therefore always taken first. One single piece can be marked from its own window instead. 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

Under Blueprints 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. The scarecrow standing in a field is decoration — it keeps no animal away. 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 every crop 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.

Five more grow on jungle ground and nowhere else. The climate is the third thing a crop may ask of its site, after water and woodland, and it is the one you cannot build toward: no field outside the jungle carries one of these, and no warmed room either. Pick one on the wrong ground and the field says needs jungle ground and sows nothing. What the jungle grows is carried out or traded, never transplanted.

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

Of the crops that grow anywhere, 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. Four of the jungle’s five are perennials on the same terms — planted once, bearing again and again, the plot committed for good.

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 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 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 +0.8 % a level on the work clock (so +80 % for a master at level 100) 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 Y

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.

Y, 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.

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

Left-click a lumber camp, fisher's hut, farm, mason's yard, hunting lodge, healer's hut or gatherer's hut 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 what zones are 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 every trade.
• "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, Relief and Hygiene 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), and Dragon near (the dragon within 48 cells). 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, gather, heal, caretake), drink, eat, sleep, wash, off to the latrine, clean a room, 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), off to the latrine, wash, clean a room, caretaker (the trade with no workshop), light a torch (from a flame already in reach — it never walks to one), take cover (the nearest roof or rock within 30 cells, then stay — WHEN Dragon near → Take cover), 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.
• A supply line between two bases. Once a camp flag stands, Haul and Fetch take a third word: here (the nearest store, as before) or a base by its flag’s name, reached at any distance — and the Stores condition can watch another base (Stores at Base0 wood < 20). Two rules make the line: WHEN Carry wood ≥ 1 → Haul to Base0 above WHEN Stores at Base0 wood < 20 → Fetch wood ×10 from North camp. A load named for another base is never dropped into the pile you happen to stand on, and a named fetch takes only from that base. Tear the flag down and every rule naming it stops — it reads a fallen flag and does not fall back to the nearest store; raise a new flag and pick it again.
• 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. Its WHEN is a sensor dropdown with nothing chosen, exactly like its DO: picking a sensor is adding the first condition, and only then does the + for a second, AND condition appear beside it. Leave the WHEN blank and the rule reads ALWAYS — it fires whenever nothing above it does.
• Every word wears its glyph in its colour — amber for WHEN, blue for DO, violet for UNTIL and the other grammar — in the rule line and on a closed dropdown alike.
• The action, trade and sensor dropdowns open as a word list with the card beside it. The words this companion has learned stand first, each with what it costs in blocks (free in green); below a still to learn line come the locked ones, sorted nearest first, each showing how far along it is (7/20 over a thin bar) with the nearest marked next. Hover a word and its full card stands beside the list — rule text, worked example, and for a locked one the errand that earns it. A word the program already uses says so (in 2 rules, and under the card which ones). A word you may write but whose work would not run yet carries a red tag — no workshop, no table — so a rule that would read blocked is known before it is written.

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 — by the same deeds, or by being taught. 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 (Z, 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 with every fifth stroke struck through — one stroke per deed on a card costing up to 30, one stroke per ten deeds above that (a struck group of five reads 50, and the stroke being cut is part-inked) — 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 or double-click it in the pack (E). Either way a dialog asks first: it lays the card face up beside what it costs (the paper is gone, the word stays) and how many copies are left to hand on. Learn it spends the card and that companion knows the word for good; Keep the card or Esc keeps it.

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 (Z), 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. The learner is selected the moment the card arrives (two at once, both), and the feed line and the plaque end on T — press it and their rules open, ready for the new word. The camera stays put (F looks at them), and the game’s pick is no takeover: it counts as no intervention, and their program’s work stays the program’s.

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, so twenty drinks are a 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 — but not always one price, so a WHEN can arrive before the DO it is written for. The line the deck draws is deed before word: what a companion has already done by hand — hauling, drawing water, feeding a fire, a couple of nights' sleep, a day off duty — is theirs within the first days. Hunger and Thirst take about a week, so until then the drink and meal rules have to hang on the Clock.

A newcomer arrives part-taught — and a word can be taught on

Somebody who joins the party does not start from nought. On joining they are handed about 70 % of what the settlement already knows:

• Card tallies, part-filled. For every worked-for word somebody in the party owns, the newcomer's tally starts at 70 % of its count — a party that has earned Drink hands over 14 of the 20. Where several cards share a counter, the share is taken off the cheapest one the party knows. It is always a tally, never the card: the last strokes are theirs to do.
• Skills. 70 % of the party's average level in each skill, rounded down — the average, not the best, so one master does not make every recruit a journeyman.
• A settlement can only pass on what it has learned. The first recruit of a run arrives with next to nothing and the eighth nearly trained, so growing the party gets easier, not harder. The violet grammar is never part of it.

A worked-for word can be taught. On the deck (Z) a locked card shows Learn from … whenever a companion in the party owns that word. Press it and the teacher walks over and the two sit down together: every 1.8 in-game hours cut one stroke on the student's tally, and both of them do nothing else until it is full — a twenty-deed word from nought is a day and a half of two people, a recruit's last six strokes an afternoon. The last stroke opens the card exactly as the deed would, and no building is needed.

A school makes a deed count for more, and does nothing else. While one stands in working order every deed counts half again toward a card (two deeds cut three strokes), every hour of work earns half again the skill experience, and a lesson is over in two thirds of the time; a second school adds the same again. It never lowers what a card asks for, and it hands nobody a word.

Found words cannot be taught, only given. The violet grammar is paper: hand the card itself over in the transfer window and let them spend it.

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 fire under 30 % fuel calls for tending until it is back at 75 %, 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, and so do a latrine that is half full (only while a compost heap has room for it) and a room past 30% grime (which stays posted until it is swept clean). 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 — and still remembers: on ground whose contents are forgotten no rule finds a bush, a loose stack or a carcass, though trees and water there are still known. A companion takes work only from the settlement it is standing in, and never from further than 120 cells: a far camp posts its own tasks and only somebody who is there picks them up. Tending a fallen companion is exempt — it has its own reach.

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" 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 program is as blind as an order. In the thick heart of a fog bank, as in a cave with no light, a companion with nothing burning feels their way: whatever walk a rule sends them on goes one cell at a time in a straight line, at about a third of the pace, and stops at the first thing in the way. A torch or lamp alight in hand, a mate's, a fire's glow or a roof ends it. In the dark does not read fog — that sensor is true only underground — so WHEN In the dark → Light a torch will not light the way through one, and neither will Precipitation (fog drops nothing). No sensor reads fog: strike the light by hand.

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: 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.
• The written rule walks them home first; nothing else does. A Free time rule sends the companion to the nearest burning fire — with none lit, to a house or a bed; failing that, to a cold fire ring — and the stroll happens there (Free time at home (Campfire)). An errand above the rule ends with the walk back home. Off duty, or with no rule that applies, they stay exactly where they stand, as above; with nothing built in reach the rule does the same.
• 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: 20 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, rest home (where the rule would send each one).

Time & world

Read the land — wind, water, coast and soil

Every seed is its own island. The seed decides the shape — compact, stretched, cut by a great bay, or two lobes joined by a land bridge, with its mountain ranges at its heart or along its coast — and the proportions: a large desert or a small one (the jungle, the cold country and the bogs to match — together they always cover about two fifths of the land), a dry island or one full of lakes and rivers, open country or deep wood, one massif or many ridges, two to five bogs, two to four oases. What no seed changes: north is cold, and resources, animals and the year are as plentiful and as harsh on every island. On Hard the creator shows the island before you commit to it.

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 the island 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 deep and impassable, and there are three ways over it: a bridge, the only one you place yourself; a finished beaver dam, which sits where the beavers wanted it and moves when they do; and a ford. Here and there a brook or a mid-sized river runs shallow from bank to bank — paler water — and companions and animals alike walk straight across, at 60 % pace. Fords are rare (at least 110 cells apart), never near a lake or a river mouth and never on a trunk river, which is crossed only by a bridge or a dam. A ford is drinkable like the river it lies in, and nothing can be built in it. Where a river 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.

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. The jungle grows none of the four — it has trees of its own.

The deep wood opens into glades. Where a forest is five or more cells deep it breaks, here and there, into a small clearing of about fifteen cells — some 160 to 190 of them on a map. A glade is open ground in the middle of the timber: room for a fire and a night, and the wood's own plants find it by themselves, so twigs and leaf piles lie there, with hazel and mushrooms now and then. It is a camp, never a settlement site — far too small to build a base on — and not a larder: food in a glade is as rare as on any forest edge, because the map holds few hazel bushes and a glade gets its share of them and no more. The desert and the ice have none, and the jungle has its own.

A run opens on temperate ground unless you choose otherwise. On Brutal and in the Tutorial the party always lands on ordinary temperate ground. On Hard the creator lets you pick the landing — temperate land, tundra, swamp, desert, ice or jungle — and a map with no such ground on its main land falls back to temperate and says so. Otherwise the far country is somewhere you go.

The map ends in sea or in mountains, on every side. There is no open ground at the edge of the world: high country rises into a range there, low country sinks into the sea, and a valley that would have run off the map ends in a bay. So where you can still walk, there is still map — and a coast or a rock wall at the rim is the rim, not a region to cross.

A party that lands on the coast finds that coast thin in wood. When the starting spot lies near the sea, the woods along that shore thin out — most near the start, less the farther along it and the farther inland, not at all past about a third of the way across the map — and as many trees stand inland and toward the far end of the island instead. The trees right around the starting spot itself stay. So a coastal first camp runs short of fuel sooner, and the way to move on points inland. A start inland changes nothing.

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×.

The moon decides how dark the night is — and how far anyone sees in it. It turns through eight phases, one a night, and comes round every 8 nights: the run's first night is a waxing crescent, the first full moon stands over night 4, and since eight does not divide a seven-day season the full moon wanders through the year. A new moon is darker than a quarter moon, a clear full moon brighter and silver; clouds hide it — half under an overcast sky, a fifth in rain, nothing in a storm. Sight follows it: in the middle of a new-moon night a companion sees half as far as by day, under a full moon the whole way, and the nights between slide with the phase (fading in through dusk and out through dawn); the weather's own cut comes on top. A lit torch, lantern or headlamp adds its radius back, up to daylight sight — so a scouting walk at night wants a light, or a full moon. What counts as night — the watch, the hours animals raid, a broken night's sleep — does not change with the moon, and underground nothing knows about it. At night the clock plate names the phase; its tooltip gives the phase, how much of the disc is lit and the nights to the next full moon.

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, and walking through it wets nobody. Sleeping in it does: the puddles are the same hollows after every rain, and a straw bed or a sleeper on bare ground in one is soaked from below, roof or no roof — see Stay alive. Where the ground stayed dry in the last rain is where the straw belongs.

A drought and a flood show on the water itself. A small pond in a drought empties in patches down to a cracked mud floor, and fills again when rain reaches it. Rivers run low — a trickle between bare banks — but never dry out and still give a drink; only small ponds do. Rain on rain swells them: one shower does nothing, a long wet spell or a downpour puts them brown and over their banks, and it takes about two dry days to run off. Hover fresh water and the readout says running low, swollen and rising or in flood. A flood is only seen and read for now: it closes no ford and drowns no field.

Over frozen ground a storm is a blizzard. The line that turns rain into snow turns the storm too: dense driving snow, a white murk instead of the dark blue one, a howling wind — and the clock plate, the arrival line and a master sky-reader all call it a Blizzard. It is still the storm in everything that hurts: the same wounds, the gale, the blindness, the drowned fires and the same advance warning. But its snow lands dry — it soaks nobody, fills no rain barrel and leaves no puddles — and it buries the ground in snow within hours.

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 and the jungle never snow and a cave has no sky, so all three stay bare and fast — and the ice is never anything else: its snow does not melt, so it is the full 35% slower in every season. A companion walking over snow leaves footprints that fade over about eight in-game hours — anywhere snow lies, and on the ice, where nothing else marks the ground, they are the way back to the fire. Only companions leave them; animals do not.

Companions go out of their way to use a road or a path. A road is worth a third more speed and a path about a seventh, and either 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. Off the road everybody walks at the ordinary pace, 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 — everywhere but in the jungle, where no water is, river and well included. 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 — the water you sent them to is the water they get: a skin scooped a step short of a pond's shore is pond water, and a well or brook behind the companion does not clean it. 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 (E) 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. About three fifths of the island is ordinary temperate ground; the rest is one of five named regions, each with its own colour on the map and its name in the readout when you hover it. The seasons turn the extremes inside out — knowing which half of the year a country is survivable in is worth more than avoiding it. A region's edge wanders — lobed and ragged, never a ruled line — so where a country ends is something you find out by walking it.

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 is one crater lake on an island, one set of hot springs and one ring of standing stones. The stones are more than scenery: an automation card lies among them — the one that lets a rule ask how much daylight is left.

The far country the ice and the jungle

Two regions lie at the ends of the map and are the reason to walk there. The ice is the coldest ground in the north and gives nothing; the jungle is the wettest ground in the south and takes everything. Each holds what home cannot give — and neither is a place to settle.

Where they lie. The ice is cut out of the middle of the tundra, so the walk north always goes forest, taiga, ice: nothing but tundra lies against the ice on any side that is not the sea, at least two cells deep, and a small islet off the polar coast is tundra too. That matters because the taiga is the last wood there is. The jungle is one region far in the south; the desert takes the driest ground there and the jungle the wettest, so the two share the south between them. The first step anybody takes onto the ice, and the first under the jungle's crowns, is written into the chronicle (J).

Hover a cell and the readout says what its ground does to food. The climate that counts is the one where the food is lying: meat carried north keeps and comes home as fresh as the ice left it; a larder carried into the jungle is gone in days.

The ice how far you get is how much fuel you have

A fire is as much of a refuge on the ice as anywhere — there is just nothing to feed it with. No tree stands there and nothing lies on the ground, so an expedition is as long as the wood in its packs, loaded in the taiga on the way. Two things change that: fur that can sleep a night out there, and blubber.

• Blubber is the fire that needs no wood. A seal pays 6 slabs and a polar bear 10, on top of meat and skin; no other animal carries it. A slab burns a third longer than a log and weighs a third as much, in a campfire and a stone hearth alike — one seal keeps a campfire through a night. A fire still takes wood first; blubber comes after kindling and before charcoal. It is not food. It also fills the blubber lamp. A party that hunts can stay on the ice; a party that does not is on a round trip.
• Fur comes in two tiers, and the second one is made of the ice. Polar bear, arctic fox and seal leave an ice pelt, a white fur nothing else wears, and the polar coat, hood, mittens, leggings and boots are sewn from it. In the furs you can make at home a winter day on the ice can be walked and the night cannot; in the ice's own the night can. Coat and hood are enough for a still night; the other three are the margin when the wind gets up. The warmth of each piece is in Tools & clothing.
• Leave by your own footprints. In a whiteout you see a seventh of what you should, and the prints you left in the last eight hours are the only mark on the ground.

What lives there is written for that ground and found nowhere else — hunting them works as it does at home.

What the ice holds. Three things lie out on the deepest ice, close enough together to be one errand — and it has an order: camp, then ship.

The wreck is three decks at twenty below zero. Walk in through the breach in her side. Below is as dark as any cave — she has no shaft — and the cold is the building: at −20 °C a party in the furs of home loses Health slowly on every deck, and one in the ice's own furs does not. There is no dart, no plate, no valve and no secret; what she has is what a wreck has — rotten planking on two decks, which groans, splits and falls exactly as the manor's floors do, one open hatch in the main deck, a hole to fall through into the hold, and a bilge half under water. A map without ice has no wreck.

The strongroom key is not in the ship. It is the brass key at the expedition's camp, and the door opens for anybody standing at it carrying the key. A party that finds the ship first can walk all of her but that one room. The polar coat is the one piece of the ice's furs you can own without hunting for it.

The jungle food in every season, and nothing keeps

What grows there keeps growing through the winter. That is the temptation — and every other line of the table above is the price. Four things decide whether a trip south comes home:

• There is no drinking water. Every water in the jungle is foul: drinking it untreated builds dysentery exactly as a pond's does, the rivers included, and a well dug there is no better. Boil it, or bring full skins. A rain barrel still fills clean — and it rains there a great deal. The tile readout and the right-click tooltip say Jungle water. A Drink rule written for the river at home poisons its owner here.
• Sleep under a roof or beside a lit fire. Mosquito bites in the jungle build marsh fever: a companion who sleeps there unprotected comes down with it in about a day and a half; one under a roof or beside a burning fire never does. Herbs do nothing for it — fever bark does, and the fever tree grows right there. Carrying a patient out of the jungle slows the fever, bark or no bark. The sickness itself is in Stay alive.
• Put the furs down before you go in. A quarter of the warmth a companion carries is added as heat there, and the more fur they carry the faster they soak. Carrying a piece is wearing it, so the only way out is to leave the furs at the edge. A badge says when it is happening.
• Eat it there, or carry what keeps. Food ages three times as fast in a pack, in a pile and on the ground; a kill must be dressed within about ten hours.

Its wood is undergrowth. Among the trees it is dim at noon: a companion sees about half as far (11 cells against 20) and walks about 30% slower than in any other wood. Fell a tree and that cell is ordinary ground at once — a way through the jungle is one you cut. Binoculars double what is left, not what the canopy took. The trees are the jungle's own, and most are giants with a lot of wood in them: palms (base 6 wood), mahogany (10), the dark roof, and the rare kapok (14) that stands over everything. None of them turns in autumn.

The jungle is even from edge to edge. Its glades are small and lie everywhere at an even pitch, so what it grows is found all through it and not only at its rim. And nothing grows in stands there: every plant below stands singly. It is the one region with an even scatter — elsewhere you look for the patch, here you simply walk.

The Mood a sweet thing lifts is a treat and not a cure: it raises nobody's ceiling and drains back within hours. Banana, breadfruit, sugar cane, pepper and cocoa can also be sown — on jungle ground and nowhere else.

What lives there — hunting and raids work as they do at home:

What the jungle holds. Two things, on a map that has a jungle:

The temple is three storeys at 28 °C, and the forest is inside it. Its traps are snakes' nests, and they keep the pyramid's bargain: drawn on the tile, plain under a torch and invisible without one. A nest bites once — 8 Health, and snake venom after it — and is then gone, so a file may follow the first one through. There is no dart, no plate, no seal and no rotten floor.

Lightning and wildfire a full barrel is the extinguisher

A storm can set the forest alight — and the base, where the base is built of wood. Fire ignites, it never destroys outright: there is always a window in which to put it out.

What burns is what grew. Any piece with wood, planks, twigs, leaves, reeds, fibre or cordage in it burns, and piece by piece — a wall cell, a door, a hut, a bed, a roof tile. Stone, a stone wall, a road, every floor, a campfire and a stone hearth do not, and inside the base they stop a fire just as a road does outside it. This is the one thing in the game that brings a building down and takes goods with it.

Right-click anything burning or smouldering with a companion to put it out — on a burning cell that order beats every other verb. They pour the water they carry, then fetch more from the nearest water barrel, well or shore and come back, piece by piece, until nothing burns. So a full water barrel in the base is the fire extinguisher. Only you can give this order: no rule and no task fights a fire.

The alarm says where. Click its line in the event log and the camera goes there, and the time warp drops to normal speed. Hover a burning building and the tile readout gives the time it has left and the water it still needs.

Nobody is set alight, and automation stays out. Fire never takes a cell somebody is standing on, and a companion working a rule or a task never steps into fire: they wait at the edge. One you steer may walk in, and loses Health for every moment they stand in it. Animals flee it, bears and wisents included.

At most 60 cells are down at once across the whole island — burning, or burnt and not yet regrown — so a fire is an event, never the end of the wood.

The dragon it is never aimed at you — where you settle is the decision

There is one monster on the island, and it gets worse every year. It cannot be fought or killed, it never flies at the party or the base — and the further from its lair you live, the less of it you see.

• It is never aimed. Each passage is a straight line through its lair at an angle the seed decides, and its fire falls where the seed puts it. Nothing it does reads where the party or the base is. Far from its lair is safer, and that is the whole defence.
• It warns you. You hear it call before it comes, its shadow crosses the ground and its throat glows before each jet. On a fire passage heading your way (within 70 cells of a companion) the game says so in red, with the direction, and drops the speed to 1×.
• Its fire sets forest and buildings alight on the 3×3 it strikes — a burning building is put out like any other fire — and burns whoever stands within a cell and a half in the open: 10 Health at once (never the last point) and a bad burn (see Buffs & debuffs). Cover is a roof, a roofed building, rock or a cave; forest is not. A burn heals with herbs and a bed; left untended it turns deadly, and a second burn on top of the first is deadly at once.
• Fear. A companion awake who sees it pass loses 8 Mood, the same for everybody. Living inside its realm caps Mood — the The dragon’s realm badge — by up to 20 points at the lair, nothing at the realm’s edge.
• Terror. Game within 10 cells of its shadow bolts — bears and wisent too.
• The blight. Around the lair the ground sickens slowly. On ground past half blighted the water is foul — wells included, nothing grows back, nothing new takes root, and a field withers. Below that line food already rots faster, up to three times as fast. When the dragon has moved on the blight recedes slowly. The Blight lens (X) shows how far it has spread over ground you have explored.
• A rule can answer it: the sensor Dragon near (within 48 cells) and the action Take cover (walk to the nearest roof or rock within 30 cells and stay there), written WHEN Dragon near → Take cover high in the program. You earn both cards by getting a companion under cover by hand twice while it flies near.
• On the Tutorial it only flies over — no blight, no fire, no burns.

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 level 50 says which quarter the weather comes out of; at level 70, 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 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. Standing there all day buys nothing more.
• 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. Weather-reading runs to 100 like every skill, and what it buys comes in ten steps of ten levels: nothing at all is said before level 10. 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 30 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 — unless their light is gone: a rule feels its way in the dark one cell at a time like anybody else.

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.

Dig & trade the money is in the rock

Gold nuggets, opals, rubies and diamonds are the money — and they are found by digging rock. Nothing drops them and nothing crafts them; the only ones that lie waiting are the few in the wreck and the temple. A nugget weighs 0.1 kg and a stone 0.05 kg, so a fortune is the one thing a migration carries whole; the pack lists them under their own Valuables chip. The same digging brings up iron ore and coal, which are not money but tools.

Digging needs a pickaxe in the digger's own pack. The stone one is a bench kit — 3 stone + 2 wood + 1 cordage, about 2 h 36 min of in-game work — and it also takes stone off a rock face ×1.5 faster. It wears like the axe: 400 seconds of work for a whole one, then mended by right-clicking a mason's yard for 1 wood. The iron pickaxe from the smithy works at ×2 and lasts three times as long. A pickaxe takes both hands, so a digger cannot hold a torch — which decides how a dig underground is lit (below). The makes, the hands and what a tool's quality means are in Tools & clothing.

• An order that cannot be carried out is refused at the click, with the reason — no pickaxe, no wood, too little mountain — never after the walk. The light is checked at the rock.
• A mine is a way in like any cave mouth, drawn as a doorway with its shoring. Behind it is a short entrance tunnel and then solid rock, a block sized by the mountain it was cut into (14 to 44 cells a side) — and as dark as a cave.
• One order drives a gallery, not one cell. The digger carries straight on, away from where they stood, until they strike something, the light goes out, or the rock in that line runs out. What happens after a find is your call.
• The spoil is stone: one a cell into the pack while it fits, left behind after that — and, in the right rock, ore or coal with it. A find the pack cannot hold is dropped at the digger's feet, where it glints.
• Digging is hand work. No rule can do it. It trains Masonry — so the work times above shrink with the skill, and with the pickaxe's own ×1.5 — and each cell counts toward the Stonemason card.
• Pyramid, manor, wreck and temple walls are never dug, and hold nothing.

Not every mountain pays

Each cell of rock dug is a chance at a find: 3 % in the poorest rock, 20 % in the richest, and most rock is poor. Three things set the odds, and all three can be reasoned about:

• The place. Richness changes from mountain to mountain. The first dig in a place says how rich its rock is, once, in the event log — barren, thinly veined, veined or richly veined — so the second dig is an informed one. Cutting a mine says it at once.
• The depth. Deeper is richer: the odds climb with every cell of distance from the entrance, to twice the base odds at 24 cells. A mine is a thing to drive, not a hole to poke.
• The climate picks the stone. A find is gold 56 %, an opal 20 %, a ruby 15 %, a diamond 9 % — and the land above tilts it, most of all in the far country: ice rock runs to diamonds (×3), jungle rock to rubies (×2.6, and gold ×1.2), desert rock to opals (×2.5), temperate rock to rubies (×1.4), swamp rock to gold (×1.3), and tundra rock keeps a trace of diamond (×1.2).

The veins are part of the world, fixed when the map is made. The same cell holds the same thing every time, so reloading never rerolls a dig.

Iron ore and coal

The rock holds what tools are made of, too. Ore and coal are spoil, not a find: they come out with the stone when a cave wall or a mine gallery is dug, go into the pack beside it, and never stop the gallery.

• Which mountains are rich in ore is not which are rich in stones. Ore has a richness of its own, so a mountain that is barren of gems may be the one to dig for iron — where to dig for money and where to dig for tools are two questions.
• Depth does not matter for ore. The first cells of a gallery pay as well as the last, so a short dig in the right mountain is enough.
• It is heavy. A lump of ore is 3 kg — as much as a log — and coal 1.5 kg, so a long gallery fills the pack fast; what does not fit is left behind like the stone.
• What it is for. The bloomery smelts ore over charcoal or coal into iron, and the smithy forges the iron knife, axe and pickaxe. Coal also burns in a campfire and a hearth, a third longer than charcoal.

Travelling traders

From day 8 a trader may walk in: once seven days have passed since the last one, each day is a 30 % chance. The event log names the direction, and they wait two days. A trader comes whether or not the party is full, and cannot be recruited.

Left-click the trader to open their table — and walk a companion over first. The bargain is struck with the pack of the living companion standing nearest, within 4 cells: never with the stores, and not with whoever is selected. That pack's weight limit holds.

• Selling reads as selling. The right column is headed Your pack — to sell; lay goods on the table and the footer says the trader pays you: 3 Gold nugget before you agree. A unit worth under a tenth of a nugget is shown as 20 for 1 gold.
• You are paid in whole stones, largest first, out of the trader's own purse; only the rounding under one nugget stays with the trader.
• A trader never takes goods for nothing. Two bargains are refused, with the reason: a plain sale worth less than one nugget — lay more on the table (wood sells at 0.05, so it takes twenty logs to make one) — and one that would leave a nugget or more unpaid because the purse cannot cover it.
• The purse is small — 8 to 20 nuggets, sometimes a few opals, rarely a ruby — and it is all a trader can pay with. So a big load is sold against something you want, or in the part the purse can cover.
• What a trader carries: two or three pieces of kit or clothing, two to four goods from far away (flint, feathers, leather, cordage, pelts, seed, and sometimes pepper, cocoa or fever bark), two or three kinds of provisions (preserved food, travel cakes, nuts, herbs) — and, every second trader, one rule card. It is the one way to buy a violet word instead of finding it, and the dearest thing on the table.
• Binoculars come from a trader or the kit page — nothing crafts a pair, and a trader only sometimes has one (18 gold of worth, so 27 asked). Whoever has a pair in the pack sees twice as far in the open: 40 cells against 20, with no hand taken. Not underground; a storm, a fog and the jungle's canopy still take their share of the doubled reach; a second pair adds nothing. Give them to whoever walks ahead.
• Not everything has a price. A trader will not deal in water, waste, spoiled food, or the one-of-a-kind finds of the run.

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 a lantern 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. Inside you step in at the south edge of the first storey with the hall opening up ahead and the stairs down at the far end — as in the manor, the wreck and the temple. A dungeon a save entered before 0.26 keeps the layout it was built with.

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 a keepsake first: carrying it home buys a chronicle line and a hidden achievement, and a trader takes an ornament as goods — worth 6 gold, so 3 in the hand — not as money.

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, and nowhere near enough to walk by.

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. 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.

Storey	What it is for
Great Hall	Teaches. One plate, one gate, a rack of torches, no hazard at all.
Long Gallery	Coming down. The floors are the danger here.
Servants’ Wing	Hides the secret.
The Cellars	The decision: two pressure plates in opposite wings and one gate on the stair.
The Vault	The family’s gold, a handcart — and, on a floor that has already split, an automation card.

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. At the zoom the game starts at the work, the footsteps, the fires and the animals play at full volume; they fade out only as you pull back towards the overview (below zoom 0.6), where you hear the beds and the music and nothing else — and the near ones only within earshot of the view, so the other base is not heard while you watch this one. The river and the sea shore fade with the distance to the water and fall silent once you zoom out. 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: the rain, the work loops and the clicks each ride a slider of their own, so turning the interface down does not turn 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. There is no engine logo; 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.

Every new run opens with a parchment after the loading screen: the four rules of the wild — think before you move (pausing costs nothing), stay warm and dry, water before food (rivers run clean, ponds make you sick) and nobody is coming (a wound left alone festers). The world waits until you click or press a key; the ambience and music are already playing. Never on Continue or a load, and Settings → Gameplay → New run switches it off.

The companion window holds everything you do to one companion, as five tabs — each key opens its own tab (press again to close; Ctrl+Tab walks the tabs). All five are about the companion you're steering — and pressing one with nobody selected 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 companion's card says who needs you with a word, a stripe and its frame, and hovering the card unfolds the full stat bars. The row of small bars beside each card — one per stat, always in view — is off until you switch it on under Settings → UI; the card is narrower without it. There is no running list of everything the settlement owns: a total of every pile on the map at once, from anywhere, through fog, is a question nobody standing in the world can ask — the goods 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 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, the chart, 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.

Every visible thing on the map answers a left-click with a small window of its own — a portrait and the thing in numbers, pinned where you clicked while the corner readout goes on following the mouse. What it shows and how it closes is under What a left-click opens.

How large any of it is drawn is yours to set. The windows ship small on purpose, so the map stays in view behind them; if that is too small to read, the answer is a slider and not a lower resolution — Settings → UI sizes each part of the interface by itself. A tooltip and a drop-down list are drawn at the size of the part they belong to, so enlarging the windows enlarges their small print with them.

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 → Climate → Rainfall → Blight → 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 the grip in its top-left corner to resize it — it stays pinned bottom right and grows up and to the left. The log lies under every window: an open window covers it where the two meet and keeps its own size and place, so close the window to see the whole feed again.

What happens to one companion floats over that companion, where a harvest's gain shows: +1 Foraging (12) or +1 Level (5) in the boon green for a step up, and a red Cast failed, Shot missed or Spark failed for an attempt that came to nothing. Every skill level floats; the log keeps only every tenth, so a skill's hundred levels do not bury the feed.

The plate on top of the log is the craft queue: one row per companion with something on their bench, each entry with the product's picture and how many are still to come, the kit in hand with its progress. Click an entry to take it off. It is hidden while nobody is crafting.

The clock 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 → UI offers Everything, Fewer (no wildlife chatter) and Only what matters. Verbosity only filters the live feed — the chronicle (J) always keeps the full history.

Achievements — yours, not the run's J

Forty-six 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. Twelve rows stay nameless until they happen, most of them 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.

Four of them ask whose hand did the work. A run keeps count of your interventions: taking a companion over, giving an order, moving goods with your own hand, and staking a build site. Watching, panning, opening a window and running the clock fast are not interventions.

The two day-100 rows carry a bar: the best day any run reached with that style still intact.

Thirty-two of the forty-six 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. The title screen offers three — Tutorial, Hard and Brutal — and opens on Hard. The Tutorial saves exactly like Hard; what else it changes is below.

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.

A save from an earlier release does not load. A save keeps the seed and what you changed on the map, not the map itself, and this release grows a different island from the same seed — so the game refuses the file rather than set a camp down on ground that has 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.

The Tutorial — a full run on a small island in plenty

The third button on the title screen, ahead of Hard. It is the easy way in and a whole run — play it as long as you like. Play starts it at once: no creator, three companions rolled for you.

Your companions explain the game in speech bubbles that stay until you click the little arrow in their lower-right corner — the next page, or closing on the last one. Fifteen lessons in a row, from moving and drinking through tools, fire, a straw bed and a roof, walls, fishing, a scouting trip for feathers, hunting, caves and mines to the rule program, plus a word at the first lit fire (boiling), the first night, kill, cave and card, a fallen companion and the first autumn. Keys are named as you have them bound, and the right mouth speaks: the one who earned a card announces it, the one who walked into the cave finds it dark, and a fallen companion is never the one calling for help. Early on come Tab / Shift+Tab to hop between companions, Shift+right-click to queue orders, and the advice to keep every companion busy at once rather than one working while two watch.

Each lesson sets tasks, and the next lesson waits until every one is ticked. They stand in small green at the left edge, in groups under their own headings, several at once:

• The first steps: select a companion; see every companion drink and every one eat (the list counts them, 1/3, 2/3 — food can be handed over in the transfer window); fill a waterskin; queue two orders.
• Tools and fire: 6 plant fibre, an axe, 3 twigs, a campfire, a flint, the fire lit, pond water boiled. A Wood group (collect 10) appears the moment somebody carries an axe.
• The camp — bed and roof come before walls. Straw beds (six leaves each, Build → Camp) and a thatch roof dragged over them (four leaves a tile, Structure → Roofs, its pillars staked for you): three beds and a finished roof of at least 3×3 over the beds and the fire, the fire lit. Only then walls and a stockpile.
• The night: at 22:00, or once anybody’s Tiredness falls under 30 %, put every companion to bed yourself.
• Food and the way out: everybody fed and drunk to the full; make a rod and fish; then scout 40 cells out — gathering on the way, food above all — and bring back 4 feathers for the coming bow; only then hunt, enter the cave and dig ore.
• Automation: the lessons open with the first card, walk you through the first rule and Auto, and end wanting three rules on one companion and programs running on two.

Settings worth knowing about

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

• Gameplay — Slow to 1x when someone is dying, edge-scroll speed and border width (0 switches edge scrolling off), the autosave interval, and whether a new run opens with the four rules of the wild.
• UI — everything about the interface itself: how large it is drawn (below), the event log's detail, whether companions speak, the small stat bars on the companion cards (off as shipped) and the FPS readout.
• Graphics — resolution, window mode, VSync, anti-aliasing and quality. 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.
• Keybindings — every binding above can be reassigned.

The size of the interface is seven sliders, not one. Each runs from 70 % to 150 % in steps of 10 and takes effect when you let go of it; 100 % is how the game ships. Everything scales the whole interface at once — the map keeps its own zoom — and the six under it resize one part each, multiplied on top of it:

Reach for the part first, and for Text size last. Large type in a frame that did not grow crowds; if a window is too small to read, enlarge Windows.

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.
• What animates gets its own CanvasItem. Godot re-runs the whole _draw() of any item that calls queue_redraw(), so a moving part goes on a child canvas item and only that is redrawn (WorkshopView._life_layer is the pattern). A guard on the redraw does not satisfy it; drift check 11 refuses a bare queue_redraw() in a per-frame callback.
• A hidden node still holds its drawing. visible = false keeps the recorded commands, and those are renderer RIDs in pools capped at 262144 — so a gate that hides must queue_redraw() on the way out as well as in, and a gate on the fog is not a gate on the camera. Console drawn; tests/draw_budget_probe.gd measures it, on a display only.
• Performance is measured on the late-game fixture (scenario latebase, see Testing) — a probe on a fresh map measures a settlement that does not exist. A per-frame cost is booked by name with JobRunner.profile_add("<system>:<branch>", since), which is what perf prints.
• A .tres is written in the editor's own form (uids, sorted keys, no ; comments) through tools/resave_resources.sh or tools/resource_format.gd, or the editor rewrites it on every F5. No code may read meaning from a Dictionary's key order in a .tres — a save re-sorts 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/polar/jungle, grown as one region each — the enum is append-only, its value is the stored byte), landmark (world/landmark_types.gd: crater lake / hot springs / standing stones, the traces somebody left — old camp / cairn — and the authored places: pyramid, manor, mammoth, lost expedition, wreck, temple, ruins), 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 surface grid 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.

Mining, fire, regions and the zoom limit

The fog’s memory — autoload/fog_manager.gd

The front that walks the old route is not simulated: cells are stamped as they leave sight (STAMP_MINUTES_PER_CELL 1.0), so they come due in the order and at the pace they were walked, and _run_queue() files at most VEIL_PER_FRAME (100) a frame. The edge is soft over edge_minutes (20), and ground whose contents are forgotten is drawn at edge_brightness (0.5). What the party built is pinned: _anchor_building() sets RUNG_PINNED on a building's footprint plus anchor_margin_cells (2) and releases it when the building goes. The memory rides the save under the manager's own key; a save from before it comes back with everything explored at legacy_rung (5 — fully settled). reveal_all() hands the map over for good; set_fade_enabled() is the console's fog fade, and fog memory reads one cell.

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].

A trader is a wanderer too (WandererController.trader, WandererSpawner.spawn_trader()): trader_first_day (8), trader_min_days_between (7), trader_chance (0.3/day), trader_linger_days (2). The bargain is items/trade.gd — Trade.quote() prices it and Trade.settle() is the one function that moves goods (BUY_MARKUP 1.5, SELL_RATE_GOODS 0.5, SELL_RATE_CURRENCY 1.0, CARD_CHANCE 0.5). A quote carries its own refusal: quote() returns reason, and settle() moves nothing while it is set — a sale worth less than one nugget, one the trader's purse cannot cover, a load the pack cannot carry. Only the rounding under one nugget (lost) stays with the trader. A far good is priced by the walk: Trade.distance_factor(item, cell) runs from NEAR_FACTOR 0.6 in the item's HOME_BIOME to FAR_FACTOR 2.0 once it has been carried FAR_SHARE (0.45) of the map, and both buy_price() and sell_price() go through it. The stock is rolled from KIT, FAR_GOODS and PROVISIONS (the binoculars are a KIT row, worth 18 gold in ItemCatalog); the window is ui/trader_panel.gd (TraderPanel.strike(), reach_cells 4). Both strangers arrive only on ground the party can walk to. Console trader.

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, tool_class + tier (the makes of one tool), max_durability/wear_per_work_second, repair_workshop/repair_cost, warmth, wind_block, carry_bonus_kg (the handcart's 90), sight_multiplier (the binoculars' 2.0) 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. Twenty definitions today: the stone makes axe and pickaxe (×1.5, 400 durability, mended at the lumber camp / mason's yard for 1 wood) and knife; the iron makes iron_axe and iron_pickaxe (tier 1, ×2.0, 1200 durability, mended at the smithy for 1 charcoal) and iron_knife (×1.5 butchering); handcart, binoculars, and twelve pieces of clothing in three tiers (cloth and leather, fur, and the ice's polar set).

One tool per class counts. work_multiplier() picks, per tool_class, the best make in the pack that is neither broken nor blocked by the hands, and only that one multiplies in and takes the wear — a stone axe beside an iron one is a spare, not a third tool. A gate names the class, not the make: class_tool(&"pickaxe") / has_class() / the static class_tool_of() / carries_class() answer with the best make carried, and JobRunner.tool_refusal(tool_id, verb) is the sentence every refusal goes through (“none in the pack” and “the hands are full” are different sentences).

Two hands and a head. The hands are the one part of the loadout that is not derived from the carry: Loadout.Hand (LEFT / RIGHT), take_in_hand(item, side), stow_hand(side), hand(side), held_items(), and for the head put_on_head() / take_off_head() / head_gear(). What an item needs is data in ItemCatalog: two_handed (axe, pickaxe, bow, fishing rod and the iron makes; ItemCatalog.is_two_handed()) and head_gear (the headlamp; is_head_gear()). blocked_by_hand(tool) / blocking_item(tool) are true only for a two-handed tool while something else is held in either hand, and can_use(tool) = carried and not blocked is the gate the bow, the rod and digging ask; the axe and pickaxe simply give no bonus. What is on the head blocks nothing. The flame lives beside it (light(), snuff(), burn(), is_alight(), light_radius()): a lamp with a refuel item in the catalog (the blubber lamp, the headlamp) takes the next slab from the pack in _refill() instead of being consumed. Saved as hand (the right, the old key), off_hand and head; absent keys load empty, and a two-handed tool stands in both fields.

Carried = equipped for everything but the hands and the head, 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. In the jungle the same warmth turns on its bearer: TerrainManager.fur_heat_at(cell) adds a quarter of it as heat, and the only way out is to put the furs down. Wear is multiplied by Loadout.rot_rate() (the jungle's 2.0). Repair is Command.REPAIR (right-click the matching workshop). Console equip, durability, warmth.

A made tool has a quality, and a repair stops at it. JobRunner.craft_quality() grades the maker's Crafting skill between craft_novice_quality (0.5) and 1.0, and Loadout.set_crafted_condition(tool, quality) writes it once: the tool starts at that share of its kind's durability, and _ceiling(def) = max_durability × quality(tool) is what repair() mends back to — never past it. repairable_tools() leaves out a tool already at its ceiling. QUALITY_FLOORS 0 / 0.65 / 0.8 / 0.95 name it Poor, Average, Good, Epic (quality_tier(), quality_name()); has_quality() is the gate for every readout, so a found or traded tool, or one from an older save, is whole and shows no grade. Saved under quality beside durability. Console durability quality.

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 (0.15) / despondent_recover (0.25) — a latch, and the latch itself rides the save, so a companion between the two lines does not come back cured. Automation: base_rule_slots (30; rule_slot_budget() adds the planning table's 6), 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, hunt_stalk_cells (40 — how far the Hunter ranges from its first stand), hunt_stand_seconds (18). The three chances a beginner fails at all run novice → master on CharacterSkills.mastery(): a cast fish_base_chance 0.25 + fish_skill_chance × mastery, 0.9 for a master (cast_chance(); the water's own water_chance(density) is rolled after it, so a fumbled cast teaches and an empty lake does not), a point-blank shot hunt_base_hit 0.35 → hunt_master_hit 0.95 (hunt_hit_chance()), a spark light_novice_chance 0.45 → light_master_chance 1.0 (light_chance(), which each miss in a row raises, so never more than four running; a failed spark costs no tinder and a lit torch always lights a fire). Crafting never fails — it grades (craft_quality(), see Equipment). roll(chance) is the one die and skill_odds_line(skill) the sentence the Skills tab's tooltip and the console's odds print. A miss pays the skill's failure_xp and floats a red line through FloatingTexts.spawn_fail(). Fatigue penalties live on player/player.gd (fatigue_walk_penalty, fatigue_work_penalty, mood_low_ratio 0.6 and mood_work_penalty 0.5 — work slows linearly from 60 % Mood to half at empty).

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 is simply a night not slept: Tiredness keeps falling, and there is no debt carried into 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.

Good sleep is rewarded; a short night leaves no debt. Player.deep_sleep_factor() runs from 1.0 at lying down to 1 + deep_sleep_bonus (0.4) after deep_sleep_full_hours (8) slept in one piece, and multiplies both the rest and the bed's healing in JobRunner._rest_in_bed. A gap longer than deep_sleep_grace_hours (0.1) ends the run and its depth; being woken in the dark still costs Mood through MoodController.on_woke(). The run rides the save for a companion saved in bed. Rest, bed healing and waking repair are all paid per game hour (paced_rest_per_second(), _paced_bed_heal_per_second(), VitalsController.paced_regen_per_second() — see GamePace under Time), so a night keeps its length and its worth when the day's length is changed. Console stat sleep_hours.

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, HAULER and CARETAKER, which BuildingManager.is_job_unlocked returns true for unconditionally: none of them has a workshop, 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, gatherer, caretaker, auto, cards, deck, school, hands.

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 fourteen 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.

Work and the body follow the day’s length — scripts/main/game_pace.gd

A new clock or per-second rate goes through GamePace at its one choke point, or the dial bends everything but it. Progress is stored in seconds, so changing the day in mid-build shifts that build's fraction. Write-up: docs/time-and-temperature.md.

A paused clock decides nothing. Engine.time_scale = 0 does not stop _physics_process — the engine still calls it, with a delta of zero. Everything scaled by delta stood still by itself; a decision did not, so Player returns on a zero delta before the runner is ticked (only _advance_visuals(0.0) runs, so a selection ring still follows the click). An order given in the pause is taken and acted on when time runs. What ticks on the render clock rather than on delta must be told: a GPU emitter is stopped by neither the time scale nor a paused tree, so a fire's smoke listens to TimeWarpManager.clock_stopped (Autoloads) and sets its speed_scale. tests/pause_probe.gd is the measurement.

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

Sizes — autoload/graphics_manager.gd, ui/ui_windows.gd, ui/ui_settings.gd

The panels, file by file

Save / load

A save does not store the map — it stores the seed. A load grows the world from the seed again and lays the player's diffs over it by raw cell coordinate, and that contract holds only while the generator is the same generator. So SaveManager.SAVE_VERSION (9) is bumped by any change to worldgen, not only by a change of file layout, and a slot of another version is refused in read_meta() rather than read: it would set its buildings, companions and resource nodes down on ground that has moved out from under them. The refusal is the feature. Version 8 is the glades cut into the deep wood (WorldGenerator._open_forest_glades): the pass runs after the spawn pick, so a seed's spawn, rivers and landmarks stay put, but a few hundred trees per map became open ground, and the species quantiles and the stock normaliser run over every forest cell that stands — so every other tree shifts by a hair. Version 9 is the closed map edge (_close_map_edge), which sinks or raises the outermost band of every world. The reasons for 3 to 9 stand as comments above the constant; add the next one there. The file is two Variants and the order is load-bearing: a small metadata header first (what the save browser lists), the payload second. version is the file format; the header's game_version is the build stamp and never gates a load.

What a load costs. Its floor is a new game's stand-up; everything above that is the restore. tests/load_time_probe.gd walks the path load_game takes and prints apply_state step by step (SaveManager.report_costs), every listener on BuildingManager's and TerrainManager's signals by total cost and call count, and the first frames after — re-run it after anything that touches the restore. Three rules came out of it:

• A load replays signals, so a listener that does whole-world work per signal is quadratic here. building_placed fires once per restored building and terrain_changed once per cell the save disagrees with the seed on. RoomFloorRenderer now only marks itself stale and repaints once, deferred (_mark_dirty), and TerrainRenderer uploads its textures once a frame. A new listener on either signal coalesces, or it shows up in the probe.
• TerrainManager.layers_restored means “the ground may have changed”, not “rebuild”. TerrainCollision keeps the walkable mask it built from and rebuilds only the rows that differ; past RESYNC_FULL_REBUILD_ROWS it rebuilds everything.
• A pending load grows nothing the save is about to replace. ResourceSpawner and AnimalSpawner skip their placement while SaveManager.has_pending_load(); the resource spawner still deals the pool the restock draws from.

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.

Hand-written keys beside the group: room_grime, floor_offered / roof_offered, build_shortcuts, settlement_names (only the next base number — a flag's name and radius ride its building), wanderers. Resources ride as columns (ResourceManager.save_columns()); a save with one dictionary per node still loads. The autosave collects on the main thread and encodes and writes on a worker (flush_write() before any read or rewrite of the slot; a forced save lands before it returns). On Hard, SaveManager.exit_needs_confirm() makes Quit, Main Menu and the close button ask when nothing was saved in the last minute (PauseMenu.ask_leave); Brutal saves itself on the way out.

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. The bench's queue rides with the order (craft_queue, kits by resource_path).

State that lives only in memory must be re-derived on restore, or a load changes the run. Three cases, each one a bug once: a companion is restored by raw position, so CaveManager.arm_at(character) both re-arms the threshold latch and calls reconcile() — without the second half a companion saved inside a cave and not moving (asleep, say) was in no interior until they took a step, with no sight, no light and no glow from the mouth. The despondency latch rides the save, because it is entered under despondent_below and left at despondent_recover, and a companion between the two lines otherwise comes back cured. And the deep-sleep run is saved for a companion saved in bed. A key that is absent simply loads as its default; what an older layout needs is a lift at the reader, never a second format:

Console commands

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

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

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

Companions & stats

Windows, items & the hand

World & terrain

Time & weather

Resources & animals

Building & automation

Sound

Saves, meta & staging

Testing & tools

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

Versioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

A MINOR release costs more than a PATCH. Only x.y.0 freezes its own wiki archive — the page plus a re-shot copy of every screenshot, roughly 10 MB per release. Paying that for a one-line fix is what made a bump a ritual, and a ritual that expensive does not get performed, which is how a whole day of work ended up sharing one number. A patch release therefore rides on the archive of its minor line: needs_wiki_archive() and release_line() are the seam, the suite checks a patch against v<major>.<minor>.0, and wiki/snapshot.sh leaves a patch alone entirely — no archive, no picker, no page edit (--force for the rare patch that really changed what the page says).

Publishing the build — one .exe, always the newest

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

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

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

The wiki archive — one frozen page per release

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

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

Keeping this in sync important

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

1. Write the changelog entry under ## Unreleased. That section is this page's to-do list — see the next callout.
2. At the next MINOR release, update the matching Player Guide section here, and — if the change touches code structure (a new file, seam, tunable or console command) — the matching Developer Reference section, re-shooting the screenshot where it shows.

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

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Companions — prototype developer wiki. Player Guide is the player’s manual; Developer Reference maps mechanics to files, seams, tunables and console commands. Screenshots made with tests/screenshot.gd (seed 12345).