How this world works
Everything below is true. None of the numbers are — they get re-rolled every game, from the ranges printed at the bottom. This guide tells you the physics; it will not spoil the pattern. That part is yours.
Why this game is built this way
A state of nature. No rules, no referee, no menu of things to buy. A body, a world, whoever else woke up in it, and a clock. Everything you can do is something a body can do: forage, eat, build, carry, talk, give, strike, stand in front of someone. The interface is deliberately thin because the interesting part is what people do with so little.
The veil of ignorance.Rawls asked what society you'd design if you didn't know who you'd be in it. Here you commit to what you care about — or roll the dice — before you know your body, your world, or who else is here. Then you live with what you were dealt. The commitments are the yardstick; the dealt hand is the experiment.
The mirror, not the sermon.There is no master score and no correct way to live. Every goal is scored on exactly the one thing it says it measures, the raw number is always visible, and the room's number is the harmonic mean — the average that cannot ignore whoever got left behind. Individual well-being and the community pull against each other on purpose; the game shows you where you landed and refuses to tell you what to feel about it.
Stochasticity is the ontology. Nearly every facet of the world is a tendency plus variation, drawn fresh per run from a declared distribution — the models and their ranges are printed below. Nothing is hidden by fiat; it's hidden the way the world hides things, behind noise and time. And all of it is seeded, so a run is a replayable fact.
A laboratory. Every run records its aspirations, its conditions, its events, and its outcomes. Depersonalized, that record is research material: what do people commit to behind a veil, and what do those commitments do to the worlds they land in?
Quick start
1.Behind the veil, slot your goals into tiers. You don't know your body yet. That's the point. Commit.
2. Move with WASD. Forage with F, eat with E. Do this before you feel weak, not after.
3. Watch the colors. Somewhere in this world there is a rule about where food grows. It is never written down and it is never the same twice.
4. Find the others. Talk with T— if they're close enough to hear. Build with B. Hand someone food with ⇧G. The clock runs (five, ten, or twenty minutes — the room picks) whether or not you make it count.
5.When something with a shape comes at you, watch for the white ring closing — that's its wind-up. Step out of the dashed circle, or hit it right then.
Controls
Always: WASD or arrows to move · hold ⇧ to run (or Q to lock it) · F forage food · G gather material · E eat · V drop one item · B build a shelter here · J tools · M leave a note · T talk · Esc closes any menu.
Near things: the bar over the map shows what you can do — click a button, or hold ⇧ and press its underlined letter. (Shift, because the plain letters are already verbs.) Shelter: enter/exit, reinforce, expand, stash, lift. Person: give ⇧G food or ⇧H material, smile, snarl, attack, protect ⇧P. Anything that bites: strike ⇧A— it picks whatever's nearest in reach, else the nearest structure.
The veil
Before each run you choose what you care about — survival, plenty, equality, dominance, legacy, peace — before you know what body or world you'll get. Rawls called this the veil of ignorance. We call it the character screen.
Your choices become your yardstick. Every goal card says exactly what it's measured by; the scoreboard shows that measure live, with the raw number under each bar. At the end, the game measures the run against what yousaid mattered — not against what the game thinks a good life is. Choose honestly. Or don't; the mirror works either way.
Your body
You inherit a body drawn from distributions: how fast it moves, how much it can carry, how efficiently it forages, how it handles heat and cold, how hard it hits, how well it guards, how quickly it learns tools. You are never shown these numbers. How you feel is the only signal you get — the energy bar, the felt badges, and how the world responds to your attempts.
Two consequences. First: don't assume what worked in your last body works in this one. Second: the fastest way to learn your body is to try things and pay attention. Your body is revealed in full exactly once — on the results screen, after it's over. The ranges it was dealt from are printed below.
The world, its colors, its weather
The map is stained with colored fields. The colors mean something: each resource follows a hidden recipe over hues — sometimes one color, sometimes a combination(“where red and green overlap”), sometimes with a color that actively suppresses it. The recipe is re-rolled every game, and every world adds noise on top — some worlds keep their promises, others mumble. Nothing in this world is a perfect pattern.
Foraged ground depletes and regrows. Weather swings on a per-world rhythm; comfort sits in a band and stress grows fast outside it, filtered through your body's own heat and cold tolerances. A shelter blunts the weather, and its quality depends on who built it and how carefully.
The sky
The weather also has tantrums, on a schedule this world keeps to itself. Rain: colder, the ground drinks it in and food regrows fast, foraging a little worse — a shelter matters. Drought: hotter, nothing regrows until it breaks, foraging much worse — eat what you banked. Bloom: everything grows; forage while it lasts. Each world leans one way. The badge by the clock says what's on and how long it has left; the map takes on the color.
Together
Talking (T) carries only as far as a listener's hearing — which varies by body. Smiles and snarls are visible signals. Markers (M) are notes you leave in the world for whoever passes.
Giving is the trading primitive. Stand beside someone and hand them a nutrient (⇧G) or a material (⇧H). You can see their load; a full pack can't take it. A trade is two gifts — there's no contract, only whether they give back. A gift to someone who looks weak (under a quarter of their energy) counts as a rescue. Shelters have a stash anyone inside can lift from; that's the other way to share.
Standing near people does more than feel safer — it is safer. Predators lose their nerve around company, and in a fight, every ally near you adds real leverage to both your attack and your defense. A mob is not an army, but three friends are worth more than a weapon.
When someone near you takes a hit, you get the choice that defines the run: defend them (⇧Por the context bar) and you soak part of every blow aimed at them for a while — they'll know you stood with them. Or watch. Doing nothing is also a choice, and the mirror remembers both.
Danger
Other people. Anyone can strike anyone (⇧A). Damage scales with strength, fighting skill, and the best weapon in hand; what lands is reduced by the target's guard, their company, and their defenders. Kindness (striking nothing alive) is a goal you can commit to. So is dominance. The game moralizes neither.
Creatures. Every world has two or three species, each wearing a shape and a color — that is the only name you get. Size tells you something honest: bigger things bite harder, take more killing, move slower, and wind up longer. What they want you learn by watching. Some leave you alone and run when you come close — those are meat, if you can catch them. Some ignore you until you step into their patch, then drive you out; leave and it stops. Some hunt — they notice the lone and the tired from further away, company shrinks their nerve, and a shelter hides you outright. And some steal: they close in on a full pack, snatch a nutrient, and run; fell one and you get it back. They live where their own hidden color recipe says — in some worlds the prettiest fields are the hungriest. When one is close, the bar over the map names it and reads its posture.
Raiders. Sometimes people who are not from here come in from the edge of the map, on a rhythm this world keeps to itself, and they come for something: some hunt bodies, some empty stashes and carry them off, some go straight for structures, some run you down and snatch from your pack before leaving. Shelter walls, allies, and declared defenders all matter. They can be felled, and whatever one was carrying drops at your feet.
Fighting
Everything that bites does it the same way: it closes, it winds up — a white ring tightens around it, the bar says WINDING UP with the seconds left — and then it lunges. That wind-up is your window, and you have two good moves. Step out of the dashed reach ring and the lunge lands on air (a dodge — the results count them). Or strike it right then for a counter: extra damage, and it staggers — shoved back and helpless for a moment, which is when you hit it again.
Range. Two rings. The dashed ring around a creature is its reach; the thin ring around you, drawn whenever something that bites is close, is yours. Bigger things reach further. Stand where it can't reach you but you can reach it, and wait.
Timing.A strike on something that isn't winding up and isn't reeling is a glancing blow— it's guarding, moving, uncommitted — and lands at about half, and it leaves you off balance for longer than a clean strike does. Mashing at a stalking creature mostly bounces off and costs you the window you were waiting for. Your strikes have a cooldown either way; “too soon” means set your feet.
Big slow things are easy to read and hard to kill; small fast things are the reverse — outrun them or fight where you can back off. A weapon in hand makes every strike harder. Strength fades with hunger, so a starving body hits soft. Fighting costs calories; sometimes the right answer is to walk away.
Scoring — the mirror, not the sermon
There is no master score. Your goals are scored on exactly the thing each one says it measures — no blends, no extrapolation — and the raw number is always shown under the bar. Your individual pointsare those scores, weighted by your tiers, averaged. The room's collective pointsare the harmonic mean of everyone's individual points — the mean that cannot ignore whoever got left behind.
Below that, folded away, are the plural lenses: collective dimensions (continuity, abundance, floor, equality, resilience, efficiency, peace, dominance), private ones (survivor, provider, builder, explorer, caregiver, hoarder, dependent, predator, autarkist, legacy), and the labels drawn from them — the Caregiver, the Hermit, the Dragon, the Bandit-King. Descriptions, not grades. None of it is scored.
The math, exactly
Nothing occult. Each goal below is one measurable thing, scored 0–100 from the run's raw ledger. Multiply by your tier weight (×3 central / ×2 important / ×1 default / ×0.5low), average, and that's your individual points. Freedom means no number is computed at all.
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| Live to the end | 0–100 | Time survived, as a share of the run. |
| Save everyone | 0–100 | Share of the room still alive. |
| Food surplus | 0–100 | Food banked per person — packs and stashes — averaged over the whole run. |
| Even shares | 0–100 | How evenly resources are held across the room (1 − Gini). |
| Save the dying | 0–100 | Food or material handed to someone who was critical (under 25% energy). |
| Self-reliance | 0–100 | What you gathered yourself, against what you drew from stashes or others. |
| Build big | 0–100 | Successful builds — new shelters, expansions, reinforcements. Six per ten minutes reads 100. |
| Map it all | 0–100 | Share of the world's cells you've come within sight of (15u). |
| Peace | 0–100 | Damage you dealt to people or their structures. Zero is 100. |
| Dominate | 0–100 | Damage you dealt to people minus damage people dealt you. |
| Trade widely | 0–100 | Peers you've both given to and received from. |
| Efficient body | 0–100 | Your useful output (finds, builds, tools) per calorie you burned. |
| Leave a legacy | 0–100 | Shelters you helped build still standing, and tools in hand, at the end. |
| Rest & breathe | 0–100 | Your energy, averaged over the run. |
| Kindness to living beings | 0–100 | Strikes you landed on any living being — people, creatures, raiders. Zero is 100. |
Where a measure needs a yardstick, here it is: food surplus reads 100 at an average of 8 food banked per person; build big at 6 successful builds per ten minutes (scaled by run length); efficient body at 0.12 useful output per calorie (a find is 1, a build 3, a tool 2); save the dying at 3 rescues per ten minutes; trade widely at 3 reciprocal partners; legacy at 8 (two per shelter standing, one per tool); peace falls to 0 at 25 damage dealt. Everything else is a plain ratio.
Collective points = the harmonic meanof every committed player's individual points. One person at 10 drags a room of 90s down to ~45. How well everyone achieved their own goals is the mark of the society. Rank people by individual points; rank games by collective points.
Everything that gets rolled
Two layers. First, the generative models — the machines the game is made of, written out. Then the parameters each one takes, with the range it's drawn from and how it varies: per run (drawn once when the world or body is dealt), per event (jittered each time something is scheduled), or per act (rolled every time you try something). Unless a row says otherwise, a draw is uniform across its band. The tables say what can happen. What did happen is on your results screen.
The models
| model | form | how it varies |
|---|---|---|
| a body | 24 independent uniform draws | each trait is drawn uniformly from its band, once per body; nothing is correlated by design — the tank, the legs, the hands, and the guard are separate dice |
| a world | size, fields, recipes, honesty, regrowth | size uniform; color fields scattered uniformly with uniform radius/intensity/hue; each resource recipe draws hue A, hue B (≥60° away), and-ness = u³ × 0.7 (skewed toward simple), a suppressor in a third of worlds; honesty uniform 0.35–1 |
| temperature(t) | mean + swing × sin(2πt / period + phase) | three uniform draws per world plus a random phase; stress = 0 in the comfort band, linear to the edge, then (distance/10)^1.8 × 0.6 beyond; divided by your heat or cold tolerance |
| drain per second | idle burn × (1 + stress) × shelter factor + move cost | shelter factor = 1 − quality × 0.55 × your shelter benefit (floor 0.2); a sprint multiplies move cost by your run cost |
| forage odds | clamp(0.2 + recipe(x, y) × 0.65 × skill × (1 − depletion)) × sky | the recipe score mixes hue alignment across every field covering you: lerp(A, 1.9 × min(A, B), and-ness) − suppressor × max(0, V), blended with per-field noise by (1 − honesty) |
| the sky | jittered schedule + a weighted die | gap and duration are per-world means; each event's actual gap and length are mean × (0.6 + 0.8 × hash); its kind is drawn from the world's three weights, one of which was leaned by +1.2 |
| a species | size first, then everything hangs off it | size uniform; bite, hp, speed, and wind-up are uniform draws scaled by size (bite and hp up, speed down, wind-up longer); motive from a weighted die; at least one species per world is hostile |
| a creature's day | seeded waypoints; reactions to you | a fresh waypoint near home every 7s from a hash; engagement is a rule per motive (distance, your energy, your company, whether you're sheltered); the lunge resolves after the wind-up by distance alone |
| a raid | jittered schedule from the edge | same schedule shape as the sky; spawn points hashed onto the border; one motive per world decides what they walk toward |
| a strike | (0.4 + strength) × skill × 6 × weapon × leverage, then the target's guard | strength is energy-derated; a counter (landing during a wind-up) multiplies by 1.6 and staggers |
| a build | one uniform roll against skill + 0.025 × attempts | success below the threshold; the remainder splits half neutral, half backfire |
| a tool | 0.2 + learning × made-before ± 0.1 | then each craft moves it by (roll − 0.25) × 2 × 3·learning × headroom — usually up, sometimes down |
| every deliberate act | cost × your multiplier × (1 ± your jitter × roll) | so no two attempts cost the same, and no two bodies pay the same |
Your body — 24 traits, each drawn independently, per body
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| max energy | 80–120 | the size of your tank; you start full |
| death at | -50–-15 | energy this far below zero and the body fails |
| base speed | 4.5–7 u/s | walking speed before hunger and load slow you |
| base strength | 0.4–1.8 | drives strike damage and how big your dot looks; fades as energy falls |
| move cost | 0.08–0.22 /u | calories per unit walked |
| idle burn | 0.25–0.42 /s | calories per second just for existing (≈5–10 min to empty, standing still) |
| derate shape | 0.5–1.5 | how sharply speed and strength collapse once you're below zero |
| carry limit | 6–16 | items you can hold; over that, finds are wasted |
| encumbrance | 0.3–0.8 | how much a full pack slows you |
| hearing | 2–18 u | how far speech and notes reach you |
| eat recovery | 0.5–1.7 × | energy per nutrient = 18 × this |
| forage skill | 0.5–1.7 × | multiplies your odds when foraging food |
| gather skill | 0.5–1.7 × | multiplies your odds when gathering material |
| heat tolerance | 0.5–1.7 × | divides heat stress; higher = hot weather hurts less |
| cold tolerance | 0.5–1.7 × | divides cold stress; independent of heat |
| tool learning | 0.03–0.15 | how fast your tools improve with each one made or crafted |
| build skill | 0.2–0.85 | chance a build succeeds; failures are half neutral, half backfire |
| fight skill | 0.2–1.6 × | multiplies the damage your strikes deal |
| guard skill | 0.2–1.6 × | blocks a share of every hit you take (capped at 75%) |
| run speed | 1.7–2.4 × | sprint speed multiplier |
| run cost | 2.2–4.5 × | sprint calorie multiplier — some bodies sprint cheap |
| action cost | 0.75–1.35 × | multiplies the calorie cost of every deliberate act |
| action jitter | 0.06–0.25 ± | no two forages cost exactly the same |
| shelter benefit | 0.6–1.4 × | how much a shelter's quality reduces your idle burn |
The world — per run
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| world size | 100–250 u | square; the viewport shows 100×100. Cells are 10u |
| color fields | 7 per 10k u² | radius 12–28u, intensity 0.18–0.45, hue anywhere on the wheel |
| pattern honesty | 0.35–1.0 | how faithfully colors keep their promise; below 1, per-field noise muddies the rule |
| food recipe | hue A, hue B, and-ness, suppressor | food grows near hue A; a minority of worlds demand A AND B (and-ness cubed toward 0, capped 0.7); a third have a color that suppresses it (0.12–0.35) |
| material recipe | same shape, rolled separately | material has its own recipe — the food rule tells you nothing about it |
| regrowth | 0.012–0.05 /s (food), 0.008–0.045 /s (material) | per cell; each success depletes a cell by 0.25 |
The weather — per run
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| mean temperature | 40–80°F | the baseline |
| swing | 5–40°F | how far it swings either side of the mean |
| period | 45–220s | seconds per full cycle (a sine) |
| comfort band | 50–70°F | no stress; 40–80°F mild; outside that, stress grows as (distance/10)^1.8 |
The sky — profile per run, then per event
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| gap between events | 110–360s | mean; each gap jittered ±40% |
| event length | 35–110s | mean; each jittered ±40% |
| first event no sooner than | 30–200s | |
| mix | three weights, one leaned | each world leans rainy, dry, or lush; every event draws its kind from the mix |
| rain cooling | 8–18°F | felt temperature drops; food regrows ×1.8–3; foraging ×0.8–0.95 |
| drought heat | 6–14°F | felt temperature rises; NOTHING regrows; foraging ×0.5–0.8 |
| bloom | ×2.5–4 regrowth | foraging ×1.15–1.45 |
The creatures — species per run, then per creature, then per encounter
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| species per world | 2–3 | each with a distinct shape (of six) and color; at least one species is always hostile |
| size | 0.55–1.7 × | pulls bite and hp up, speed down, and lengthens the wind-up |
| bite | 2–9 | damage per landed lunge, before your guard |
| hp | 8–40 | they can be felled |
| speed | 2.6–7.5 u/s | stalking or fleeing; roaming is slower |
| pack size | 1–4 | members per pack |
| packs | 0.5–1.4 per 10k u² | at least one per species; hard cap 32 creatures per world |
| motive | skittish 30% · territorial 30% · predator 25% · scavenger 15% | what it wants; learned by watching, never labelled in play |
| sense | 6–16 u | how far it notices you; predators stretch this ×(2 − your energy) and shrink it by √(1 + allies) |
| territory | 8–20 u | territorial only: the patch around home it defends |
| wind-up | 0.4–0.9s | how long it telegraphs before a lunge — your window; scales with size |
| cooldown | 1–2s | between lunges |
| meat | 0–3 | food when felled (skittish species: 1–3); plus anything it snatched |
| home | best of 6 seeded points | by the world's hidden danger recipe — sometimes the prettiest fields are the hungriest |
The raiders — profile per run, then per wave
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| motive | hunt · loot · raze · rob | hunt bodies · empty stashes and carry them off · hit structures ×1.6 · run a body down, snatch from its pack, leave |
| waves every | 210–390s | mean; jittered ±40% per wave |
| first wave after | 90–240s | |
| wave lasts | 40–70s | mean; jittered |
| raiders per wave | 1–3 | the group |
| power | 4–8 | damage per strike, before your guard |
| hp | 10–28 | they can be felled; what they carry drops |
| size | 0.8–1.7 × | and one of three shapes per world |
| aggression | 0.5–1.6 × | scales pursuit radius (18u base) and how fast they swing (0.6s wind-up, 1.2s cooldown, both ÷ aggression) |
| looting | 1 item / 1.5s | leaves once carrying 3 |
How bodies look — per run
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| dot size | 0.25–0.6 + 0.4–0.9 × strength^0.7–1.5 | how strength shows; the mapping is re-rolled per world so size never means the same thing twice |
| dot opacity | floor 0.1–0.25, curve 0.7–1.5 | how vitality shows |
In play — per act
| what | dealt from | what it does |
|---|---|---|
| forage / gather | P = clamp(0.2 + recipe × 0.65 × skill × (1 − depletion), 0.02, 0.85) | × the sky's food multiplier; costs 0.7 cal (jittered); one roll per press |
| build / expand / reinforce | P(success) = min(0.97, build skill + 0.025 × attempts) | failures: half neutral, half backfire (−0.08 quality, −3 hp). Build: 2 material + 4 cal |
| construct a tool | quality = 0.2 + learning × made-before ± 0.1 | cap 0.95; 1 material + 3 cal |
| craft a tool | Δ = (roll − 0.25) × 2 × 3·learning × (1 − quality) | ~75% improves, ~25% degrades; 1 material + 2 cal |
| any deliberate act | cost × action mult × (1 ± jitter) | no two attempts cost the same |
| your strike | (0.4 + strength) × fight skill × 6 × (1 + 0.8 × weapon) × leverage | leverage = 1 + 0.15 per ally within 10u (max 3); reach 3u; cooldown 0.8s; costs 4 cal |
| a counter | × 1.6, then 1.2s stagger | land your strike during a wind-up; the enemy is shoved 1.5u and can't act |
| a glancing blow | × 0.55, and your next strike is 1.5s away | a strike on something neither winding up nor staggered — guarding, moving, uncommitted |
| what lands on you | raw × (1 − min(0.75, 0.25 × guard × leverage)) × (1 − min(0.6, 0.35 × defenders)) | guard skill, company, and declared defenders all shave it |
| a lunge or swing | wind-up, then: in reach → lands; out of reach → a dodge | the wind-up is drawn as a closing white ring and named in the bar |
| raid schedule | gap × (0.6 + 0.8 × hash), stay × (0.6 + 0.8 × hash) | a pure function of (world seed, time) — every peer sees the same wave |
| climate schedule | same shape, own hashes | and the kind of each event drawn from the world's mix |
| creature roaming | new waypoint near home every 7s, from a hash | seeded, so unengaged creatures sit in the same places on every machine |
Mapping counts a cell as seen once its center comes within 15u of you; the viewport shows further, but mapping means going there. Company is anyone within 10u; reach for most things is 2u. Everything is seeded: the same world seed and the same choices replay the same run — see PHYSICS.md in the repository for the formulas in full.
The ontology (for the curious)
Stochasticity isn't sprinkled on this game; it's the material. Almost every facet — body traits, world size, weather rhythm, the sky's tantrums, color recipes, what lives where and what it wants, raid tempo — is a draw from a distribution: a tendency plus variation. Then in play, every uncertain act (a forage, a build, a bite in the dark) is a probability shaped by the world and your body, resolved by a roll.
All of it is seeded. Your run is a pure function of its seed and your choices — which means a run can be replayed, argued about, and studied. The world isn't out to get you. It's just drawn that way.
For science
Runs generate research-grade logs: the seeds, the world's physics, every body, every commitment, every event, and the final scores. You can download your own from the results screen (“export run”). Depersonalized run data may be used for research purposes — what people choose behind the veil, which worlds produce which societies, who defends whom, who gives and who takes. Aggregate findings will be published as occasional summaries at /research. No accounts, no names, no tracking — the unit of study is the run, not the person.