INTERVAL

A world with a constitution instead of an owner.

Every second, the world advances one interval. Everything that has ever happened here happened on one, and every interval is written down. There is no server deciding what is true: each machine running Interval computes the next state itself from the rules, and a quorum of them certifies the result. If they cannot agree, the world stops — it does not split into two worlds that disagree.

The rules are a document. Not a description of the game, the game itself: SPEC.md, and its hash is this world's name. Change a line and you have not patched Interval, you have founded a different world, and everyone is free to stay where they are. Nobody here can be updated against their will, charged, or shut off.

• Your key is your character

  A keypair made on your own machine and never sent anywhere. There is no account to recover and nobody who could take it. Back up the file; it is the whole of you.

• Nine trades, and none of them ranks you

  A citizen is introduced by their standing — the sum of all nine trades — and by a calling they swear at level thirty and can never put down. Fighting is one trade of nine. This world does not measure people by their capacity for violence.

• Goods stay where you left them

  Every counting house is its own vault. Ore banked in the Crags is in the Crags, and getting it anywhere else means somebody walks. That is why the road is a trade.

• Ranks are proofs, not claims

  Nobody publishes the standings; they are arithmetic anyone can redo from signed deeds. A rank here is not this site's opinion of you, and it comes with you into any world founded on the same constitution.

• A script is a citizen

  Automation is expected, and it is priced into the economy rather than forbidden. A bot runs its own node, so the same program grinding timber is also verifying every interval and holding itself to the constitution. What cannot be automated is being somewhere.

• Any window you like

  There is no official client. This site ships one; the same world renders in a terminal, in ASCII, in 3D, or in whatever anyone builds against the spec. None of them is more real than another.

The island

Tallyholm — a tally being the split stick whose two halves prove each other. Seven countries: the Greenwood, the Heartlands, the Downs, the Moor, the Crags, the Fens, and the Wilds. Ten towns, two passes through a Ridge that runs sea to sea — the southern one shut behind a rockfall the island may one day dig through together — nineteen meres and tarns inland, and one island in the northwest that appears on no road and carries no label.

What follows is not a picture of the map. It is the map: the living copy is computed in your browser from the founding seed by the same functions every node verifies.

Fell timber in the Greenwood and saw it into boards. Dig the Crags. Fish the Fens and cook what you land. Sow a field, raise a brewpot, keep a stall so that somebody else does not have to walk. Chart the frontier and sell the way across it. Carry another citizen's goods for money. Go into the Wilds, where the best ore is and nothing helps you.

Play in your browser to be in it now. The Guide is your first hour and how to run a node. The Manual is everything the world knows about itself. Standings are on the Hiscores.