The Manual

Everything the world knows about itself.

The world in one paragraph

Interval is deterministic: fixed rules, integer arithmetic, time in one-second intervals. Every node computes the same next state from the same inputs, so nobody is the referee. A quorum of witnesses named in the constitution certifies each interval — they recompute the transition themselves and attest to the result, not to the proposal — so a finalized interval carries a proof anyone can check against the founding record alone. Under a network split the world stops finalizing rather than fork. A stopped world, never two. The rules live in SPEC.md, the constitution; the finality machinery in CONSENSUS.md. Changing either founds a new world, and nobody is ever force-updated.

The world’s name is the hash of its constitution. A node whose copy hashes differently is playing a different game and is refused at the door — not as a version check, but because it literally is a different world.

The nine trades

Levels run 1 to 100 on a curve that is cheap to begin and ruinous to finish. The first fifty levels cost about a third of what the last seven do, and mastery at 100 is 37,503,873 experience. The final level alone is near a seventh of the whole ascent, so a citizen can sit in sight of it for a very long time while everybody watches. Master all nine and the world hears of it.

A trade here is a whole trade, not half of one. Nothing about the world said that felling a tree and burning it were two crafts, or that the citizen who digs the ore should have to hand it to somebody else to be useful — so they don't.

Trade	Kind	How it trains
Woodcraft	Craft	Fell trees for logs; saw them into planks at a pit; cut them into bows, staves and arrows; and light what is left. The axe, the bench and the fire are one trade.
Earthcraft	Craft	Work the seam and the metal both: ore and coal from the rock, iron and steel at a burning furnace, gear at an anvil. At earthcraft 70 the magic-rocks of the high country open.
Shorecraft	Craft	The rod and the pan. Fish the water's edge, then cook, smoke or salt what you landed — nobody fishes in order to carry a raw fish home.
Hearthcraft	Craft	The field and the pot. Sow, grow, harvest and grind; ferment grain into ale and fish into broth at a brewpot you raised yourself.
Prowess	Arms	One ladder for the whole of close fighting. A landed blow pays it and so does wearing one. Style — aim, force or even — decides how the blow lands, not what it teaches.
Marksmanship	Arms	Every drawn arm: bow, crossbow, handgonne, javelin. Distance is the whole of the trade.
Sorcery	Arms	The trade of refusing combat. Alch a thing into coin and practice from your first log; later press three magic-stones into a sigil and cast mend, anchor or still.
Wayfaring	Road	Going out and coming back. Ground seen for the first time pays it, and so does weight carried across ground you have. Both halves of the road are one trade.
Mourning	Mourning	The only trade paid in what it cost you. Offer a priced thing on consecrated ground and it is gone: the ledger records what it was worth, and the same gift twice is worth less. At 70 the dearest priced thing you carry survives your death.

Standing and calling

Standing is the sum of your level in all nine trades. It privileges nobody: a wayfarer who never draws a sword and a warden who never brews are measured by one rule. Mastery is a milestone, not a ceiling — a citizen who keeps going keeps rising, and the only real limit is how large a number the world will hold.

Calling is what you swear. It was once computed from whichever trade you had most experience in, and that stopped being possible when nine trades replaced eighteen skills: one number cannot tell a berserker from a warden, or a farmer from a brewer. So it is a word you say about yourself, at level thirty in the trade it belongs to, and it cannot be put down. There are seventeen.

Trade	Callings
woodcraft	forester · firekeeper · fletcher
earthcraft	miner · smith
shorecraft	fisher · cook
hearthcraft	farmer · brewer
prowess	fighter · berserker · warden
marksmanship	archer
sorcery	alchemist
wayfaring	cartographer · runner
mourning	mourner

Swearing is not only a label. A sworn calling learns half again from its own work and half as much from a sibling’s, so a forester is quickest at the trees and slowest at the bench. The three callings of prowess are paid in flesh instead of in rate: a berserker takes a smaller frame, a warden a larger one and a harder guard. Being unsworn is a choice and not a waiting room — an unsworn citizen trains everything at par, forever, and some will.

The body

Every citizen has the same frame: sixty-four, from the first interval to the last. It does not grow with a skill, because when it did, a citizen who had never been in danger was harder to kill than one who had, purely for having swung more.

What progresses instead is being hit. Armour is not a subtraction from damage; it is in the roll. A citizen in star plate is not shrugging blows off, they are being missed. Against the same attacker, the difference between nothing and a full star suit is a fivefold change in how long you last — and no change at all in how hard you are struck when it lands.

Death. Your pack is gone; your trades, name and coin survive. You also take a wound, one permanent point off the frame, to a maximum of ten. Wounds are cleared only at the wellspring, which is not in any town.

Mending

Food is a rate. Its value is the total it will pay and its kind decides how fast: the preserved and the brewed mend one an interval, cooked food two, and a cooked deep-water fish three, which is the quickest mending in the world. Nothing arrives in the interval it is swallowed, and eating twice takes the larger debt rather than the sum — so a full pack of fish is not a second health bar.

Three things restore at once, and each is paid for differently. A well is a place: full, free, instant, and then dry for a hundred intervals for everybody. Mend is a person: a sorcerer casts it on somebody else. Forage is the ground: eaten where it lies, impossible to carry, and it rots.

Carrying, and where things live

A pack is twelve slots. It is not storage; it is the ceiling on what one piece of work may cost, which is why recipes are deep rather than bulky.

Every counting house is its own vault. Ore banked in the Crags is in the Crags. There is no counter anywhere on the island from which a citizen can reach the whole of what they own, and that is the rule that makes hauling a job somebody will pay for. A vault holds eight thousand of any one kind, so a career at one seam eventually has to move, sell, or walk.

The island

Tallyholm, seven countries. A tally is the split stick whose two halves prove each other.

Greenwood Timber and the sawpits. Where most citizens learn a first trade.

Heartlands Fields, towns, the seedsman, the roads that join everything.

Downs Open grazing, twenty-eight living things, and long sight lines.

Moor The gibbet, and the king who stands at it raising the dead he sends.

Crags The seams. Iron, coal, and above earthcraft seventy the magic-rock.

Fens Deep water and what lives in it. The best fishing and the worst footing.

Wilds The best ore, the skeleton-knights, the dragon. Nothing here helps you: no forage grows, and no town will take you in.

Ten towns, two passes through a Ridge that runs sea to sea — the southern one shut behind a rockfall the island may dig through together — nineteen meres and tarns inland, and one island in the northwest that appears on no road and carries no label. The living map is computed in your browser from the founding seed by the same functions every node verifies.

The economy

Prices are not set by anybody. A keeper buys at a floor and a stall is whatever a citizen asks. A stall costs ten planks and two iron-ore — twelve slots, the whole of a pack, so it cannot be carried with anything else — takes twenty intervals of standing still to raise, and is one to a citizen. It is the only market that works while you are asleep.

Mourning is the only trade paid in what it cost you. Offer a priced thing on consecrated ground and it is destroyed; the ledger records what it was worth, and the same gift twice is worth less. It is the one ladder that converts wealth into progress instead of time, which is why the callings that never fight can still climb.

Scripts

Automation is expected and permitted. An executor runs its own node like everyone else, so the same program grinding timber is also verifying every interval and enforcing the constitution on itself. Nothing here is priced to punish patience, because a script does not mind waiting and the whole of that cost would land on the person. What a script cannot do is be somewhere: the scarce thing in this world is presence, and no amount of clicking buys more of it.

Leaving

A citizen may cross to any world founded on a constitution they accept, carrying their trades, their name and their goods — goods arrive at the counter nearest where they wake, since the vaults of a world that no longer exists name nothing. Founding data does not expire with the world that held it.

This is what governance looks like here. There are no votes. If you dislike a rule, you write the world you would rather live in and see who crosses. The constitution is short enough to read and the whole engine is one file.