The Guide

Your first hour, and how to stop trusting this website.

The fastest way in is Play. You wake in the middle of the island with twelve empty slots, twenty-two coins and no trade above level one. Click the ground to walk. That is the whole of the interface you need to begin.

The first hour

  1. Walk to water and click it. You start fishing, and a raw fish lands in your pack every so often. Everything in this world works this way: you point at a thing and your citizen works at it until you point somewhere else.
  2. Cook what you caught. Stand at a fire and click it. You will burn most of the first ones. Everybody does — the burn rate falls as shorecraft rises, and fishing and cooking are the same trade, so the failures are still teaching you.
  3. Eat, and notice that it takes a moment. Food does not restore you the instant you swallow it. It mends over several intervals — a cooked fish gives six, two an interval; a deep-water fish gives ten at three. So eating is something you do before you need it, not instead of being hit.
  4. Fight something small. Click a goblin. Combat runs itself: you trade blows each interval until one of you falls. It will take a while, because your damage at level one is terrible, and that — not the goblin's strength — is what makes the early fights cost you. Expect about eight of them before you need to heal.
  5. Eat forage where it lies. Goblins and wolves often leave it. You cannot pick it up or carry it: click it on the ground and you eat it on the spot for six, all at once. It is the only instant mending you can get alone in the field, and it rots in fifty intervals, so take it during the fight rather than after.
  6. Alch a log. Click anything priced in your pack and choose alch it. It comes apart for four coins and your first sorcery. Four coins is meant to be poor — a keeper pays far better. What alchemy buys is not having to walk to one.
  7. Drink at a well. Every town has one. Stand beside it and click: you are restored to full, free, instantly. The well then runs dry for a hundred intervals — for everybody — so drinking first and leaving it empty behind you is a real thing to do to somebody.
  8. Bank something, and remember where. A counting house is its own vault. What you leave at Anchor is at Anchor; standing in the Crags will not get it back. Choose where your things live.
What dying costs. You wake at the spawn and everything in your pack is gone. Your trades, your name and your coin survive. You also take a wound: one permanent point off your frame, up to ten, and the only thing that clears wounds is drinking at the wellspring — which is not in a town, and nobody will tell you where it is. Selling to a keeper is how a day's work stops being something you can lose.

Then what

At thirty in any trade you may swear its calling — forester, smith, cook, brewer, berserker, warden, runner, one of seventeen. A sworn calling learns half again from its own work and half as much from a sibling's, and it cannot be put down, ever. It is the first thing in this world you cannot undo, so take a while over it.

Your standing is the sum of your level in all nine trades, so anything you do raises it. At a standing of fifty you may claim a name in the ledger, held forever, with no release and no transfer. Until then you are your key, which is the truer name anyway, and you get to see the place before deciding what to be called in it.

Past that: stalls, anvils, the seedsman who is the only source of seed in the world, waystones, star gear, a brewpot of your own, charters sold to citizens who cannot cross without one, and the Wilds. The Manual has all of it.

Run a node

The browser window already makes your key on your own machine and keeps it there: generated locally, never transmitted, and every deed signed before it is gossiped. What it does not do is verify. It trusts this site's node to tell it the truth about the world.

To check every interval yourself instead of taking anyone's word for it, run a peer. Your machine computes the whole world independently and refuses any state it did not derive.

git clone https://github.com/intervalplace/interval
cd interval && npm install
node join.mjs yourname

Your citizen appears for everyone. Your key is written to identities/ and never leaves the machine. The constitution check runs first: if your copy does not hash to this world's rules, the node refuses to start and prints both hashes. That is not an error — it means you are holding a different world.

By default your citizen simply exists while your node verifies. Add --chop to run the example executor, a bot that trains woodcraft and banks its logs. Write your own with sdk.mjs: scripts and people enter this world through the same door.

Or run a world of your own

You need Node.js 22.5 or later.

git clone https://github.com/intervalplace/interval && cd interval
npm install
node serve.mjs yourname     # then open http://localhost:8787

Prefer a terminal? node play.mjs yourname — WASD to move, g gather, x attack, f cook, e eat, q quit.

Three things worth knowing on day one