Testers
The living
To walk the rings, die in them and tell us what broke. Much of the world only works with two or more: treating a wound, taking an apprentice, carrying a letter, a trade.
The Gilded Cage
Eternal autumn in a suffocating dusk.
Flat farmland under a golden-grey fog. Oaks and birches with dry leaves, still ponds, wild wheat. The only ring where anything grows, and the only one that is safe. Safe, not happy.
Last Hearth
The capital stands where the six highways meet, and it is built by hand, block by block: walls and gates, a mint, a post office, plots rented by the week. Inside its walls only masons and carpenters may build.
A trade, learned from a master
Every character takes up one trade and at most a second. You learn it as the apprentice of a master and rise from apprentice to journeyman to master, never by grinding. A miner digs the ore, a smelter turns it into bars, a smith forges the blade, and the alchemist's oil keeps it from rusting. Anyone else who breaks ore out of the rock gets worthless stone.
Standing is given by others
There are no levels. Good roleplay earns renown, and renown lets someone above you appoint you: from peasant to specialist, gentry, high lord. Whoever appoints you stakes their own name on it. The branded stand outside all of it.
Coin you can lose
Copper, silver and gold coins are items in your pocket. Only the gentry may strike them at the mint, and the mint gives less the more was struck this week. Trade chests sell while their owner is away. The notice board pays whoever brings what was asked for.
Words travel no further than a voice
Talk carries twenty blocks, a whisper three, a shout fifty, and the edges break up. There is no global chat. Anything said further away goes by letter: sealed, carried by hand, and possibly opened on the way.
Land grows back
Wilds that no one has touched for a week are reborn with fresh ore, trees and herbs. Drive a stake into the ground to keep a piece of land as it is.
The Rotting Weald
A diseased swamp where the corruption has taken root.
More water than land, brown as mud. Dead trees, rain, fog close to the ground. The highway sinks into a causeway that has fallen in. Copper, iron and silver lie under the swamp.
Poison in the water
Some pools are not water. They are olive and still, they slow you, and they eat at you while you wade.
Wounds that stay
A hard enough blow leaves a deep wound. A bleeding cut anyone can bandage. A broken leg makes you limp until a surgeon splints it. An internal injury takes part of your strength until a surgeon opens you up. Wounds outlast a relog and a restart.
Night
By day there are snakes and bandits. At night come wolf packs, spiders and the dead, and the dark itself wears on the mind. Sleep, fire, a proper meal and a mug of dark ale bring it back.
The Cinder Scars
Where the corruption comes from.
Flat ash dunes under a sky that is almost black. Cracks that glow. Now and then a claw of basalt a hundred blocks high. The highway is a few paving stones in the ash. The richest metals of the world are here: thorium, adamantite, mithril.
The ash fills you
Every minute in the Scars fills your corruption. It does not fade by itself. Only the Purifying Brew pushes it back, brewed from herbs that grow in the Gilded Cage. The most dangerous ring depends on the safest one. When the corruption is full, you die.
Whispers
Long enough in the dark, after enough death, and the mind starts to give. The screen closes in. Lines appear in chat, in the names of people standing next to you, and they never said them.
Below the ash
Under the Scars lies a withered primeval forest of stone pillars, bone and pale grass, lit by a rare blue mushroom. There is no way down. Not yet.
The border mountains
A wall of basalt, up to three hundred blocks high. No one climbs it.
Beyond the mountains there is nothing.
That is the whole world, and most of it is still waiting for people.
The notice board
Back in Last Hearth, by the gate.
Eclipse is not open yet. It is being built by a small group, and we are looking for people who want a slow, harsh world that runs on stories, and who want a say in it before it opens.
Wanted
Builders
Masons
Raise the world with us: a city that is still to be built, and everything that lies along the roads outside it. You decide how it looks and how it feels to walk through.
Storytellers
Chroniclers
Write the history of the world, its peoples and its secrets, and bring them to life. Lore writers, and game masters who want to run scenes once there is someone to run them for.
Artists and developers
Artificers
Models and textures in the Hytale style. Music for each ring. Java for the server plugins, Go and Svelte for the tools of the staff.
Ideas
Dreamers
What makes a world feel real: customs, rituals, small hardships, new reasons for players to need each other. Bring your ideas for immersion, argue for them and help us find out whether they hold.
What stands
First versions, not finished systems. They work, but each of them will change as we play, and as the people who join bring their own ideas.
First version in place
- The three rings, the caverns, the mountains, weather and spawns per ring
- Characters, speech ranges, renown and castes
- Trades and apprenticeships, our own recipe book
- Wounds, the fall, corruption, the mind
- Coin, the mint, trade chests, the notice board, letters, land
Still to build
- Last Hearth itself
- Infection, the remaining trades, the corrupted rising again
To whoever reads this,
tell us who you are, what you would like to do, and how much time you have. No experience needed, only patience with a world that is meant to be hard.