The fixed decisions every other bible document builds on. Change
these only on purpose, and update every document that depends on them.
Names and numbers have one owner each; 09-glossary.md lists them and
says which document owns what. Open questions are in 07-decisions.md.
Carry fire home on the backs of walking gods: every lamp you light is a step they cannot take.
Halvesper is a side-view 2D MMORPG. Towns ride on the backs of colossal titans that walk the world on a schedule. Players go down into a dusk that never ends, put out the Lampghosts, and carry the light they free back up to a town that has moved while they were gone. The light that keeps them alive is the titans’ own life, and the game slowly teaches them what that costs.
docs/platform.md), creators build on a living world with
an audience, a painted HD art pipeline they can reuse, and
data-plus-script content that runs on web, desktop and mobile from one
build. A developer picks Halvesper for the players and the world, not
for the editor.08-scale.md).01-world.md).docs/platform.md.Halvesper (“half-evening”: the sunset that never
finishes; D83). The repo, host paths, services and databases stay
delve.
The sun has been setting for three hundred years. It has not gone down, and it has not come back up: the world sits in a long dusk that deepens a little every generation. In the dark the Lampghosts rise: things made of absence that put out light and wear the shapes of what they consumed.
Only the titans live freely in the deep dark. They are colossal, slow, ancient beasts, each carrying a heartfire inside it that the Lampghosts cannot bear. When the old cities fell, the survivors climbed onto the titans and built towns, the holds, on their backs. The titans wander; the holds go with them.
Players are Lanternbearers: adventurers who go down from the holds with a lantern lit from a titan’s heartfire, and come back up with what the dark took.
01-world.md §1 owns it)The world turns because the titans walk, and a titan walks by
spending heartfire. Every lantern lit from a titan is a step it never
takes. Eight centuries of drawing fire slowed the world until the sun
stalled. Every Lampghost is the hole left where fire was drawn, wearing
the shape of the last thing it ate. Fire returned to its own absence
makes a new titan: that is the finale, Morrow’s birth. No player-facing
text states any of this before the level 01-world.md §1.7 sets.
These hold in every document, every asset and every line of text.
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| Two lights | Heartfire is warm amber; coldlight is cold blue-white. Never mix them up in text or art. |
| Cyan means absence | Cold light marks absence, not “enemy”: the Lampghosts, the Moth
Queen’s true wing-light, the Stay’s farms, a Shade’s cracked lantern,
Morrow’s veins. Hostile Lampghosts are read by their coloured coldlight
body plus the stolen ember, not by cyan alone (05-art-audio.md). |
| The stolen ember (proposed) | Every Lampghost is a coloured, semi-translucent body of the cold light it stole, with a small warm spark of stolen fire visible inside it (belly, throat or tail tip; never a cut-out, never a chest emblem). The ember grows and brightens with the fire it holds. Nothing else has one; a Lampghost elite has one too. Lampghosts are never black voids. |
| Heartfire and the Lampghosts | A Lampghost cannot bear heartfire; struck by it, the Lampghost unmakes. The one exception: an absence returned to its own titan. The Moth Queen took her own Lampghost back and lives as part absence; Morrow is Wend’s fire put into Wend’s Absence. |
| Motes | A Lampghost put out releases motes, its freed fire. They settle into the nearest lantern and, in the fields, run home along its thread at once: banked as caught, like meso. Below the surface (the strata and the Deep) the dark is too thick for the thread: there they must be carried home and banked at a titan, a beacon or the way up, and if the carrier goes dark they scatter for anyone to pick up. Near a docked titan they fly home on their own. |
| Light has a cost | Lighting, keeping a lantern lit, relighting and lantern ranks spend
titan vigor; banked motes restore it. A lantern burns its own fuel only
below the surface; in the fields its titan pays. The server shares one
measure of this, the Sunline (08-scale.md). |
| The sun | Always on the western horizon (Lampward). It does not move until Morrow’s birth, and then only by fixed steps. |
| No gore | Lampghosts are “put out”, people “go dark”. Monsters pop into motes; no corpses. |
| Term | Real time | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The Glow | 2 h of each 3 h cycle | Ordinary dusk. |
| The Under | 1 h of each 3 h cycle | The sun dips; darker, Lampghosts bolder; the Moth Queen flies; the Velvet Market opens. 8 Unders a day. |
| Bell | 15 min | 12 Bells per Glow-and-Under cycle. Dawn-bell is the first after the Under. |
| Turning | 7 days | The Almanac calendar: titan routes and weekly events (the Charge, Glassbreak) repeat every Turning. Aligned with the weekly reset. |
| Act | 4–6 weeks apart | A story chapter that opens server-wide on a published schedule (below). |
| Season | 10–12 weeks | A run of events and additions; after Morrow, each brings a Dawnmark. |
The world clock enters the sim as input; the sim never reads wall time.
The main story is live for everyone. The Prologue and Acts I–II ship
at launch (D1): Act I opens at launch and Act II 4–6 weeks later. Acts
III–V ship after launch as major updates, each opening server-wide on an
announced date and raising the level cap. Inside the build, an Act gates
its world state and server event, not regions, levels or personal quests
(03-systems.md §9.1). World
changes (the Pale Tenant’s wings, Morrow’s birth, Dawnmarks) happen once
per world when an Act’s server event resolves, and stay. Every player
still plays every quest personally, at their own level. Players who join
after an Act landed read it in the Archive (the
Almanac’s in-game record) and see the world as it now is. There is no
per-player phasing (D2).
| Titan | Hold | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mossback, moss-covered tortoise | Lantern Town | Starting hold; the Vent where every lantern is lit. The weakest titan. |
| Greyhorn, mountain-sized horned beast | Brazenbrow | Forge and mining hold; the forge-tap. |
| Ystra, sky-whale above the clouds | the Almanac | Scholars’ library hold; the Long Clock. |
| The Moth Queen, giant moth | Lampblack | Smugglers’ market woven into her fur; flies only in the Under. |
| Wend (dead), long heron-millipede beast | Wendhome (empty) | Fell in 262 YD; its body is the region Wend’s Fall. A beast, not a humanoid. |
| Morrow (after the finale) | none at launch | Wend reborn; Morrow’s Road is an expansion. |
Currency is brass. Ten regions, their bands and
identities are owned by 02-atlas.md. Faction, NPC and
monster names are owned by 01-world.md and 02-atlas.md.
01-world.md §7.2. Levels 60 and
100 deepen the same branch.03-systems.md owns which other
branches ship at launch.| In code now | Becomes |
|---|---|
| Lantern Town | Lantern Town (the Rim map) |
| Mossy Field | Mossy Field, first field of the Mossway |
| The Cinder Eye | The Cinder Eye, Glasslands field boss (level 20) |
| slime, cave bat, skeleton | Puddling, Dimwing, Afternooner (all Lampghosts) |
Content ids are append-only: renaming the monster files is a remap, never a renumber.
08-scale.md §9 or not at all.04-architecture.md
§5.2).Whimsical on top, melancholy underneath: Studio Ghibli warmth, a world that has lost something, MapleStory’s cheerful social bustle. Humor in the holds, awe in the dark.