Systems

The game design document for Halvesper’s systems. It builds on 00-canon.md (binding), 01-world.md (lore, titans, factions, class and branch names, the night cycle and the calendar), 02-atlas.md (regions, monsters, bosses, dungeons, the raid) and 08-scale.md (the Sunline, Strides, Dawnmarks, strata, the Deep, Omens, the density bar). 04-architecture.md owns servers and netcode; 05-art-audio.md draws what this document specifies; 10-operations.md owns the first-time experience and retention targets; 07-decisions.md holds the D-numbers cited here. Names come from 01 and 02 and are listed in 09-glossary.md; this document owns mechanics and numbers.

Numbers here are launch targets. Every number that matters for pacing is checked by a bot (section 22.1); when a bot and this document disagree, tune the game and update the number here in the same PR.

Units. 1 sim unit (u) = 4 reference px. A tile is a measuring unit of 8 u = 32 px (Tiles.SIZE = 8); collision is footholds (04-architecture.md), not a tile grid, and tiles appear here only as a length for ranges and radii. The player body is 12 x 22 u (48 x 88 px); “body height” (BH) = 22 u. The reference screen is 1920 x 1080 px = 480 x 270 u (60 x 34 tiles); phones zoom 1.33x and see 360 x 203 u. Time is in seconds unless marked. The sim ticks at 60 Hz. The world clock enters the sim as an input like any other, never as a wall-clock read.

1. Core loop

1.1 The loops

The session is the genre’s town-and-field rhythm, and in the fields it plays like MapleStory: no clock but the player’s own. Two things change it. What every kill frees is the fire the world is running out of, so the grind itself feeds the titans: every lantern lit costs a titan steps, every mote banked gives some back (section 7). And under the surface, in the strata and the Deep, the lantern becomes a clock that pulls the player home with a load worth losing (6.5, 7.2): the roguelite mode, chosen, never forced.

1.2 The first session

10-operations.md §4 owns the first-time experience: its order, its time targets and its HUD rules. This section sets the systems inside it.

The prologue is an instance: a private copy of the Pilgrim’s Stair, the Wick and Mossy Field, shared by up to 12 newcomers who started within the same few minutes (solo if there are none). It follows 01-world.md §8.1 and never reads the live world clock: it is always a Kneeling, and Mossback’s rise at the end is staged. Morrow, the Convergence and Act state never change it.

As built (2026-10-04): creation is the Lodge yard (#94). New character opens the yard, where the player tries each class at level 8 on dummies, chooses, names the character, picks its lantern glass color and begins; worldd creates it as that class and glass. The glass is one of eight swatches on the naming page (D67, game/sim/glass.gd; Amber, the painted glass, by default). worldd keeps it in characters.glass beside class, never from a save; the game server sends everyone’s glass on the map only when it changes (protocol v14); the player view tints the lantern’s glass and leaves its brass and the flame’s core, and a hooded lantern still dims. Character select shows each character’s swatch. Body, face and hair are not built yet (06-roadmap.md Phase 1, item 5).

Rules below level 10: no XP loss on death; the lantern burns no fuel in a field (6.5); no inventory-full message (48 starter slots); no menu needed to progress; every unlock arrives with one sentence and a demonstration. The free Pilgrim Tetherline (8.6) brings a newcomer back to the Mossway whenever Mossback is not kneeling there.

As built (first-field tuning, data only): a realistic newcomer (22.3) died 0.5–0.7 times a minute at levels 1–4 and took about 2x 5.1 to level 5, so the first stretch is gentler. Mossy Field’s west half is Puddlings only (its platform Mossnip point at x 450 is a Puddling point), its mound Mossnip point moved east from x 1200 to x 1460, and the Puddling touches for 4 instead of 7 (3.4) and notices a player at 4.5 tiles instead of 6 (3.7). Spawn counts and respawn times are unchanged: fewer or slower monsters cost the grind bot its 5.1 time (a first try that moved the Ponds’ Shellmites onto a high pad slowed it past 41.7 min). Solo, CAP_PER_PLAYER deals one monster to each of a field’s eight points (17.2), so a point’s kind, not its count of three, is what a newcomer meets.

As built (newcomer tuning, data only): after that the newcomer still took 17–20 min to level 5 (1.7–1.9x 5.1), dying on Mossy Field’s Mossnips and in the Footprint Ponds’ craters, and killing half as fast as the grind bot because it moves on once nothing is on screen. So every kind of level 5 and under touches for half of 3.4 (NEWCOMER_TOUCH: the Puddling 3, the Mossnip 4, the Dandlehop and the Shellmite 5), and drops a Moss Tonic one kill in ten (NEWCOMER_TONIC, 13.2); the Shellmite notices a player at 4.5 tiles instead of 6; and Mossy Field’s five Puddling points sit within one screen (x 250–700, on four heights) and respawn in 3 s instead of 6, so a newcomer finds the next one before it has walked on. The Ponds’ first crater is a Dandlehop point, not a Shellmite one, so the map’s first screen is Dandlehops only.

1.3 Teaching order after the prologue

2. Movement and controls

2.1 Platformer feel

Kept from the genre: committed jump arcs, ropes and ladders, down + jump to drop through a one-way foothold, up to use a portal. Maps are built around a known jump reach, so jump height is fixed. What we add is responsiveness at the edges: coyote time, jump buffering and small air control.

Map grammar (level designers, all at 100% stats, from the numbers above):

Anything taller needs a rope, ladder or lift. A class mobility skill may shortcut a route but is never the only route.

2.2 Class mobility

Everyone has walk, jump, climb and drop. Each base class gets one mobility skill at level 5 and a second at the branch trial (30), whatever branch they pick.

As built (game/sim/skills.gd): Lantern Hook walks a line from the feet straight up, or diagonally up toward a held left or right, and catches the first foothold (ground or platform, from below, since there are no ceilings) or rope it meets within 7 tiles where the body fits. The pull is 18 ticks with walking and jumping off; on a rope it ends climbing. It runs inside Zone.step_movement, so the client predicts and replays it and the server agrees (tests/test_net.gd). It costs no Resolve, so prediction never waits on a hit the server has not sent yet.

As built (game/sim/shade.gd): Flicker is 8 ticks at a fixed speed along her facing, 5 tiles, or 8 when the light at her center is 0 as it starts, with no gravity and 0.2 s of i-frames; once per airtime (the floor or a climb gives it back). It runs in Zone.step_movement like Lantern Hook, and its state rides in me (protocol v13), so it is predicted and replayed (tests/test_net.gd). TODO: Gloamstep (level 30).

As built (game/sim/ranger.gd): Vault is jump pressed in the air once the walk’s coyote time is over, or Vault’s own key: −196 u/s up and the held direction x 90 u/s across, so it reverses; once per airtime (player.vaulted, on the wire in the own-character block), reset on landing or a rope. It runs in Zone.step_movement and costs nothing, so it is predicted like the hook (tests/test_net.gd).

2.3 Aiming

No free aim. Attacks fire in the facing direction; ranged attacks bend up to ±25° toward the nearest valid target in a forward cone of 20 tiles. Keyboard, gamepad and touch stay equal (the sim’s aim field is filled by the client from facing plus auto-target, and the server validates it against the cone). Ground-targeted skills drop at the player’s feet or a fixed offset ahead; a drag reticle is a desktop and gamepad nicety.

As built (game/sim/aim.gd): facing is the way the stick or keys last pointed, so knockback never turns a player. A target counts within 45° of facing and 20 tiles; the nearest wins, ties to the lower monster id; the shot points at it, clamped to ±25°. The zone clamps any aim it is sent to ±25° of facing and fires anything pointing backward straight ahead, so prediction never depends on aim. A 25°-capped arrow rises at most ~43 u, a jump ~44 u, so the Cinder Eye’s hover was lowered from 90 u to 40 u above its target and its hover tracking from 140 to 70 u/s (below walk speed) so it cannot sit overhead out of reach (game/sim/creatures.gd; any hovering monster follows the same rule).

2.4 Layouts

Mobile is first-class: every action is reachable with two thumbs and no tap target smaller than 44 pt. A branch’s core rotation is 6 skills, mobility included; further skills are situational and live on a second page. This document owns control counts and sizes; 05-art-audio.md draws them, with a class-resource bar (not MP) and a lantern gauge.

Keyboard and mouse (all rebindable)

Gamepad

Mobile touch (landscape, safe-area aware)

Touch assists, on by default on mobile and available everywhere: auto-target, auto-loot, hold-to-repeat basic attack, auto-climb when the stick points at a rope. None change damage or reach.

As built: a frame carries the one skill held (InputFrame.skill); holding a key repeats its skill whenever it is ready. Ctrl or J is Sweep, and clicking with a melee weapon selected still sweeps; keys 1–3 are Brace, Lantern Hook and Lanternbash; Page Up drinks a Moss Tonic. The number keys no longer pick the item hotbar: the mouse wheel and clicks do. Auto-target is on everywhere: a strike faces the nearest monster in its own box ahead, or turns to one in the same box behind when none is ahead.

3. Combat

3.1 Hit model

• Server-authoritative boxes. Each attack is a hitbox in the sim (the Warden’s Sweep is 26 x 34 u today) active for a set number of ticks. A target is hit once per swing id (hit_by_swing). Clients predict their own swing animation only.
• Target caps. Basic attacks hit 1–3. AoE skills: Lodge tier up to 6, branch (30) up to 8, 60 up to 10, 100 up to 12. Bosses count as one target.
• Hit-stop. 2 ticks on the attacker for normal hits, 4 on crits, 6 on a kill; client-side only.
• Knockback. Normal monsters are knocked back (KNOCKBACK 130, -140) unless they have Poise; bosses and elites have a Poise bar (3.6).
• Contact damage. Monsters touching a player deal touch damage; most monsters above level 20 also have telegraphed attacks at 1.5–3x touch damage.
• I-frames. 0.67 s after a hit (INVULNERABLE). Dashes with i-frames say so. A relight grants 2 s.
• Player knockback. A hit is a short hop away from what hit, MapleStory’s: PLAYER_KNOCKBACK (80, -130), about 9 units up and 20–25 back, and HIT_STAGGER 0.25 s in which the keys neither steer nor turn the player (the ground still brakes the slide). It reads as a hit, not a launch. The hit flashes the character white for 0.12 s, then a soft pale shimmer shows the i-frames (no alpha blink).

3.2 Stats

No stat points to allocate. Stats grow with level and come from gear.

Base growth per level L: primary = 20 + 5L, secondary = 5 + 1L, Grit = 10 + 2L. At-level Glass-grade gear adds about 1.5L primary and 0.5L secondary across all slots.

As built (game/sim/stats.gd): every character is a Warden, Might primary and Aim secondary, growing as above; Grit is the +10 life a level progression.gd already gives. Phase 0 has a weapon and no armor, so the weapon carries the whole gear budget: a sword of item level il adds floor(1.5 il) Might and floor(0.5 il) Aim besides its ATK. An at-level Warden with an at-level sword then hits exactly as 3.3’s rows. TODO: move the budget to armor and accessories once slots exist (10.1), leaving the weapon its ATK.

3.3 Damage formula

StatValue   = 4 * Primary + Secondary
Base        = ATK * StatValue / 100
Hit         = Base * Skill% * (1 + Damage% [+ BossDamage%])
                   * CritMult * ElementMult * LightMult * DefenseMult * LevelMult
                   * Variance
CritMult    = 1 + CritDamage            on a crit, else 1
LightMult   = 0.5 if the target is Shrouded (6.6), else 1
DefenseMult = 1 - MonsterDefense * (1 - Pierce)      MonsterDefense in [0, 0.6]
LevelMult   = 1 if monster level <= player level + 2
              else max(0.2, 1 - 0.08 * (monster level - player level - 2))
Variance    = uniform 0.92–1.08 from the zone's seeded RNG

Damage is an integer, minimum 1. All rolls come from the zone RNG so fights replay.

Reference values for an at-level character with Glass-grade gear, basic attack:

Formulas: weapon ATK(il) = 5 + 1.1 · il^1.25 for a Glass-grade weapon at item level il; normal mob HP(L) = 3 x at-level basic hit; mid-class HP(L) = 80 + 12L + 0.9L^1.5 (Warden x1.3, Ranger x1.0, Shade x0.95, Kindler x0.8). The level 1 row matches today’s sim (worn Pilgrim’s Shortsword 5, Puddling 14 HP, player 100 HP).

Built: Creatures.normal_health and touch_damage (3.4) in game/sim/creatures.gd, with primary and secondary floored to whole stats, and every Mossway kind’s life and touch are those at its level, except the Puddling’s 14, sized to the starting sword above, and the touch of every kind of level 5 and under, the newcomer allowance (newcomer_touch, 1.2, 3.4).

Built for player hits (game/sim/stats.gd, every Warden strike): Base from the sword’s ATK and the Warden’s stats (3.2), Skill% the strike’s power, a 5% crit for +50%, LevelMult as above and Variance, rolled per target from the zone’s own hit stream (Zone.hit_rng), so spawning’s stream never shifts; LightMult is the Lampghosts’ own (6.6), applied after. Damage%, elements and Defense wait for affixes and monster defense. Bows still deal their flat damage (TODO: through the formula with Aim primary once Rangers exist). A sword above the character’s level is never swung (10.2). tests/test_stats.gd holds 5.6’s two invariants for levels 1–10: an at-level Warden with an at-level sword puts out an at-level normal monster in 1.1–1.2 s of Sweeps (0.35 s each), and one 10 levels above puts it out with one hit at the lowest variance.

The Mossway has four swords (10.9), so between them a Warden is up to two levels behind its weapon: with the best sword it can wield, each Mossway kind at its own level takes 1.0–1.7 s (Shellmite at 5 on the Thornwood Sword is the slowest).

Designed, not built (02-atlas.md §6.6, all proposed, D41): the rest of the Mossway and the Glasslands, at normal_health and touch_damage of their level (newcomer_touch at 5 and under, 1.2). Aggro, leash and pacing in tiles as 3.7’s table; behaviours and where each lives are 02’s.

Elites (02 §6.6) are 10x life at their kind’s level. The bosses (16 and 3) are in 15.1.

Kill-time targets (one at-level player, Glass-grade gear, no buffs):

3.4 Damage taken

Incoming   = MonsterAttack * AttackSkill% * ElementResistMult * (1 - Mitigation)
Mitigation = min(0.6, Armor / (Armor + 40 * MonsterLevel + 100))

A normal monster’s touch hits for 7% of mid-class HP before mitigation (7 at level 1); a monster of level 5 and under touches for half of that (the Puddling 3, the Shellmite 5), an allowance for the Mossway’s newcomers (1.2); a telegraphed attack 12–20%; an elite 15–30%; boss mechanics 25–60%, with “wipe” mechanics only where an avoid is telegraphed for at least 1.2 s. At-level armor: Warden ≈ 12L, Ranger and Shade ≈ 7L, Kindler ≈ 5L (Warden about 22% mitigation at 60, Kindler 11%).

3.5 Elements: the three lights

Three elements plus physical, one per kind of light in the world (01-world.md §1.2).

Coldlight ignores the Shroud: a Shade’s borrowed absence is the Lampghosts’ own, so it deals full damage to a Shrouded Lampghost. Cinderkin mean the dark classes have their moment, starting with the Cinder Eye at 20. A party with amber and blue-white light is strongest.

3.6 Status effects

Statuses are light states. Bosses take statuses marked “Poise” as Poise damage instead.

Poise. Crowd control on bosses and elites fills a Poise bar. Filling it (about 6 player-staggers’ worth in a dungeon) breaks the boss for 4 s: stunned, +30% damage taken. Poise refills over 20 s. Players have diminishing returns: the same control within 10 s lasts 50%, then 25%, then immune for 10 s.

3.7 Threat and aggro

Field monsters target the nearest player who has hit them, or the nearest within aggro range (6–12 tiles by type). In dungeons, raids and on elites and bosses:

Threat += Damage * ClassThreatMod
Threat += Healing * 0.5, split across monsters in combat with the healed ally
Taunt   = set taunter's threat to 110% of current top, force target for 3 s
Target  = argmax Threat * (1 + 0.5 * LightIntensityAtPlayer + 0.5 * MoteLoad)   (Lampghosts)
Target  = argmax Threat                                                         (others)
MoteLoad = carried motes / mote capacity, 0–1 (0 in a field, which carries none)

ClassThreatMod: Lampguard 3.0 in Bastion Stance, Ghostsworn 2.5 in Shroudmantle, Ironbrow 2.0 in Hornset, everyone else 1.0. A target switch needs the new top to exceed the current target by 10% (melee) or 30% (ranged).

Lampghosts want fire. They go for the brightest lantern and the fullest one: a Lampguard pulls them by shining, and in the strata and the Deep a player carrying a full load of motes is hunted. Ghostsworn taunts ignore both light terms; he tanks as an absence they hunger to fill.

Built in game/sim/behaviours.gd (and native/src/monster_ai.cpp, bit for bit): a field monster paces a few tiles either side of where it spawned until a player comes within its aggro range or hits it, then chases that player. A chase that takes it past its leash from home (measured across) drops the target and walks it home, ignoring players until it is back in its pacing range; a hit retargets it at once. Bosses have no aggro range yet and go for the nearest player anywhere. TODO: threat, lantern state and load scaling aggro range (6.3, 7.2), Hooded players ignored unless they attack.

3.8 Downed, relit and death

• Downed. At 0 HP a player is Downed for 15 s: on the ground, lantern guttering, still holding any motes they carry. Any player can relight them (stand beside, hold interact 3 s, interrupted by damage): they rise at 30% HP and their own fuel, with 2 s of i-frames, no XP loss, motes kept. Where fuel burns the relighter pays 20 fuel from their own lantern. Tender’s Rekindle does it from range. Raid mechanics can disable relighting.
• Out. After 15 s (or on choice) the player is relit at the last lit beacon they passed in the region, or at their bound titan’s hold. They return at 50% HP with the fuel they died with, minimum 20, and the XP penalty applies. Respawn never refills the lantern: the top-up to 20 is the most it gives. Being relit draws a fixed 20 motes of vigor from that beacon’s or hold’s titan (7.3): “another step, every time.”
• Motes scatter in the strata and the Deep: carried motes fall where the player went out as a spill (7.2). A field has nothing to lose; its motes are already home.
• Spare Flame prevents one death’s XP loss. From Guild contracts, max 5 held. Never sold.
• No item loss, no durability, no corpse runs.
• An open-world boss with no living attacker for 60 s resets and returns to its den. Not yet built: today a field boss vanishes when its zone empties (zone.gd remove).

4. Classes

4.1 Structure

A player always has a full kit for their level: base skills from minute 1, class-wide skills from 10, branch skills from 30.

Branches. Twelve in the lore, named in 01-world.md §7.2. Eight ship at launch, chosen so the launch roster has two Sustain branches and one full Protector plus an off-tank stance.

Roles (soft trinity). Protector, Sustain, Striker, Controller. Open-world content never needs a role. Normal dungeons can be cleared by any composition with more care and more potions. Hard dungeons and the raid expect one Protector and two Sustain; Ironbrow’s Hornset stance covers a second tank where a fight needs one.

Branch change. At any hold’s class trainer, within the same base class, for level x 500 brass and a 7-day cooldown (D11). Skill points are refunded. Gear is shared by the base class.

The base class is per character. It never changes; trying another class means an alt, and the game expects alts (Wayfarer’s Mark and Lodgemarks, 5.4). Because the pick is permanent, creation lets a player try every class first (10-operations.md §4).

Complexity. Every base class and branch carries a label at creation, on the trainer and in the guide. MapleStory players pick on mobility and looks and then quit a class that plays harder than it looked; the label says up front how much the kit asks.

Every base class has at least one branch labelled Simple or Standard, so no class fantasy is locked behind a hard kit.

4.2 Resources

As built (game/sim/resources.gd): the resource is one float on the player, player.resource, and each class’s rules above are a row of data (DEFS, by class through OF_CLASS). “Per hit” counts each target a strike or arrow lands on and each hit that gets through i-frames. Resolve’s “out of combat” and Heat’s “not casting” are calm seconds since the last hit landed or taken (Resolve, 4 s) or the last spell (Heat, 1 s); Focus counts as moving while the feet move sideways, are off the floor or climb, and gains nothing from a Vault until landing (vault in its row). Lanternbash costs 40 (§4.3). Blazing’s x1.2 damage and x1.5 fuel and Overheat’s Hush are built (blazing_damage, blazing_burn, kindler.gd): Heat holds at 40 until the Hush ends.

No MP. HP potions and lantern oil are the two consumables (one fewer type is simpler on a phone). The HUD shows the class resource bar and the lantern gauge.

4.3 Base skills (1–9)

As built for the Warden (game/sim/skills.gd, data run by sim code per D7): every strike is 3.3’s formula at its Skill% with the carried sword (the selected one, else the highest-ATK one its level can wield; TODO equipment slots).

4.4 Lodge tier (10–29, class-wide)

As built: each class’s kit is a table of [level, skill id] rows (Skills.KITS in game/sim/skills.gd) that drives the hotbar and what a level unlocks; skill ids are a save format, append-only, with a block reserved per class for its base and Lodge skills (rows marked not yet built stay locked and off the bar). Class skill code sits in one module per class (kindler.gd, ranger.gd, shade.gd; the Warden’s in skills.gd) behind the dispatcher kits.gd. All four Lodge-tier skills unlock at 10, once inducted. The induction (game/sim/lodge.gd) is a talk-to quest: from level 10 the guide sends the player to their class’s Lodge on the Rim, and pressing interact inside it marks quests.lodge done. TODO: the trainer NPC, the faction introduction and the Guild license.

Exact numbers for 4.2–4.4, all four classes to level 20, with the DPS budget: 4.9.

4.5 Branches

Two to three signature skills per tier; every tier also has 3–5 supporting skills (passives, buffs, a second attack). Percentages are Skill% at max rank.

Lampguard (Warden) — Protector

Lantern-halberd and tower shield. The party’s light: brightest lantern, draws Lampghosts, walls of light. Bastion Stance raises his intensity by 2 and Lampghosts choose targets by light, so he tanks by shining.

Ironbrow (Warden) — Striker, off-tank

Two-handed lantern-halberd, trained on Greyhorn. Momentum and charges.

Cinderwright (Kindler) — Striker

Raw heartfire as burst and burning ground; rides Heat near Overheat. Her fires are light sources; burning ground Lits Lampghosts.

Tender (Kindler) — Sustain

Heals by warming. Allies inside her light regenerate; she lends fuel and relights the fallen. The party’s lantern economy runs through her.

Pocketsmith (Shade) — Sustain

Takes the light right out of your hand. Lifts stolen light out of monsters (Lampghosts carry the cold light they put out; Cinderkin carry fire) and slips it to allies as healing. Her heals grow in the dark and shrink in bright light, so she wants the party just lit enough. No coin theft: stolen brass would be a faucet.

Pathfinder (Ranger) — Striker

Longbow, range, marking targets. Sees farthest, shoots farthest.

Lurewright (Ranger) — Controller

Lantern-baited traps and decoy lights. Makes the dark come to the trap.

Gapwalker (Shade) — Striker

Steps through gaps in the light; daggers from nowhere. Strongest in the dark.

Stridewright (Kindler) — Controller, season 1

Heartfire as motion: haste, slow, push, blink. She spends fire the way titans do: her strongest skills cost lantern fuel, not Heat.

Ghostsworn (Shade) — Protector, season 1

Evasion tank who wears the shapes of Lampghosts he has put out. He tanks as an absence; his taunts ignore the light and mote terms in Lampghost targeting.

Later branches (design before their season)

4.6 Skill points

Each tier can max about 85% of its tree, so there is a real choice, and nothing is a trap because respec is free in any hold out of combat. SP cannot be spent backward into an earlier tier after advancing. Rank 1 of every active skill comes with the advancement, so a player who never opens the tree still has all signature skills.

4.7 Hotbars

Desktop: two bars of 10. Gamepad: 12 skill slots (4 x 3 layers) plus 4 quick items. Mobile: 6 skill buttons (mobility among them), a situational page and 2 contextual buttons (2.4). Bars save per character per input method.

4.8 Cooldown rules

MapleStory’s late game lines every class up on a 2-minute burst: party buffs and big cooldowns are all stacked into one window, and a boss fight becomes a rotation of lining that window up. Classes start to play alike, and a missed window feels like a wasted fight. Here damage is steady:

• Damage cooldowns stay short. No damage skill or damage buff has a cooldown over 60 s, except one 100-tier signature per branch (90 s at most).
• Bursts stay small. Over a 2-minute single-target fight, a branch’s long-cooldown damage skills together give no more than 15% of its damage. The content tests check this with the parse bot (22.1).
• Party damage buffs are toggles, auras or cooldowns of 20 s or less (Quicken, Waymark, Huntsmark), so they do not stack into a party-wide window.
• Utility, survival and revives may be long (Unguttered, Everflame, Moth’s Hand). They answer a moment in a fight; they do not decide its damage.

4.9 Kits 1–20 (Phase 1 build spec)

The four base kits to level 20, at the grain of the Warden’s As-built table (4.3): what skills.gd needs as data and what the sim code must do. Every number not already in 4.2–4.4 or the As-built lines is (proposed) (D35); the Warden’s base kit is as built and is the baseline. Wave 2 of the class build (06-roadmap.md Phase 1) implements these, then the balance pass tunes them in data only.

Conventions. Boxes are w x h in u, in front of the body’s center as Skills.box lays them out. Times are ticks at 60 Hz: Use is how long the skill holds the character before the next action, and a multi-hit strike lists the tick each hit lands on (each hit is its own swing id, so hit_by_swing lets it land again). Skill% runs through 3.3 with the class’s own primary and secondary (3.2). Cooldowns are in seconds and start on use. “Hushed” blocks every skill but the basic, mobility included (3.6).

Prediction. Movement skills (Lantern Hook, Vault, Blink, Flicker) run inside Zone.step_movement and cost no resource, so the client predicts and replays them and the server agrees (the Lantern Hook pattern, tests/test_net.gd). Everything else is server-only: the client predicts its own swing or cast animation and nothing more (3.1); damage, pools, traps, statuses and resource changes come back in snapshots, the resource in the own-character block when it changes. Two movement skills read server state: Blink is refused while Hushed and Flicker’s length depends on light. The client checks both against its latest snapshot (the Hushed timer, the light sources it was sent); in the rare tick where they disagree, reconciliation snaps the body back.

Auto-target (2.3). Strikes turn first as Sweep does (Skills.turn: the nearest monster in the skill’s own box ahead, else behind). Shots and bolts aim with aim.gd (45° cone, 20 tiles, ±25°). Placed things (light pools, traps, marks) land on the aim target, or at its feet, within the skill’s range, else at a fixed spot ahead on the foothold below. Bursts centered on the character need no target.

Ranks. The Warden has no skill points or ranks in the sim, so neither does this spec: skill points (4.6) wait for the skill tree. Base skills (2–8) ship at the numbers below, which are their top rank. Until the tree exists, Lodge skills auto-rank by level: Skill% and heals are the listed value x (0.7 + 0.03 x (level − 10)), so 70% at 10 and 100% at 20. Costs, cooldowns, durations and target counts do not scale (proposed, D37). All four Lodge actives come with the induction, as 4.6 says rank 1 does.

Weapons

Every class’s basic attack swings or fires at its weapon’s use time; the weapon’s ATK and its gear budget (3.2: floor(1.5 iL) primary, floor(0.5 iL) secondary) are the same for every class, so an at-level Base (B, the hit at 100%) is the same number for all four. New items are appended (ids are append-only).

The Hornsmith sells every line at 11.2’s price (3.4 x iL² brass) and buys any back at a brass per item level. A weapon drop rolls the looter’s own class line (personal loot, 13.3). Arrows stop being consumed: a bow needs none, and the arrow ids stay as placeholders (proposed, D38).

Warden (Resolve)

Base kit as built (4.3). The Lodge tier is built at these numbers (skills.gd), still proposed until the balance pass. Call to Light and Lampstake hold the Warden in a swing that hits nothing for their use time (TODO: cast animations). Taunted holds the monster’s foe (3.7) on the Warden, so another player’s hit does not take it, though the leash still does; Staggered zeroes its velocity each tick, a monster in the air still falling. Neither lands on a boss (TODO Poise). Lampstake is a light pool (as Kindled Edge’s, 7.9) tagged with the Warden, so a new one replaces the old; Wide Glass lengthens it. Light Behind Me is data and Skills.armor_bonus until armor exists.

Ranger (Focus)

Focus 0–100, full on spawn and respawn. +15/s with no move input while on a foothold, +6/s otherwise (walking, in the air, climbing), 0 from a Vault until landing. It never decays. Standing still is the Ranger’s damage; moving is its safety.

Range is the Ranger’s edge and the Shroud is its cost: a Lampghost beyond the Ranger’s own 6-tile lantern stands at intensity 0 on a Dusk map and takes half damage (6.6). Flare Arrow is how a Ranger fights at range.

As built (game/sim/ranger.gd, rows 18–25 in skills.gd): the numbers above, as data. The attack input fires Quickshot (combat.gd); every shot is an arrow in the zone’s projectiles with its skill, Skill% base and target cap, flown by Ranger.fly, and holds the Ranger for its use time on the swing timer with no reach. Damage runs through 3.3 off the bow Ranger.weapon picks: the selected one her level draws, else the best carried, else the Pilgrim’s Shortbow’s numbers (item 43). The Hornsmith sells the three bows beside the swords, and a Ranger’s arrows need no ammo. Snapjaws are zone.traps, and Snared and Waymarked are fields on the monster stepped in combat.gd (Snared stops its walking); Waymark’s +10% applies in Combat.hurt_enemy before the Shroud. Dim Fletching puts back the Lampghost’s previous foe after a hit from past its aggro range. Protocol v10 carries the others’ classes (only when they change), a Ranger’s Vault (in her own block only), monster statuses (only for monsters that have one), the arrow’s skill and the traps, so a class’s fields cost nothing in anyone else’s snapshot. The Lodge yard’s creation hands each class its starter weapon; the Shortbow fallback stays as a safety net. TODO: Flare Arrow’s Heartfire (3.5); weapon drops by the looter’s class line; ammo for a Warden’s bow stays as it was.

Kindler (Heat)

Heat 0–100, 0 on spawn. Skills add Heat (below). Blazing while Heat is above 70: +20% to every Kindler skill’s damage, Spark included, and the lantern burns 1.5x where fuel burns (6.5). Overheat on reaching 100: Hushed 2 s (120 ticks), Heat set to 40 and held there until the Hush ends. Heat falls 8/s once 60 ticks pass without starting a skill. The skill is riding the 70–99 band without tipping over; Vent is the release valve.

As built (game/sim/kindler.gd, numbers in Skills.DEFS): every row above at its listed numbers, Lodge skills auto-ranked. A cast holds her as a swing that strikes nothing (swing_targets 0), so clicks with a rod and the skill keys share one use time and the view draws a cast. Spark is a projectile (projectile.gd skill), hits through Combat.hurt_enemy, and is her click with a rod. A new Kindler’s Pilgrim’s Shortsword is a Pilgrim’s Rod (Kits.assign). Hushed blocks all but the basic in Skills.can_use, so Blink, predicted, is refused from the Hush the client has from its own-character block. Statuses, the Hush and Spark’s homing are server-only. Protocol v11 adds hushed and swing_skill after a Kindler’s kit cooldowns, the class and the skill swinging to a non-Warden’s player row, and the skill to a Spark’s projectile row; a Warden’s snapshot is unchanged, to stay under the bandwidth test’s limit. TODO: Kindle pools reach clients as plain lights, so only a local sim draws their glyph ring.

Shade (Gloom)

Gloom 0–100, 0 on spawn. +8/s while the light at her center is intensity 0, +4 per hit landed (each target, each hit), −4/s at intensity 2 or more, and +2/s while Crack the Glass is on, added to the rest. It does not decay out of combat. In a field her own lantern lights her, so intensity 0 means hooding: a Hooded Shade can still use Shade skills (6.3), moves at 80% and hoods for up to 20 s. Coldlight ignores the Shroud (3.5), so in the dark she still hits Lampghosts for full damage.

As built (game/sim/shade.gd, rows in Skills.DEFS): the table above, with these choices. A strike with hit ticks opens a fresh swing id on each, so Combat’s swing hits land each one. The Shade’s click is Quick Cut. Crack the Glass toggles on the press, not while held. Crack the Glass and Nightveil hold her for their use time as a swing that hits nothing. Lodge-tier Skill% is scaled by rank (70% at 10, +3% a level). Cut is a list of [owner, damage, ticks left, coldlight] stacks on the monster. It ticks through Zone.bleed, which neither knocks back nor counts as a hit landed (no Gloom). Nightveil takes her out of the monsters’ target list (brains.gd, so native and GDScript agree). Her first strike from it hits x2 (not its Cut) and ends it. She shows at 60% to herself and 30% to others (TODO: her party at 60%). Gloom fills dark violet with an ember edge. Coldlight is a hit flag that skips the Shroud (Light.lampghost_damage). TODOs: * No hooding exists yet, so intensity 0 comes only from dark places. * Absent unlocks but does nothing until evade (3.4) exists. * No Pilgrim’s Daggers item exists yet: she strikes with the carried melee weapon, as the Warden does, and is drawn with daggers.

Statuses

Only a skill that names a status applies it: a heartfire hit is not Kindled, nor a physical hit Cut, unless its row says so (proposed, D36; 3.5 and 3.6 read as if every such hit applies, which would add up to 80–90% to every basic). Damage over time uses the applying hit’s rolled damage and element, rolls nothing new, and ticks once a second from when it was applied. Bosses take control statuses as Poise (3.6; TODO Poise).

As built (game/sim/statuses.gd): Kindled and Hushed; Kindled stacks on enemy.statuses, ticks in Combat.step through hurt_enemy with no knockback and no resource gain, and stops if the player who applied it leaves the zone. A status comes from the status field of a skill’s DEFS row (Lanternbash, Flareburst). Lanternbash applying Kindled breaks the earlier Warden parity on purpose: a Warden’s Lanternbash now deals 20% of its hit a second for 4 s more (the “with Kindled” column below). The native path is untouched, since statuses are script-only and spike S1b’s world has no players. TODO: the other statuses with their kits.

Elements other than these statuses’ own stay a TODO, as for Lanternbash: no element multipliers (3.5) until elements exist. Seared, Shrouded and Lit are the light’s (6.6) and already built.

Kit tables and default bars

The per-class kit table classes-core builds (level → skill) is the Lv column of each table above: 1, 2, 5 and 8 on reaching the level, the Lodge tier when the induction quest completes at 10 or later. The level-20 cap stays data. Default bars (keyboard; 2.4): the basic on Ctrl or J, then keys 1–6 in this order. The mobile core page is the same six, mobility nearest the thumb.

DPS budget

Sustained damage per second in B (the at-level hit at 100%, 3.3: about 29 at level 5, 88 at 10 and 327 at 20), from a 60 Hz run of 120 s against still dummies at intensity 1 (Lit), no crits (5% for +50% is the same 1.025 for everyone) and mean variance, damage over time included. Each class runs a fixed priority: Warden Shield Bash, then Lanternbash with 40 Resolve (single target only), then Sweep. Ranger keeps Waymark up, then Piercing Shot, Snapjaw and Split Shot whenever Focus allows, then Quickshot. Kindler casts Vent at 85+ Heat, then Lance, then Flareburst, then Spark. Shade opens with Nightveil, then Fan of Knives (3 targets), Twin Fang, Shadow Fang at 70 Gloom (from 10, only when Gloom is full), then Quick Cut with Crack the Glass on. Utility (Brace, Kindle, Flare Arrow, Warm Hands, Call to Light, Lampstake) is left out.

• Single target is within 15% once Lanternbash gains Kindled. Against today’s Warden, without Kindled, level 20 is 16% apart, so Kindled on Lanternbash ships with the Kindler’s wave, which builds the status.
• The trades. The Warden’s basic is a 3-target cleave: it eats every touch, and its AoE is 1.4–3x anyone’s. The Ranger trades AoE for range and gives up about 10% when it moves. The Kindler’s AoE comes from cooldowns and grows most with the Lodge tier; she pays in Overheat and the lowest life (0.8x). The Shade’s 2-target basic gives her AoE from level 1; the dark adds 3–5%, and Coldlight keeps her at full damage on Shrouded Lampghosts.
• Light is outside the budget. Kindle, Flare Arrow and Lampstake stacked on the caster’s lantern make intensity 2, Seared, for +20% on Lampghosts (6.6) inside the pool. That is the light classes’ answer to the Shade’s dark bonus, and it pays only against Lampghosts.
• Grind pace. The grind bot’s time to 10 on each class must sit within the Phase 0 band ±15%. If a single-target class falls behind on packed maps, the lever is data: its basic’s target count or use time.

The Lodge yard demos

The yard (10-operations.md §4) runs each class at level 8 with its level-5 mobility. The dummies never die (life refills at 0), show damage numbers and count as level 8. One is a Lampghost dummy that is Shrouded outside light, one swings at the front every 2 s, and the yard has a lit end (a static light) and a dark corner (no light). What each class shows in 30 s:

As built (game/sim/yard.gd, map 20): the dummies are creature kinds 8 (Training Dummy) and 9 (Archery Butt), dummy and shrouded both: every one takes half outside light, so the lit row by the west lamps and the dark corner under the drill shed teach the same lesson for any class. They have no touch damage, no drops and no xp. Switching class keeps the spot and resets everything else to a fresh level-8 character. A class whose skills are not built yet is still playable and choosable; its panel shows those skills as coming soon. A new character starts with its class’s starter weapon (Classes.STARTER; D38). Still to build: the dummy that swings at the front (for Brace).

5. Progression

5.1 XP curve

From target time per level, the grind rate and a 1.15 multiplier for a typical quest/dungeon mix:

xp_to_next(L) = round( 1.15 * t(L) * K(L) * mob_xp(L) )
t(L)      = target minutes per level, piecewise-linear through
            (1, 1.5) (10, 6) (20, 14) (30, 27) (45, 52) (60, 75) (80, 105) (100, 132) (119, 160)
K(L)      = at-level kills per minute = 14 + 10 * min(L, 60) / 60
mob_xp(L) = round(6 + 1.6 * L^1.45)      normal monster at level L

The table is generated into a data file and is a save-format constant once shipped (appended to on cap raises only). Built: XP_TO_NEXT in game/sim/progression.gd, levels 1–60, with exact .5 ties rounded up (level 1 is 196). Phase 1 opens levels to 20 (OPEN_CAP); XP stops there. A level adds its Grit’s life (3.2: +10 a level over the starting 100) and refills it. Monster levels are in game/sim/creatures.gd, from the atlas bands (Puddling 1, Mossnip 3, Dandlehop 4, Shellmite 5, Thornpig 6, Dimwing 7, Afternooner 9, Cinder Eye 20; 3.3). Kill XP is shared by the party on the map (5.5).

Milestones: Lodge induction at about 45–60 min (10-operations.md §4), branch at 6 h, second name at 32 h, third name at 102 h, cap at about 150 h. The launch cap of 60 is about 32 h; each Act update raises it (9.1). Elites give 8x mob XP, dungeon bosses 60x; quests are tuned in “minutes of grinding at this level” (12.1).

Level difference on monster XP: full within ±5 levels; −10% per level beyond 5 above the player; −10% per level beyond 5 below, floor 10%.

5.2 Where XP comes from

Hub rule. Levels 1–60: no more than about 45 minutes of pure grind between quest hubs. Above 60 a level takes 75–160 minutes, so that rule would need dozens of hubs per region; instead every region from the Combs on has at least three repeatable sources besides its story (dock quests, Guild contracts, its strata and the Deep), and its story covers about half its band. The Mossway is about 40 minutes of play on purpose: it is the prologue’s region.

5.3 Rested XP (Hearthrest)

• Accrues while logged out or idle in a hold: 5% of the current level per 8 hours, capped at 1.5 levels’ worth.
• Spent 1:1 on monster kills, giving double mob XP until used. Not on quest XP.
• A player on 1 hour a day gains about 25% more per hour than one on 6 hours a day.

5.4 Catch-up

No paid level boosts, ever.

5.5 Party XP and kill credit

MapleStory-style: a party splits a kill’s XP evenly with a bonus for its size.

party_xp  = mob_xp * (1 + 0.10 * (min(size, 6) - 1))     +10% per extra member, up to 6
share     = party_xp / size * level_modifier(member, monster)

Every member gets the kill (the kill counter, and quest credit once quests count kills). Solo, the share is exactly the old kill XP. Every member also rolls the loot for themselves (13.3); motes stay with the killer (7.2).

As built: worldd holds parties (worldd/party.go, Postgres): up to 6 members, a leader, invites by character name or from a player’s menu (right-click or tap) that run out after 60 s, leave, kick and promote (the leader), the lead passing to the longest-standing member online when the leader leaves, and a party that empties disbands. A member who disconnects keeps their place for 5 minutes, then drops. The party finder lists parties by a preset purpose (14.1’s categories, no free text), the leader’s map, a level range and open slots; anyone in no party asks to join and the leader accepts or declines. The game server polls worldd every second, reporting who is online, and gets the state back only when it changed (TODO: LISTEN/NOTIFY to each host once there is more than one, 04-architecture.md event bus). The party for a kill (game/sim/progression.gd) is the killer, every living member of the killer’s party anywhere on the same map, and every living player who tagged the monster (13.1: 10% of its life, last hit within 10 s); a member on another map shares nothing. A solo kill is the old award. P opens the party window (lantern glass): members with level, class, map and life, invite by name, leave, kick, promote and join requests; a Finder tab with the listings and one’s own listing. Party frames top left show the other members (level, name, life), greyed with the map’s name when they are elsewhere or “Offline”. Each client is sent its view of the party only when it changes (game/net/party.gd). Offline, in dev and in scenarios (no worldd), the old stub stands in: everyone in the zone within 40 tiles of the killer shares, and the frames show them.

5.6 Scaling rules

How power grows, so every band plays like the first one. MapleStory is the lesson both ways: its maps for each band of levels, and the feeling of returning to an old map and clearing it in one swing, are worth copying; its power spread, where gear and paid enhancement put two characters of the same level orders of magnitude apart, is not. It makes content impossible to tune and turns progress into spending.

Time to kill stays fixed at level. A normal monster takes 1.0–1.5 s of an at-level character’s single-target damage at every level (3.3: monster HP is 3x the at-level basic hit). Progress shows as moving to the next band’s maps, not as killing the same monsters faster at the same level.

Outlevelling is felt. A character 10 levels above a normal monster kills it with one basic hit in Glass-grade gear (level 20 hits for about 330; a level 10 monster has 270 HP). Content tests check this for every band.

One level-difference table. Δ = monster level − player level.

Group scaling. Open-world normal monsters and elites never scale with the number of players; maps are dense instead (17.2). Scaled content: world bosses (15.1: +4% HP per attacker beyond 10), Normal dungeons (HP and add counts x (0.4 + 0.1 x party size), so 1.0 at 6 and 0.5 solo), the raid (15.4).

Power ceiling. At any level, the best possible character of that level deals no more than 2x the damage of an at-level character in Glass-grade gear, and takes no less than half its damage. The budget above Glass-grade:

Nothing sold for money appears in this table (19.3). Tuning targets assume Glass-grade (open world, Normal dungeons) or Ember-set at +5 (Hard, Deep-touched, the raid).

Cap raises. Each Act update raises the cap (D1). A new band’s Glass-grade item beats the previous cap’s best Ember-set at +5 within 10 levels, so old gear carries the first band of new content and no more; Hornbinding transfers (10.4). The 2x ceiling means no stat squish is ever needed.

Accounts and alts. Alts speed up leveling (Wayfarer’s Mark, 5.4) and add no power to the main. A MapleStory-style roster bonus (power from levelling alts) was rejected for Lodgemarks (5.4, D26), which give unlocks and no power.

Something to show for every session. MapleStory always has a small number to raise (symbols, Legion, a star). A 2x ceiling removes most of that, so the increments must come from breadth instead: at every level band, a player’s median time between visible increments is 30 minutes or less. Increments are a level, a skill rank, a Hornbinding step, a Lantern Rank, a new gear piece, a boss-ladder clear (15.6), an Archive entry or a Lodgemark. Telemetry tracks it (22.2).

6. Light

Light is who you are: how you fight the Lampghosts (Shroud, Lit, Seared), how you find what is hidden (lightbridges, gloamways), the light pools a party stands in and the dusk the whole world is drawn in. Below the surface it is also the reason a run turns back (fuel) and what it carries home (motes, section 7). It must matter in every region and never be a chore on a phone.

The slim lantern (2026-10-04). In the fields the lantern never burns and carries nothing: caught motes bank at once, as MapleStory’s meso would. Fuel, carrying, load, leaks and spills live only in the strata and the Deep (08-scale.md §3–4), the roguelite mode. Everything else in this section holds everywhere.

6.1 Gameplay light is analytic, not rendered

The renderer’s lighting is decoration. Gameplay light is computed in the sim as circles: each source has a center, radius and intensity; intensity at a point is the sum of the three strongest sources covering it, capped at 3. Light passes through platforms (cheap and readable). The renderer draws the same circles, so what you see is what the sim uses. Every source has an id and is part of snapshots. Light queries are part of the tick budget (04-architecture.md, spike S2).

Built in game/sim/light.gd: a lantern’s id is its player’s id and a map’s static lights are -1, -2, … in file order. Covering is inclusive (a point exactly on the radius is lit). A dead or Hooded player casts no light, nor does an empty lantern (fuel 0).

6.2 The lantern

Every player carries a lantern in its own gear slot from the Lighting. It is never replaced, only improved, through Lantern Rank 1–30. In a field a rank is light: radius and wick sockets, so Lampghosts stay out of Shroud and the utility wicks fit. In the strata and the Deep it is also range: fuel capacity, burn efficiency and mote capacity decide how far a run can go and how much it brings back.

A rank spends motes from your banked total at a hold’s hearth (7.2), a crafted lantern part and a draw on your bound titan (7.3). Rank r → r + 1 spends 20 + 20r motes: about 9,300 to reach 30, a quarter of what a player banks on the way to cap. Typical rank by level: about 1 + L/4 (rank 5 at 20, 13 at 50, 20 at 80, 29 at 115). The glass color is cosmetic and set at creation.

6.3 Lantern states

Burn applies only where fuel burns (6.5); the rest holds everywhere.

Shuttering is the quiet way to travel, and below the surface the cheap one: half the burn, but Lampghosts outside half your radius are Shrouded. Hooding stops the burn but halves your speed and locks your skills (and below, costs motes), so it is a way to slip past, not to travel.

Hood stamina. Every character has 100 stamina, shown as a thin arc on the lantern gauge only while it is below full. The hood drains 10 per second (Shades 5); at 0 the hood drops, the lantern relights Open and cannot hood again for 5 s. Stamina refills 20 per second while unhooded. A hood lasts 10 s (a Shade’s 20 s): long enough to slip past a pack, never a way to cross a map.

Glare is the lantern overcharging, not more safety. On the Cloudshelf tops it sears everything near it and stacks Dazzled on its bearer (3.6); where fuel burns it also empties the lantern in under an hour. Shuttering in direct sun keeps the lantern at Open instead (x0.5 radius, no Glare).

6.4 Ambient tiers

Each map has an ambient tier; caves and rooms inside a map can be darker. Lampghost share of spawns is set per region (17.1), not per tier.

• The Under darkens every map one tier, to at most Black; Sunlit maps go Dark (the sun is below the horizon). Lightless stays Lightless.
• Strata (08 §3) are darker than their region’s surface and the lower stratum darker still; 17.1 sets each. Lightless appears only from Lowlight on.
• Walkable footholds always draw a faint rim. Darkness is tension, not a blind jumping puzzle.
• Ambient tiers are authored per map. Strides and Dawnmarks never change them (7.5, 7.6; 08-scale.md §1).

6.5 Fuel economy (the strata and the Deep)

Fields burn nothing. On every surface map, at every tier, the lantern does not burn and nothing spends its fuel: light-eaters only dim it (6.7) and the fuel costs below apply only under the surface. A lantern still empties below and comes up as it went down; a hold’s hearth fills it. Going home is a choice in the fields and a necessity below. (Until 2026-10-04 every tier at Dim or darker burned, which made every grind a forced trip home; 07-decisions.md, Settled.) TODO: field forms for the branch skills that spend fuel (Emberheart, Stridewright) before their season.

Why the old numbers failed. Motes used to be fuel. In Dark, 20 kills a minute x 40% Lampghost x 25% mote chance x 2 fuel = 4 fuel in against 3 out: the lantern never ran dry. In the old darkest tier, 6 in against 6 out. Respawning refilled the lantern for free and hooding was free travel. Now motes are cargo, not fuel, wherever they are carried. Nothing in the strata or the Deep refills a lantern except oil and your party, so every tier there drains.

Fuel sources

Oil and the hearth are the first dilemma: oil costs you brass, the hearth costs a titan.

Per-tier drain, below the surface. Effective burn = B x (1 − e) x 1.25. The 1.25 is the average mote burden over a run (burn rises with load, 7.2; a lantern that fills evenly averages half full: 1 + 0.5 x 0.5). Capacity and efficiency at the typical rank for the band (6.2). Strata are darker than the surface above them (6.4), so a band’s stratum runs a tier or two down this table.

A Blazing Kindler burns 1.5x on top. The first time fuel is a real limit is the first Dark stratum (level 30–35). Runs target p50 20–40 minutes, with most returns at 10–40% fuel (22.2). The fuel bot checks each row and that a field never burns (22.1).

6.6 Shroud, Lit and Seared

• Shrouded. A Lampghost at intensity 0 (or on a Sunlit map outside your lantern) takes x0.5 from everything but Coldlight, and is harder to see.
• Lit. At intensity 1 a Lampghost takes normal damage.
• Seared. At intensity 2+, a Lampghost is Seared (+20% damage taken, +10% crit chance against). Two overlapping lanterns do it, so two players standing together hit Lampghosts harder than two apart. Sunlight hits Sear anything.
• Stacking cap. Nothing scales past intensity 2 except Unmade and glyph doors (which need 2 or 3). Thirty players on one platform are no stronger per head than two, and the renderer merges more than six overlapping lanterns into one glow.

Positioning around light is the core tactic in Lampghost fights; the Protector is the brightest player; spreading out costs damage.

6.7 Light-eaters

Lamplickers, Dimwings and Sootbears Gutter lanterns they touch; Snuffer Zealots and black fen-water Douse them; Cinderkin drain 3 fuel per hit below the surface. In a field these dim the light and never touch the fuel. Bosses can put out all player light for a phase, turning the fight into a beacon-and-Coldlight fight.

6.8 Beacons

Every map at Dim or darker has 1–3 beacons: braziers on fixed footholds, the Guild’s waystations into the dark. Lowlight has none: the Stay will not have heartfire burning in their country (its banks are moth-skiff drops and the Tetherline at Stairfoot).

• Kindling. A player starts a 60 s kindle and a wave of Lampghosts comes for it. The fire comes from one of two places, chosen by whoever kindles:
  • Drawn: fire from the nearest living titan (the region’s docked titan, else the one whose route is nearest): 100 motes of vigor at kindling and 5 a minute while lit (75 per Bell), 200 over a full burn.
  • Poured: players pour in motes, carried or from their banked total, 200 in total from anyone. Poured motes are burned: no titan’s fire is drawn, but banked motes poured come back out of the Sunline (7.3) and no one gets Favor for them. The beacon shows which (a drawn beacon carries its titan’s mark).
• While lit (20 min): radius 15–25 tiles at Hearth tier; a relight point; +10% XP for everyone on that map in that channel. In a stratum it is also a bank for carried motes and a refuel point (with the vigor draw), the run’s halfway house.
• Surge. When it gutters, a 2-minute Lampghost wave with an elite spawns at it. The Surge’s motes fall into the beacon and relight it for 10 minutes, at no cost to anyone.
• Beacons are per channel. A quiet channel’s beacons stay dark longer: fewer people, less competition, more Lampghosts.

Built for the Low Lamp (game/sim/beacon.gd, 11-prologue.md §8, D75, D76): a map’s beacons key places the braziers, and the rules above run as written, with the details these leave open set in D75 and D76.

6.9 Exploration by light

• Lightbridges: footholds that are solid only at intensity 1+ from a source the server trusts for your body:
  • your own lantern (predicted exactly on your client);
  • static light: flares, Lampstakes, Kindle and Hearth pools, Lightwalls, burning ground, beacons (fixed once placed, so there is no latency to hide);
  • a party member’s lantern, with a 0.5 s grace: the server keeps the bridge solid for you for 0.5 s after their light leaves, and your client fades it over the same 0.5 s. A client that sees the light 100 ms late never falls through on the server. A stranger’s moving lantern makes the bridge shimmer but not solid for you.
• Gloamways: footholds solid only at intensity 0. Only your own lantern (hooded, or shuttered for a Shade with Gloamstep) and static light count; another player’s lantern never removes a gloamway under you, and a static light placed on you gives 0.5 s grace.
• Glyph doors: sealed Concord doors that open at intensity 2 held for 3 s (two players, a pool and a lantern, a Lampguard in stance).
• Absences: dark masses where fire was drawn: under hold edges, old tap sites, Concord lamp-posts. They spawn Lampghosts until burned at intensity 3 for 5 s. Burning one releases a 30-mote cache split among the players whose light touched it, and a chest.
• Hidden maps: at least one per region (08 §9), reached only by light or dark paths, each with a lore item and a cosmetic.
• Information. Lampghosts outside light and unrevealed paths are not sent to a client until revealed (per-client interest filtering, 04-architecture.md), so a light hack shows nothing.

6.10 Wicks

Socketable lantern mods (sockets at Lantern Rank 15 and 30), one of each kind. Crafted by Lampwrights and dropped in dungeons; tradeable.

7. Motes, titan vigor and the Sunline

This is the twist made into a mechanic. 01-world.md §1: every lantern lit from a titan is a step it does not take; a Lampghost put out releases that fire as motes, and fire that goes home is a step given back. 08-scale.md §1 owns the Sunline, the Strides and the Dawnmarks as rules; this section sets their inputs, costs and thresholds.

7.1 The rule

The Sunline is one server-wide number: the titans’ net vigor. Every draw of fire lowers it, every mote banked raises it, and worldd nets it at each Turning boundary. Its level sets the world’s Stride for the next Turning (7.5). Before Morrow is born the sun does not move, whatever the Sunline does (7.6).

Units: a mote is the light of one small Lampghost; 100 motes = 1 step, the fire one lantern holds when lit. Every draw and return is also tagged with the titan it came from, for the player’s Ledger, Titan Favor and the Listeners’ signs.

7.2 The extraction loop

In the fields it is no loop at all, by design: a caught mote goes home and the fight goes on, as in MapleStory. The strata and the Deep keep the whole loop, carry and risk included, as the roguelite mode (08-scale.md §3–4). A map’s carry_motes flag says which a map is.

1. Release. Every Lampghost put out releases motes, rolled by the server for each tagged player: a normal Lampghost 1 mote at 30% (45% in the Under), an elite 5, an Absence 30 (split), a dungeon boss 10 per player, an open-world boss 50 per eligible player. No motes from Lampghosts more than 10 levels below you. Living things and Cinderkin release none.
2. Catch. Motes rise and want the nearest living titan, but cannot find it in the dark alone: they home on the killer’s lantern if the killer is within 12 tiles, so a ranged kill is caught too; failing that they settle into the nearest lantern within 3 tiles, a party member’s first. Uncaught motes fall as sparks and gutter in 10 s; anyone can catch them by walking through.
3. In a field, bank. Every lantern lit from a titan keeps a thread to it, and a caught mote runs home along it at once: it banks to the player’s banked total, the titan and the Sunline the moment the lantern takes it. No capacity, no load, nothing to lose. Motes carried up from below bank the same way on reaching the surface.
4. Below, carry. In the strata and the Deep the dark is too thick for the thread, so a caught mote stays in the lantern as cargo. A lantern holds up to its mote capacity (6.2); motes over capacity gutter. Load = carried / capacity. A loaded lantern burns x(1 + 0.5 x load), shines visibly brighter, and draws Lampghosts: aggro range x(1 + 0.5 x load) and the target weight in 3.7. A full lantern burns 1.5x and is hunted. The lantern gauge shows the count. Inside a docked titan’s Heartwarm radius (60 tiles at Steady; 7.5) motes still arrive on their own, even below.
5. Bank below. Carried motes go home at a lit beacon (interact 2 s), on climbing out to the surface, on entering a docked titan’s Heartwarm radius, at a hold’s hearth, at a moth-skiff drop in the Under (open 15 minutes), or at the Moth Queen herself where she lands. Motes banked at a beacon go to the titan it was drawn from (a poured beacon: the nearest living titan).
6. Spend. The banked total is the player’s as well as the titans’: at a hold’s hearth, Lantern Rank (6.2) spends from it, which draws the spent motes back out of the Sunline from the bound titan (7.3). Everything not spent stays returned.
7. Lose them (below only).
   • Lantern out (fuel 0): carried motes leak 10% every 5 s until it is relit (oil, a Tender, a beacon).
   • Hooded: 1 mote per 10 s.
   • Out (went dark after Downed): every carried mote falls as a spill where you went out. Spills are shared, not personal loot: everyone on the map sees them; they gutter 10% a minute and are gone in 10 minutes; anyone can take up to their free capacity and carry them home. A Downed player who is relit keeps their motes, so a party protects its carriers.
   • Disconnect below: motes are held 10 minutes for a reconnect, then spill at the last position. Logging out in a hold returns them.
   • Return Lantern does not work while you carry motes (“motes won’t follow the thread”). The Tetherline does, slowly (8.6).
8. Motes cannot be traded, stashed, mailed or listed. They exist only as sim entities, lantern state and the banked total.

Built rough in game/sim/lantern.gd and mote.gd (Phase 0): fuel, carried and banked motes on the player; a released mote picks its lantern when it is released (the killer’s if within 12 tiles of its body, else the nearest lit one within 3) and homes in, otherwise it falls as a spark; spills gutter even while their map is empty. A map’s optional carry_motes flag (false for every field and hold; the Deep and the strata turn it on) is the slim rule: without it a caught mote banks at once to banked and the Sunline, nothing burns, leaks or spills, and carried motes bank on arrival; with it the lantern burns by tier and load, carries up to capacity, leaks at fuel 0 and spills on going Out. A map’s optional hearth rect banks every carried mote on entering it (on a carrying map) and refuels the lantern in 5 s (no rank spending yet), and the server keeps the Sunline in memory.

The dilemma on every run below. Push deeper (more motes, darker, faster burn, Lampghosts hunting your bright lantern) or turn back. Bank at the near beacon (safe, but a titan’s fire may have lit it) or carry to a docked titan (Homecoming: +25% Favor). Go dark with a full lantern and strangers carry your work home. In a field there is no dilemma by design: the fight and the build are the game, and every mote goes home.

7.3 Draws

The inputs 08-scale.md §1 lists, with their values. Every draw is computed by the server and charged to the titan whose fire is used and, where a player caused it, to their Ledger.

Upkeep is the fuel the fields no longer show: the lantern never burns in a field because its titan pays for the light instead, and the Ledger says so.

The Ledger is Reeve Tamsey’s habit, now everyone’s: drawn and returned this Turning, per titan, in the lantern panel. It never blocks play. Before level 60 the Guild labels it “Lanterns lit / motes home”. At the first revelation (01-world.md §1.7, level 60) its labels change to “Steps taken from Mossback / steps given back”. The reveal changes the UI.

7.4 Returns, grants and caps

World bosses pay through their motes (50 per eligible attacker, banked as caught like any other field mote). Grants come once per character per Turning, so they cannot be farmed.

Caps (the defenses 08-scale.md §10 names):

400 motes is about 2.5 hours of play: a normal evening counts fully, a bot’s 24-hour day does not. A character whose Turning Ledger is net positive gets a weekly Kept the Light chest (Favor and Guild tallies) at reset.

7.5 Strides

The Sunline S is a stock, in motes. W is the world’s average gross draws per Turning over the last four Turnings (floor 50,000), so thresholds scale with population. At each Turning boundary, and only then:

S ← clamp(S + weighted credits + grants − draws − age drain, −0.75W, +1.0W)

A new world starts at S = 0. The Stride for the coming Turning is set from S, announced on the event bus a day ahead (04-architecture.md §4), and published in the Almanac calendar at reset. A live forecast shows at each Listener during the week; it binds nothing.

Strides never take away earned progress and never cut anyone off from their bound hold. Every region stays reachable on foot and by Tetherline in any Stride, and every loop still fits the Turning (8.3). Strides never change a map’s ambient tier (6.4).

Two Stride events: the Vigil (Surging two Turnings running: a one-hour world event and a story vignette in each hold) and the Stumble (Faltering two Turnings running: one titan stumbles mid-crossing and that Crossing becomes a rescue, with more Lampghosts and larger rewards).

7.6 The sun, Acts and Dawnmarks

• Before Morrow. The sun stands at 2.1 degrees and never moves. The Long Clock shows the Sunline and the Stride; each hold’s sundial shows its own titan’s sign.
• Dawnmarks. A Dawnmark is the once-per-world change at the end of an Act’s server event (08-scale.md §1; Acts in 9): the Pale Tenant put out (Act III), Morrow’s birth (Act V), and after Morrow one per season. It lands only if the Act’s event is won and S is Steady or better at that Turning’s boundary; otherwise the world retries the next Turning.
• Morrow’s birth. The first clear of the Second Noon during the Convergence (9.4), a world singleton event (15.2). The sun rises one step, a tenth of a degree; every sky re-renders; Morrow joins the Migration as a fifth titan with his own Listener and Ledger column.
• After Morrow. Each season’s Dawnmark raises the sun one more step and re-renders the sky, music and some NPC lines and states. It never changes a map’s ambient tier; it adds an Omen tier to the strata and the Deep instead (08-scale.md §4): the brighter the world, the deeper the dark.

7.7 Validation and bot resistance

• Motes are server entities from server-side kills. Carried counts and the banked total are character state in the channel process. Banking is the server’s catch in a field, and below a server interaction with a beacon, hearth or dock entity in range. Clients never report motes, draws or returns.
• Channel processes report credits and draws to worldd in batches every few seconds (04-architecture.md §4); worldd applies the caps and trust weights.
• Weekly settlement: Strides act only at the Turning, so worldd audits the week’s ledgers and voids contributions from accounts actioned for botting before it nets S.
• Field motes, the safest way to farm, never pay Homecoming Favor, and the same-map cap (7.4) stops one map farmed all day from moving the Sunline.
• Picking up a spill counts against the picker’s caps, so passing motes between accounts by going dark gains nothing.
• Telemetry: banking cadence, path repetition, motes per kill against expected rates, spill pickups between account clusters (21).

7.8 Worked budget

Per player-hour of typical play at mid levels, to show where the Sunline goes and what tilts it. Thresholds are fractions of W, so population does not move them; the constants are re-based each season from live data.

If players solo, never pour and buy no oil (credited 152; refuels 21; every beacon Drawn, 40), draws total 179 and the net is −27 an hour, −0.15W a Turning: Faltering within about two Turnings. If players party up (half of banks) and use oil below (credited 171, drawn 144), the net is +0.19W a Turning: Striding in about two Turnings and Surging soon after. The server’s habits decide how its titans walk.

7.9 Trip boons

Combat is MapleStory’s: platforms cleared with a few hotkey skills. Each trip is a roguelite run on top of it (decided 2026-10-04): the same skills, built differently every time, and lost if you do not get home.

• The trip. A field trip runs from leaving a hold until entering one or going Out. In fields every mote banks as it is caught, so a trip carries nothing to lose: it is the boons that last only as long as the trip. In the strata and the Deep the trip is the carry run (§6.5).
• Offers. Every 25 motes caught on a trip (they count whether they bank or are carried), and at each beacon lit or banked at, the lantern offers 1 of 3 boons, rolled per player by the server from the zone’s boon pool. The pick is made in place (a 3-card prompt; the trip does not pause, so pick with care near monsters). Up to 6 boons a trip; a seventh replaces one.
• What they are. Sideways changes to the class kit and the lantern, never raw stat growth. Examples: Wide Sweep (Sweep hits a 4th target), Kindled Edge (Lanternbash leaves a 3-tile light pool for 5 s), Ember Trail (kills leave light), Bright Core (your lantern Sears close in), Mote Magnet (catch radius +2 tiles), Second Wind (the first Downed of the trip rises at once at 30%). Each class has its own pool plus a shared lantern pool; pairs that combine (a duo) are rarer and named.
• Field and Deep pools. Fields have no fuel or carry, so their lantern pool is light and reach. Where motes are carried (the strata and the Deep), the fuel and carry boons join it: Slow Wick, Steady Glass and Thrifty Wick are offered only there. Mote Magnet is in both. Numbers per boon live in a data file; no boon more than +15% to a single damage source.
• Lost on return or death. Boons end when the trip ends: on entering a hold (its hearth or a portal into it) or on going Out. A relit Downed player keeps them. Beacons do not end a trip, so a long trip stacks up a build.
• Deeper is richer. Strata offer from a wider pool, Deep floors offer every floor and add duos and cursed boons (stronger, with a cost such as faster burn).
• Never sold, never traded, never kept. Boons are not items. Gear and levels stay the permanent MMO progression; boons are horizontal and last one trip, so they cannot move the economy or the time-to-level targets (bots measure levels without boons).
• Parties. Each member picks their own. Some boons affect allies in light range.

Phase 0 builds the offer, a Warden pool of about 8, the field lantern pool of 6 and the carry-only 3; Deep duos and cursed boons come with the Deep in Phase B.

Built (Phase 0) in game/sim/boons.gd, with the effects read where their numbers are used: Skills.stat for the kit, lantern.gd and light.gd for the lantern, combat.gd for Second Wind and kills. Offers roll from each zone’s own seeded stream (boon_rng), so they never shift spawning or mote rolls. Every mote caught counts (released, sparks and spills alike). A zone offers from FIELD_POOL, or from DEEP_POOL (the field pool plus the three fuel boons) when its map sets carry_motes. Up to 6 offers wait in a queue, shown one at a time; past that none are made. A pick may also pass. The trip ends on entering a hearth’s rect (with or without motes), on a portal into a map with a hearth, and on going down without Second Wind; offers and the count toward the next go with it. Beacons do not exist yet: Boons.beacon is the hook they will call. Bots (the grind bot and the fighting scenarios) pass every offer with Boons.decline.

Keys (§2.4): , . / pick the three cards, Backspace passes. With six held, a card key chooses the card, then , and . walk the row, / gives up the boon marked (or click it), and Backspace backs out. Mouse and touch click the cards.

8. Titans and the world clock

8.1 Glow, Under and Bells

The world sits in dusk (01-world.md §3). A 3-hour cycle runs from a fixed epoch: the Glow for 2 hours, then the Under for 1 hour. Twelve Bells per cycle, one every 15 minutes: Bells 1–8 are the Glow, 9–12 the Under; “dawn-bell” is Bell 1. Eight Unders a day, so every time zone gets several.

During the Under: every map is one ambient tier darker (6.4); Lampghost spawns +25%; mote chance 45%; the Moth Queen flies; Lampblack’s Velvet Market opens (the Night Market); moth- skiffs run. The world clock is an input to the sim, identical in every channel and on every platform.

8.2 The Turning

A Turning is 7 days and begins at the weekly reset (Tuesday 15:00 UTC); day 1 is its first 24 hours. Every titan’s loop divides 168 hours, so the calendar repeats exactly at every reset. No loop divides 24 hours, so each dock arrives at a different hour each loop and covers every hour of the day within a Turning.

8.3 Routes

Dock places are 01-world.md §5.3’s; this table sets the hours.

• Greyhorn’s weekly moments (01-world.md §5.4). His loop is phased so its Furrows → Glasslands south crossing falls at Turning hour 104 on loop 3 (day 5) and hour 146 on loop 4 (day 7). On day 5 that crossing is the Charge; on day 7 it is Glassbreak; on loops 1 and 2 it is an ordinary Crossing. Both land at the same UTC hour every week, so each one’s reward lasts the following Glow (8.5) and the Almanac calendar gives a week’s notice.
• The Moth Queen’s legs rotate Lowlight → Wend’s Fall → the Combs’ rim, one per Under, so each leg comes every third Under. Eight Unders a day against a three-leg rotation puts each leg at a different hour each day. The rotation restarts at each Turning reset (56 Unders: 18 rotations, then Lowlight and Wend’s Fall), so the calendar repeats exactly. She lands on Wend’s skull on every Wend’s Fall leg. While she flies, Lampblack is reachable only by moth-skiff.
• Lowlight is never docked, on purpose: no titan kneels where the Stay keep their cages. It is reached on foot and by the Tetherline at Stairfoot, and the Moth Queen passes over in the Under.
• Every region is always reachable on foot and by Tetherline (8.6). A dock makes a region close, cheap and rich, never possible-only-now.
• Crossings per Turning: 18 (Mossback) + 16 (Greyhorn) + 6 (Ystra) = 40, about six a day.
• The Stride (7.5) can skip a dock or add one; hours move inside the loop, so loop lengths never change.
• The schedule is computed from the epoch and the published Stride, shown in the Almanac calendar at reset and in a public calendar feed.

8.4 Docking

While a titan is docked (01-world.md §5.2):

8.5 Crossings

While a titan moves between docks (1 hour, 90 minutes when Faltering), its hold has no foot link. In the first 15 minutes the Crossing runs on the titan’s flank map, in every channel: Lampghosts climb its legs toward the hold and players defend three lantern posts.

• Lampghost count = 10 + 3 x players present, capped at the map’s 60 alive monsters.
• Lampghosts put out on the flank return their motes to the titan on the spot (7.4).
• Rewards: 100 Favor, Guild tallies, a chance at crossing cosmetics.
• All posts held: the next dock gets Heartwarm on two more maps. Posts lost: nothing worse.
• Named crossings:
  • The Charge (Greyhorn, day 5; every loop when Faltering): a dust wall crosses every Furrows map. Ride his horns or hide in the trench walls; for the next Glow, mote chance on the Furrows is doubled (“a rain of motes”).
  • Glassbreak (Greyhorn, day 7): the south Glasslands shatter as he arrives; shortcut paths, buried lanterns and Glassbreak Fields open for the next Glow.
  • The songwater pass (Ystra): songwater rain over Tallowmere for an hour: burn x0.5 in its strata, and Lampghosts are Hushed while she sings.

8.6 Getting around

Travel off the docks exists and is slow, so a docked titan stays the fast way in.

Carried motes exist only below the surface and bank on reaching it (7.2), so the last column matters only for a run’s way out.

The Tetherline ride is a playable map (emotes, scenery, a Lamplighter guard), and in Act III Snuffers raid it as a world event.

8.7 Binding

Every character is bound to Mossback at their Lighting. From the branch trial (30) a character may rebind at another hold’s hearth, once per Turning, drawing 100 motes from the new titan. The bound titan is the Return Lantern target, the relight point when no beacon is lit, and the titan charged for rank-ups. A guild is bound to one titan too (14.4).

8.8 Events from the migration and the calendar

Never more than one event per week needs a login at a specific time beyond the Charge and Glassbreak, whose rewards last a Glow; crossings and Unders recur through the day.

9. Story state

The story is a live season for everyone, not per-player phasing. 04-architecture.md keeps one world state in worldd; there is no per-player world.

9.1 Acts

The world story (01-world.md §8) runs as server-wide Acts. An Act opens for the whole server on a scheduled date. The open Act sets the world state (NPC states, faction activity, world events, the sky) and its server event. Regions, dungeons, levels and personal story quests (9.3) are not gated by Act.

Launch scope is D1 (07-decisions.md): the Prologue and Acts I–II, regions 1–5, three holds, the Gutterworks and Hornheart, cap 60. Act I opens at launch and Act II 4–6 weeks later. Acts III–V ship as major updates about every 3–4 months, each with its regions, instances and cap raise (92, 106, 120); Lampblack and the Velvet Market come with Act III and the Second Noon raid with Act V. Each world event happens once per world.

9.2 Server outcomes

Each Act ends with a server event and one outcome the whole server decides by what it does, measured by worldd, never a vote alone. The story continues either way; the outcome changes the next Act’s texture. Acts III and V also carry a Dawnmark (7.6), which lands only when the event is won and the Stride is Steady or better.

9.3 Personal beats

The story’s key moments are instanced and personal: the Lighting; the Chandler’s ledger; Hornheart and Hob at the tap (the first revelation); Nan Corvina and Lisle (68); the song of the Tapping; Quarle’s model (the second revelation); Wickham’s letter; the Heartchamber; the Listeners’ questions. They run on the player’s quest flags, alone or with their party, whenever the region is open, whatever the world Act. Dialogue lines that state a world fact (the sky, the Second Noon, Morrow) have one variant per Act (12.2).

9.4 The Convergence and Morrow

The Convergence is the last Turning of Act V. All four titans leave their loops and walk to the Sunfoot over the Turning; hold docks move to the Convergence map. The Second Noon rises in the east of every sky for that Turning. The raid opens.

• The first clear on the server is Morrow’s birth (7.6), a world singleton (15.2): everyone online sees it, and the first clear’s names are written into Morrow’s hide.
• Every later clear is the Remembering, with the same rewards.
• After the Turning, loops resume and Morrow walks a fifth, slow loop around the Sunfoot and the Mossway.
• The prologue is an instance and does not move. During the Convergence, characters under 30 bound to Mossback Return Lantern to the Mossway camp, and the Pilgrim line stays free.

9.5 Late joiners

• The Archive at the Almanac recaps every closed Act and its server outcome: 3–5 minutes of illustrated pages read by Mote the Archivist, also offered as a “Previously” card at login and from the quest log.
• Personal beats are never skipped because the world has moved on. A player who joins after Morrow still has their Lighting and still stands at the tap in Hornheart.
• World singletons already done (the Pale Tenant’s first kill, Morrow) replay for them as the Remembering.
• The public result of a finished Act is not a secret; the personal beats deliver the why.

10. Items and gear

10.1 Slots

14 stat slots. The cosmetic layer covers every visible slot separately (10.7).

10.2 Item level

Item level (iL) equals required level for drops. Gear comes in bands of 10 levels (iL 10, 20 … 120). Dungeon gear sits +5 above its band; raid gear is iL 125–130. A band’s Glass-grade item is the baseline the damage table (3.3) assumes. Stat budget per item: band value x slot weight (weapon 1.0 ATK; top 0.25, bottom 0.2, head 0.15 … of armor), plus affixes.

10.3 Grades

Rarity is the grade of flame a lantern-maker would say the piece could hold. Each grade has a flame tell on the icon, the nameplate and the drop itself. None is cyan: cyan means absence (05-art-audio.md sets the exact colors).

Affix pool (each rolls from a tier range by iL): +Primary, +Secondary, +Grit, +ATK, +Damage%, +Boss Damage%, +Crit Rate, +Crit Damage, +Pierce, +Speed (feet), +Jump (feet), +Radius (lantern, head), +Burn Efficiency, +Fuel, +Mote Capacity (lantern, belt), +Element damage, +Gathering speed (charm). No affix raises mote drops or vigor: those would turn gear into a way to buy the titans’ health. Titan-cut uniques change how a skill works (“Lampstake also fires a Spark every second”).

10.4 Hornbinding (enhancement)

Brazenbrow’s craft: binding hornstone into gear. No destructive gambling, and nothing for it is ever sold for money.

• +0 to +10; each step adds 4% of the item’s base stats.
• Cost per step: hornstone dust (from salvaging items) and brass, rising with iL and step.
• +1 to +5 always succeed. +6 to +10 succeed at 80%, 65%, 50%, 40%, 30%.
• A failure never downgrades or destroys. It adds a third of the step’s chance to the next try on that item (so +10 is certain by the fifth try) and refunds half the dust.
• Hornbinding transfers at 80% to a new item of the same slot within one band.

10.5 Reglyphing

The Almanac’s glyph-scribing: reroll one affix of a Glass-grade or better item; see 3 options and choose one or keep the old. Cost: brass and glyph ink (from dungeons), rising 25% per reglyph on the same item per week. No paid rerolls; affix ranges are shown in the tooltip.

10.6 Sets

Each party dungeon has a 5-piece set (2- and 4-piece bonuses): the Chandler’s (Gutterworks), the Burnward (Hornheart), the Reckoner’s (the Orrery), the Wendhome (the Heartchamber). The raid has a 4-piece accessory set, the Noonbreaker, whose bonuses play with light (“your Seared targets are also Kindled”). A full set is slightly better than mixed best-in-slot Ember-set, never mandatory.

10.7 Cosmetics

Every visible slot (head, face and eye accessories, top, bottom, overall, hands, feet, cape, weapon, lantern skin, lantern glass color) has an independent cosmetic override. Cosmetics never carry stats. Sources: shop, events, achievements, crafting, dungeon and raid drops, the seasonal track. Hair, face and skin change at a hold stylist for brass or with shop coupons. Dyes are crafted (Mosswife) or earned. A wardrobe stores every cosmetic the account unlocks.

10.8 Inventory

48 slots at creation, +8 per bag upgrade (4 earned in the story to 80; 2 more purchasable to 96). Tabs for equipment, consumables, materials and quest items; materials stack to 999; quest items take no slots. Storage in every hold (shared, 80 slots, STASH_SLOTS), +40 per tab, 2 earnable tabs and 4 purchasable. Motes never go in storage.

10.9 The slice’s items

The items in the game today, renamed from the Terraria slice (ids unchanged, game/sim/items.gd). Materials name their maker’s world: Thornwood from the Dewline hedges, brass struck in Brazenbrow, hornsteel forged at Greyhorn’s tap.

11. Economy

11.1 Currencies

Motes are not a currency: they are fire going home (7.2), and a banked total pays only for Lantern Rank. Guild tallies replace the account currency; an Ember is a piece of Wend’s heart, never money.

11.2 Faucets and sinks (brass)

Brass income while grinding at level L, all sources: about 400 + 120L per hour (L10: 1,600; L60: 7,600; L120: 14,800). Quests pay one grind-hour of brass spread over a region’s quests.

Target: brass supply per active player-hour grows no more than 3% per week after the first month, and a reference basket (an at-level Glass-grade weapon, 100 HP tonics, a stack of common hornstone) moves less than ±10% a month. Levers: vendor prices, Hornbinding costs, Exchange tax.

As built (game/sim/loot.gd, game/sim/shop.gd): brass is a purse on the character, shown in the pack window. A monster’s brass drop is sized from its level so that a solo at-level grind at 5.1’s kill rate K(L) earns 400 + 120L an hour from brass drops and the materials it sells together, with brass drops never under 30% of it: at level 1 (Puddlings) about 180 from brass and 340 from Glowdrops, at level 9 (Afternooners) about 740 and 740. Amounts roll 0.5x to 1.5x of the mean, rounded at random so the mean holds. Materials carry a vendor price per item (sell in game/sim/items.gd: Glowdrop 1, Concord Coin 2). The Mosswife’s stall stands on Lantern Town’s hearth plaza: E opens her window; she sells Moss Tonics at 1.5 x the buyer’s level (at least 2) and buys any material stack whole. Every buy and sell is checked on the server’s tick against reach (3 tiles of her feet), stock, brass and pack room. A new character starts with 3 Moss Tonics.

The Hornsmith’s stall stands by the Warden Lodge: he sells the Mossway’s swords at 3.4 x item level² brass (Thornwood 31, Brass 122, Hornsteel 275), about 90% of what 5.1’s at-level grind earns over the band step before each (34, 134 and 281 brass from levels 1–2, 3–5 and 6–8), so brass buys the next sword about once a step with tonics to spare. He and the Mosswife buy a sword back for a brass per item level (3, 6, 9): a drop’s sale counts toward its kind’s income like a material’s, and anything more would crowd out brass drops (the Afternooner’s would fall to the 30% floor and still overshoot the budget).

11.3 The Exchange and the Velvet Market

• One world order book, reachable from any hold’s market board; items collected at any hold.
• Sell and buy orders. Listing fee 1% (min 10 brass, never refunded), sale tax 6%.
• Lampblack’s smugglers’ counter: 3% tax, usable only while you are in Lampblack.
• Fencing at the Velvet Market (Under only): once per Turning, unbind one Ember-set item for 20% of its 7-day median price in brass. A brass sink and the Moth Court’s trade.
• Price guard: listings below 0.2x or above 5x the 7-day median are held 24 h for review unless the item has fewer than 10 sales in that window.
• 30 active listings per character (50 with Hearthbond, 19.2).

11.4 Trading and anti-RMT

• Direct trade needs both characters at level 20+ and the account 7 days old with a verified email. Brass in a direct trade is capped at level x 2,000 per trade and 10 trades per day. Younger or lower accounts use the Exchange only.
• Hearth Writ (Hearthbond as an item, 19.2) is bought with real money and can be sold on the Exchange for brass: a legal route to the subscription that undercuts gold sellers. It makes brass indirectly purchasable (D16).
• Personal gear loot and shared tagging (13.1) remove farming disputes.
• Bound items: Ember-set bind on equip; Titan-cut and raid bind on pickup.
• Detection: one-directional brass flows, many accounts feeding one, trades far off median, 20-hour play, identical input timing, mote patterns (7.7). A person reviews before a ban.

11.5 Gathering

No terrain digging. Gathering nodes are fixed objects. The best materials come off the titans themselves, so materials follow the migration.

• Everyone can gather all three; skill 1–100 per kind raises yield and unlocks higher-band nodes.
• Nodes are per player (everyone gathers the same node once per 5-minute respawn), with a daily full-yield allowance: the first 200 gathers a day yield fully, then 25%. Botted gathering stops paying after an hour.
• A gather is a 2 s hold, interrupted by damage. 6–10 nodes per map.

11.6 Crafting

Each character takes 2 of 6 professions (switch for a fee; progress kept).

• Mastery 1–100; recipes by band. Crafted Glass-grade gear matches dropped Glass-grade; crafted Ember-set needs an ember from a dungeon. Crafts can roll Masterwork (+1 affix tier) at 5–15% by mastery.
• Crafting is instant in a hold workshop (no timers to sell skips for).
• Crafters sign their work on the tooltip.

12. Quests

12.1 Types

Objectives: put out N, collect N, talk to, escort (escorts walk at player speed and wait), light (carry light to a place, kindle a beacon, burn an Absence), bank motes, deliver across titans (use the migration), gather, craft, find (with a light-only clue).

Kill credit is shared by the party on the same map. Quest drops are per player and drop for everyone tagged, at no less than 40%, so no quest needs more than about 2.5x the stated count. “This quest is easier with others” is a tag on the quest, never a requirement at this level (the open world never needs a group).

As built (game/sim/quests.gd, D78, D79): quests are data rows (giver, hand-in giver, level, an optional quest before it, goals, reward, lines), so a region’s quests are more rows. Goals so far are put out N (on one map when the row says) and collect N, counted from the pack and taken at the hand-in; a collect goal can name a kind that drops its item as a quest item, at full chance for each eligible player who still needs it. Kill credit goes to the kill’s whole party (5.5). The interact key beside a giver hands in a finished quest that ends there, else takes the next it offers (from one level under the quest’s). The server is the authority: progress changes only in the sim’s tick on the server. TODO: talk, light, escort, bank and the other goals; Accept / Not now and abandon with the dialogue scripts.

12.2 Dialogue

Dialogue runs as sandboxed scripts. Every NPC conversation is a small graph:

Greeting (1 line; varies by quest state, titan position, Stride and Act)
  ├─ Quest offers / turn-ins (each 1–3 bubbles; Accept / Not now)
  ├─ Topics (lore, at most 3, each 1–3 bubbles)
  ├─ Services (shop, storage, stylist, trainer, Tetherline)
  └─ Farewell

• A bubble is at most 3 lines of about 40 characters (phone-legible), skippable at any time. A quest’s objective is always one line in the log.
• Conditions can read level, class, quest flags, titan docks, the Glow or the Under, the Stride and the open Act. Each hold NPC has at least two lines that react to where its titan is.
• A line that states a world fact (the sky, the Second Noon, Morrow) has one variant per Act.
• Choices with consequences are rare and marked with an icon; most are flavor.

12.3 Quest log and guide

25 active quests. The guide line points at the tracked quest’s next step; tapping a quest on mobile paths the guide across maps (the player still moves; there is no auto-walk).

As built: L opens the log (game/ui/quest_log.gd): each quest under way with its giver, goals and counts, and its line. The tracker under the guide line (top right) shows the first three; the guide follows the first quest ready to hand in, else the first under way, after the prologue, portals and the Lodge. Givers show “!” for work, “?” for a hand-in and speak in a bubble when the player is in reach (game/render/giver_view.gd). TODO: picking the tracked quest, mobile pathing and the finished list.

13. Loot and drops

13.1 Rules in the open world

• Shared tagging: anyone who deals at least 10% of a monster’s max HP, or heals or shields someone fighting it, within its last 10 s, is eligible, as is everyone in the killer’s party on the map. Every eligible player gets the kill, an XP share (5.5) and their own loot roll (13.3). Kill-stealing does not exist: a stranger who tags shares exactly like a party member, so partying never costs anyone loot and not partying never earns more. As built: eligible players (the killer’s party on the map, and taggers; 5.5) share the XP and the kill and each roll their own drops (13.3, game/sim/loot.gd); motes still go to the killer.
• Personal loot: drops are visible only to their owner. Auto-loot pulls your drops within 3 tiles, free for everyone. Motes are the exception: they are shared fire (7.2).
• Drops not picked up vanish after 60 s; Ember-set and better are mailed. As built: a drop (game/sim/drop.gd) is brass or a stack of an item with an owner; the server sends each client only its own, auto-loot pulls them in within 3 tiles while the pack has room (brass needs none), and a map that empties drops them.

13.2 Rates (normal monster, at level)

Elites: equipment 100%, Glass-grade or better 30%. Bosses: their tables (15).

As built: equipment is a 4% row in a kind’s drops, the Mossway sword of the highest item level at or under the kind’s level (Mossnip, Dandlehop and Shellmite the Thornwood Sword; Thornpig and Dimwing the Brass; the Afternooner the Hornsteel). The Puddling drops none: its band’s sword is the starting one. Kinds of level 5 and under also drop a Moss Tonic at 10%, the newcomer allowance (1.2). TODO: grades (10.3).

13.3 Loot follows XP

Each eligible player (13.1) rolls the whole table for themselves, at every chance in 13.2 times:

loot_share = (1 + 0.10 * (min(n, 6) - 1)) / n  *  level_modifier(player, monster)

where n is the number of eligible players and level_modifier is the drops column of 5.6. Solo it is 1. A party of 6 gets 1.5x the drops of one player between them, the same bonus as XP (5.5), so brass and gear per player-hour do not depend on group size and the brass budget (11.2) holds. Quest items are the exception: everyone tagged rolls at full chance (12.1).

• Item level of an equipment drop is the monster’s band (10.2). A monster 10 or more levels below the player drops no equipment, so old maps cannot be farmed for gear; crafters can still farm them for materials at 10%.
• Motes are not loot: they are released into the world and caught by lanterns (7.2).
• Event rate boosts apply to everyone on the world equally, for a published window, and are never sold (19.3).

13.4 Bad-luck protection

Every random reward with a chase has a counter that turns luck into a ceiling, shown on the tooltip so it never feels like a slot machine:

13.5 Drop feel

What MapleStory gets right is the moment a drop lands. Each grade has its own flame tell on the drop (10.3), a rising pickup chime per grade, and a short light column for Glass-grade and better that other players do not see (loot is personal). Ember-set and Titan-cut also announce in the player’s own chat line; Titan-cut announces in region chat with the player’s name, opt-out in settings. Auto-loot pulls the player’s drops within 3 tiles for free; there are no loot pets.

As built: every drop is Tallow (a pale wax-white glow) until equipment drops; brass lies as a little stack of coins. A pickup plays a placeholder chime (game/render/drop_view.gd, one hook with a grade argument) and floats “+N brass” or “+N item” over the player.

13.6 The Mossway and the Glasslands (designed)

Proposed (D41, D43), for 02-atlas.md §6.6–6.7. Each kind keeps 13.2’s rates: a material at 40% and equipment at 4%, the band’s weapon of the highest item level at or under the kind’s (the Mossway swords at iL 3, 6, 9; the Glasslands’ at iL 12, 15, 18, sold at the Last Milepost). Item ids are assigned when built (next free 43).

14. Social

Chat follows docs/platform.md and D17: 13+, pings, markers, raid callouts and preset phrases at launch, no free text and no direct messages. Guild free chat for verified 16+ comes later, once moderation operations exist (10-operations.md). Every system below works without free text, and nothing needs voice.

14.1 Signals (preset phrases)

• A phrase picker of about 300 phrases in categories (greetings, party, combat, trade, directions, thanks, jokes), with slots filled from game data: item links, map names, numbers from a keypad, party members’ names, emotes.
• Examples: “LFG [dungeon] as [role]”, “Selling [item] for [number] brass”, “Beacon at [map] needs kindling”, “Carrying [number] motes to [map], escort?”, “Follow me”, “Behind you!”.
• Quick wheel: 8 favorites on a radial (desktop T; gamepad hold R3; mobile long-press the chat icon).
• Speech bubbles above heads for map chat; a chat log with tabs.

14.2 Chat channels

14.3 Pings and markers

The raid’s third phase (02-atlas.md §4) and every dark map are built to be run with these.

Pings (ping key, middle mouse, L3, or long-press the chat icon, then a direction):

• Pings show to your party or raid, on screen and minimap, for 6 s, with a short sound per kind. Shapes differ as well as colors (color-blind safe).
• Path ping: hold the ping key and drag to draw up to 6 points; the path shows for 10 s. It draws over darkness on the light layer: a Shade who can see a Lightless route can show it to everyone.
• Limits: 1 ping per 1.5 s, 3 alive per player; spam beyond that is dropped silently.

Markers (party leader, raid leader and raid assists):

• 8 world markers (numbered shapes) placed on footholds; they persist until cleared or the instance ends.
• 6 target markers (shapes) on monsters or players.
• Callouts: about 40 preset raid lines with a timer slot, shown center-screen to the raid (“Core to [tether] in [5]”, “Swap lifts”, “Spread”, “Stack on [marker]”, “Hold the valves”).
• A raid can save marker layouts per encounter.

Pings and markers carry no free text, so they need no moderation beyond rate limits and block (20).

14.4 Guilds

• 100 members at guild level 1, 150 at level 10. Ranks: leader, two officer ranks, member, initiate (custom names, preset permissions).
• Each guild binds to one titan’s hold (rebind once per Season). Guild level 1–20 rises with Guild Seals from members’ weekly activities (beacons kindled, motes banked, dungeons cleared, Crossings defended). Each member’s contribution is capped weekly, so a guild cannot be bought by one player.
• Perks by level: crest and cape (3), shared storage tab (5), Tetherline discount on its titan’s lines (7), guild beacon night (a weekly guild event map, 10), member cap 150 (10), title track (15, 20). No combat stats.
• Creating a guild costs 50,000 brass and needs 6 members within 48 h.
• Guild Holdings (a guild hall at a hold) are Season 2 (08-scale.md §5).

14.5 Friends, blocks and emotes

• 300 mutual friends: online status, location and class; invite to party; join on their channel. No messaging beyond Signals while chat is preset-only.
• Block hides the player’s bubbles, pings, signals, invites and trade requests everywhere, and survives name changes.
• 40 emotes at launch (wave, cheer, sit, dance, lantern-raise, bow, shutter-bow, cry, laugh …), more from the shop and events. Under preset chat, emotes are a first-class social tool and get real animation budget.

14.6 Hearthrooms (Season 2 or later)

An instanced room in your bound hold that walks with its titan. Furniture is crafted (Hidewright, Lampwright, Hornsmith), dropped or bought as cosmetics; friends and guildmates visit; a trophy wall shows boss kills and lore finds. It is the best power-free sink for brass and Starglass and a second market for crafters. Not at launch: a large UI and content cost that does nothing for the leveling path.

15. Group content

15.1 World bosses

One per region, from 02-atlas.md: the Puddle Mayor (10, the Soak), the Cinder Eye (20, the Kiln), Old Gutter (30), the Bellwether (42), the Dusk Roc (55), the Pale Tenant (68, the Under only), the Drowned Bell (80), the Afternoon Prince (92), Hob Sallow and the Black Tide (104). Wend’s Absence (120) is a world singleton (15.2).

Larger fights (150 in one instance) are a later aspiration that needs S1b and S2 headroom; the design must work at 60.

The first two, designed (02-atlas.md §6.7, proposed, D43). Open-world life is the table above; a Trial (15.6) is a dungeon boss, 400x a normal monster’s life, times 15.3’s (0.4 + 0.1 x party size). Hits are shares of mid-class life at the boss’s level (3.4).

At about 260 damage a second for an at-level level-10 Warden’s Sweeps (3.3) and 940 at 20, two bots need about 2 minutes of hitting for either Trial; dodging, Runlets and the Sweep take the rest of 3–5.

15.2 World singletons

A world singleton exists once per world (04-architecture.md §4): the titans, Wend’s Absence, the Pale Tenant’s resolution, Morrow, the Sunline and Act state. worldd owns the state; channel and instance processes render a read-only copy and report contributions in batches.

• Shared pool. A singleton fight runs as many 60-attacker instances against one health or progress pool held by worldd. Each instance applies its damage locally and reports it every second; worldd sums, and every instance shows the shared bar. When the pool empties, every instance gets the result on the same tick.
• The Pale Tenant (Act III event): its first resolution is a Dawnmark (7.6) through the shared pool across one week of Unders. Afterwards it is an ordinary world boss (15.1).
• Wend’s Absence (Act V): cannot be put out. Parties draw it away from the Gilded Hour’s lance batteries with light, break the Titanshades it sheds and destroy batteries; progress fills the shared pool, and success moves it to the Convergence map for the raid.
• Morrow’s birth: the first raid clear during the Convergence, if the Dawnmark condition holds (7.6).

15.3 Party dungeons

Instanced, 1–6 players, 20–30 minutes; approach, two mini-bosses and a final boss with phases (02-atlas.md §3 owns the fights).

• Difficulties: Normal (scaled to party size, any composition), Hard (tuned for 6, entry at the band’s top, +10 iL), and at the level cap Deep-touched versions of every dungeon, scaled to cap with the week’s Omens (08-scale.md §4).
• Lockout: unlimited runs; 2 full-loot clears per dungeon per day on Normal, 1 on Hard, 3 Deep-touched per week across all dungeons. Further clears give XP and Dungeon Marks.
• Loot: personal. Each boss rolls for each player; the final boss guarantees one set piece per full-loot clear. Dungeon Marks buy a chosen piece at 10 clears.

15.4 The raid: the Second Noon

Level 120, iL 125–130, flexible 12–18 players (D18). HP and mechanic counts scale with size; 18 is not easier per player than 12. Expected composition: 2 Protectors, 3–4 Sustain, the rest any. Phases from 02-atlas.md §4:

• Lockout: weekly per boss per character, at the weekly reset.
• Loot: personal; 25% chance per player per boss of a raid item, plus Raid Marks (a chosen piece at 6). Duplicates of bound items become Marks.
• Story mode (4 weeks after the raid opens): 6–18 players, reduced mechanics, story and cosmetics, iL 120.
• The first clear on the world is Morrow’s birth (9.4); later clears are the Remembering.

15.5 Weekly reset

Tuesday 15:00 UTC, the Turning boundary (shown in local time): raid lockouts, weekly quests, Deep-touched lockouts, boss-ladder lockouts (15.6), the Deep’s weekly seed, Omens, guild weekly caps, the Favor curve, the Sunline netting and the new Stride. Maintenance, if any, uses the same hour (D14).

15.6 Boss ladder (D27)

MapleStory’s endgame is its weekly boss list: each boss has Normal, Hard and harder tiers, a party of 1–6 works down the list, and “which tiers do you clear” is how players measure themselves. World bosses here are open fights for 60, and the raid arrives only with Act V, so the launch cap needs a small-group ladder:

• Trials. Every region’s world boss also has an instanced Trial for 1–6 players, scaled like Normal dungeons (15.3). Same boss and moves; the Trial adds one mechanic per tier.
• Tiers. Normal (at the boss’s level, Glass-grade), Hard (band top, tuned for Ember-set at +5) and, at the cap, Deep-touched with the week’s Omens. Because of the 2x ceiling (5.6), Hard and Deep-touched are won by execution more than gear.
• Lockout. One loot clear per tier per character per Turning; unlimited practice runs with no loot.
• Loot. Personal: an Ember-set piece chance, hornstone dust, glyph ink and Boss Marks (a chosen piece at 8). The first clear of each tier gives a title.
• The ladder. The character card and the party finder show the highest tier cleared for each boss. At the launch cap: 5 bosses x 3 tiers.

16. PvP

Not at launch. Open-world PvP never. Opt-in Sparring later; a normalized arena only if players ask for it after Season 2.

• Pillar 4 is cooperative; light rewards standing together, and PvP turns overlapping lanterns into a griefing tool.
• The audience is 13+ with preset chat; open-world PvP produces most of an MMO’s harassment reports.
• The combat is tuned for PvE (target caps, auto-target, i-frames); balancing both splits every class change.
• PvP raises the value of every latency trick and needs lag compensation the PvE netcode does not.

Later: Sparring (Season 2): consensual 1v1 or party-against-party duels in hold courtyards, stats normalized to a band template, no rewards beyond a tally.

17. World structure for systems

17.1 Regions

Names, maps and monsters are 02-atlas.md’s. Lampghost share is the share of spawns that are Lampghosts (and so release motes); the rest are creatures, machines and people.

Each region meets the density bar (08-scale.md §9): at most 6 surface maps and 2 strata, its own monster family, a camp (lit, with vendors, a beacon, a kitepost and a Tetherline station), a world boss, a quest line, at least one hidden map, an Omen set, and one frame-worthy vista. The Deep sits under the strata (08-scale.md §4).

17.2 Channels and maps

• A channel is one process holding every public map of one copy of the world. A map instance caps at 150 players and 60 alive monsters; monsters appear at the map’s spawn points, and how many scales with players present (8 per player, CAP_PER_PLAYER) up to the points’ counts and the cap. A point refills one monster per respawn beat (Mossy Field: 6 s).
• Why 8: a field puts a monster on every platform tier for one player, which takes a point per tier stretch, and Mossy Field has 8 (ground, the hills and four platforms). At 4 a solo player saw about one monster per screen (a screen is about 465 units of a 1,600-unit field) and the upper platforms stood empty. Kill rate is not what forced it: the mossy-grind bot made 18 kills a minute at 4 (24 at 8), past §5.1’s K(1) = 14, because Puddlings hop at the nearest player from anywhere on the map. A MapleStory-style field whose monsters wander until hit would need the full sum: a ~1 s kill and a kill every 4.3 s leave ~300 units of walking (90 units/s) per kill, so ~2,300 units of floor needs about 8 alive per player. Supply is not the limit either: 8 points at a 6 s beat refill 80 a minute.
• worldd opens and merges channels to hold density, not just load (04-architecture.md §4): at 2,000 CCU, 4–6 channels with 15–30 players on the busiest field map; at 5,000, 10–14 channels with the same field density and towns at 120–150.
• A portal into a full map offers a channel switch. Clients draw the 60 nearest players (30 on mobile).
• Beacons, Crossings and spawns are per channel; titans, Acts, the Sunline and world bosses are not.

18. Endgame and live ops

18.1 At the cap

An engaged player’s week, about 8–12 hours:

Power after the best gear comes from Hornbinding and Lantern Rank, both capped per Season, so there is no infinite grind. The cap is 60 at launch (D1) and rises with each Act update. At 60, the endgame is the Gutterworks and Hornheart on Deep-touched, the Deep, the world bosses of regions 1–5 and the Sunline; later Acts add their dungeons, and Act V the Second Noon raid.

18.2 Seasons

A Season (10–12 weeks) is a run of events and additions; Acts keep their own schedule (9.1). After Morrow, each Season also brings a new Dawnmark (7.6). Each Season adds a free seasonal track (cosmetics, titles, 300 Starglass in total), a premium cosmetic track (19), an Omen set, Deep pieces, a balance pass, and usually a new branch, dungeon or region. Expansions (about yearly) add a titan route, a region band and a cap raise. Events are in 8.8.

18.3 Calendar

Daily reset 15:00 UTC; weekly reset Tuesday at the same hour. A live event at least every 2 weeks.

19. Monetization

Free to play: cosmetics, conveniences and a subscription. Canon: never sell power. The test for a new item: if a paying and a non-paying player of equal time and skill could end up with different stats, kill speed, XP rate, drop rate, success chance, fuel, motes, Favor or Sunline weight, it is not sold.

19.1 What is sold

19.2 Hearthbond

$9.99 a month, or as a Hearth Writ item tradeable on the Exchange for brass (D16; Writ listings capped per account per week). Gives 500 Starglass a month, a monthly cosmetic, +20 Exchange listings, +2 storage tabs while active, a free appearance change a month, and a saved Tetherline destination set. Nothing that touches XP, drops, brass earned, fuel, oil, motes, Favor, Hornbinding or loot.

19.3 Never sold

• XP, Hearthrest or level boosts; skipping levels or story.
• Drop, brass, mote, Favor or Guild tally boosts; Sunline weight.
• Gear, stats, Hornbinding materials or success, reglyphs, wicks, lantern parts or ranks.
• Fuel, oil, belt slots, potions, Spare Flames, relights.
• Lockout resets, extra loot claims, dungeon or raid entries.
• Paid randomness of any kind: no loot boxes, gacha or mystery bundles.
• Auto-battle (it does not exist; auto-loot is free).
• Branch changes and respecs (brass in game, D11).

19.4 Minors and spending

13–17 accounts: a $50 monthly cap by default, adjustable by a verified parent; no purchase prompts in the first session; no limited-time timers under 72 h; no Starglass gifting to or from minors. Purchases go through Apple and Google IAP, and web in the US (docs/platform.md).

20. Safety

Policy is docs/platform.md’s and 10-operations.md’s (13+, US first, preset chat, no direct messages, report and block everywhere). Systems commitments:

• Chat is Signals, pings and markers (14); every slotted value is validated against game data, so slots cannot spell words. Player, guild and listing names pass a name filter (blocklist, fuzzy match, human review of reports).
• Reporting on every player, name, guild and listing from the profile, party frame or a long-press. Categories: harassment by emote or ping spam, offensive name, cheating, botting, real-money trading, other. A report carries the last 5 minutes of that player’s server events (signals, pings, emotes, trades, movement), so review needs no client data.
• Spam and follow-griefing: 10 emotes per 20 s; the ping limits (14.3); a “keep distance” toggle fades other characters standing on yours in holds.
• Spills are shared, so going dark beside a stranger can hand them your motes but never your items.
• Trading with minors: direct trade between an adult and a 13–17 account needs 7 days of friendship; minors can always use the Exchange.
• No personal data in game: no real names; URLs rejected everywhere.

21. Anti-cheat

The server runs the sim; clients send input frames only.

22. Tuning and metrics

Bots and telemetry decide whether these numbers hold. Bots run in CI (the scenario gate and nightly sweeps); telemetry runs on live servers. First-session targets and retention benchmarks are 10-operations.md’s.

22.1 Bots

The grind bot plays from what a player sees: it walks, climbs, drops, hooks, sweeps, braces and bashes, and moves map to map through the portals by level, at the low end of each atlas band: Mossy Field for levels 1–3, Footprint Ponds from 4, the Old Tollbridge from 8. In town it sells its loot and spare swords, buys the Hornsmith’s best sword it can wield and afford, then Moss Tonics back up to 5; it walks home as soon as a better sword is affordable, swings the best sword it carries, and declines boons. Its map of each zone includes props’ footholds (the tollbridge deck is a prop) and never joins a surface that lies over itself.

The other classes play their kits 1–9 (Lodge skills wait for the induction at 10). The Ranger and Kindler back off a monster whose body comes within 26 u, turning for each shot or Spark with one tick of walk; the Ranger stands far enough off to aim at a target above or below, vaults over a monster when cornered, spends Focus on Split Shot (its spare arrows find a lone target) and Flares a Shrouded Lampghost. The Kindler Blinks clear within 12 u, Flarebursts two or more (one once Blink is spent) without Overheating, Kindles under a fresh Lampghost and holds a Spark that would Overheat her while backing off. The Shade keeps the glass cracked, spends Gloom on Shadow Fang, and backs off and Flickers away below 35% life while her tonic cools. The three pick a lone monster over a pack (48 u of walk per neighbour within 40 u). Nightly 2026-10-05, 4 seeds: Kindler 37.5–39.8 min (pass, 17.8–19.0 kills a minute); the Ranger 42.9–44.4, just over the band, loses its time to single-target kills (ponds 19.5–20.7 kills a minute against the Warden’s 23–25, the tollbridge 13–14 against 13–18), not deaths; the Shade 47.1–63.1 with 7 to 12 deaths, from level 5 on the ponds, where a two-target 55% x 2 cut with no defensive skill trades worse than Sweep and Brace. Both are balance findings for the class pass (the lever 4.9’s DPS budget names: the basic’s target count or use time), not bot changes.

Measured 2026-10-04 (nightly, 4 seeds): every seed reached level 10 in 35.0 to 40.6 sim minutes (35.3, 40.6, 38.7, 35.0), inside 30.8–41.7, at 17.5 to 19.6 kills a minute (about 690 kills, 1 to 2 deaths, 3 to 5 trips home; 14 s of wall time per run). Per level against §5.1’s cumulative 1.15 x t:

By map (minutes include walking through): Mossy Field 18–19 kills a minute at 8.7 XP a kill; Footprint Ponds 21–24 at 21; the Old Tollbridge 14–18 at 36. The tollbridge is the slow one: its Dimwings hover over the riverbed out of a Sweep’s reach, and the bot waits under them. A death costs the walk back from town through every map; the slowest seed died twice. On Mossy Field alone it took 81 minutes (114 to 117 before the damage formula and swords): its monsters top out at level 4.

22.2 Live telemetry

22.3 Playtesters

D28 keeps the game private until launch, so nobody outside plays it before then. Playtesters stand in for those outside testers: scripted personas that play every night, and an AI critic that plays a first session on demand and writes down where it got lost. Neither replaces people. They catch the regressions and confusions that people would hit first, on every build, before anyone can.

Persona bots (tools/bots/playtesters.sh, the nightly’s Playtesters job, 4 seeds each):

“Real client” means game/main.tscn in a window, connected over WebSocket to a local server/server.tscn. The bot acts only through Input.parse_input_event: key presses held for real durations (at least 83 ms), and mouse moves, clicks and wheel turns at screen points. It reads only what the screen shows: the world inside the camera’s view, including footholds, portals and vendors it has seen so far, and the HUD’s numbers. “Fast” means InputFrames go straight into the sim with the whole map known. It measures pacing and map coverage, not the input path, and the report labels every row with its path.

Each persona reports:

• minutes to each level against 5.1
• deaths, with map and position
• time stuck: any 10 s with no XP, kill, level, brass, banking or map change and no move of more than 16 units, with its place
• time spent walking instead of grinding
• brass per hour

The real-client runs also report:

• presses, fumbles and mean reaction
• server corrections, and the worst 5 s of them
• how often the newcomer had to ask the way: it fell back to the known route once both ends of a map had been seen

The nightly fails on:

• any 120 s stuck
• a newcomer slower than 1.5x 5.1 to level 5 (15.5 min), or one that never gets there (NEWCOMER_GATED and NEWCOMER_SLACK in run_personas.gd). Off again (2026-10-04): after the newcomer tuning (1.2) it reaches level 4 in 10–11 min but level 5 in 16–20 min (1.5–2.0x), with 1–3 deaths, the rest lost on the Ponds and on detours through Mossy Field’s Hedgerows portal, so it is reported until it is inside 1.5x. As built (2026-10-05): the newcomer leaves untried any portal to a map whose band starts above its level (BAND_FLOOR in newcomer_bot.gd), so it no longer detours into the Hedgerows; the full nightly had it reach level 5 in 16.3, 19.0, 16.0 and 17.3 min (seeds 0–3, real client), having asked the way 0, 0, 0 and 1153 times (870–1080 every seed before), and learned only the town, field and ponds portals
• a monkey failure: a script error or crash, a correction storm (more than 30 corrections in 5 s), the player inside solid ground for half a second or out of the map for a second, or a pack, shop or boon offer that does not close when its key is pressed

Everything else is reported, not gated. The table goes in the job summary, and the artifact holds report.json and every run’s logs.

AI first-session critic (tools/critic/, on demand). A model plays the real client the same way, one turn at a time. Each turn:

1. The client draws a 1280x720 frame and reads the HUD’s visible text (hud_text.gd mirrors hud.gd’s strings; no hidden state).
2. The server is paused and the model chooses one action.
3. The game plays that action for 0.5 s.

The actions are move, jump, attack, E, skill bar N, potion, pack, escape, boon card N or pass, click X Y, and wait. Each turn the model also writes its goal, what it expects, and what confuses it. The persona is a prompt in tools/critic/personas/: newcomer, maplestory-veteran or kid.

The run stops after N turns or at level 5. Its report ranks confusions by how long they blocked progress (from the first turn that names a confusion to the next XP, kill, level, map or brass), with the frame each started on. It also includes the model’s goal over time and the full notes log.

The model is Claude Code headless (claude -p, default the latest Sonnet), on whatever subscription is logged in. No key is in the repo.

To run the critic:

• On a Mac with Claude Code logged in: tools/critic/run_critic.sh [persona] [turns] [model] writes build/critic/<persona>/report.md.
• In CI: GitHub Actions, workflow Critic, Run workflow, with persona, turns and model. It runs on the mbp runner, is skipped with a notice if claude is not on that runner’s PATH, and uploads the report and frames as an artifact.

Every turn is one model call, so a 40-turn session costs about 40 calls.

23. Launch scope and later

Launch scope is D1: Acts I–II, cap 60. This table is what ships at launch and what follows; “Act III”, “Act IV” and “Act V” mean the update that ships that Act.

24. Decisions this document depends on

Open and settled decisions live in 07-decisions.md. This document follows its settled launch scope D1 (Acts I–II, cap 60), server-wide Acts D2, the Lampghosts name D3, and its recommendations: the Moth Queen dusted until 68 D10, branch change for a brass fee and 7-day cooldown D11, maintenance at the Turning reset D14, shared storage D15, the Hearth Writ D16, pings, markers and presets at launch D17, a flexible 12–18 raid D18, about 150 hours to 120 D21, Lodgemarks for alts D26 (5.4) and the boss ladder D27 (15.6). New systems questions go to 07 with the next free number.