Scale

How the game feels massive with a small team. Scale here is not a map count. It is three things a player can feel: the world is bigger than me, what we do changes it, and there is always more. This document owns the Sunline, strata, the Deep, world state and the density bar. It builds on 01-world.md (the truth, Morrow), 03-systems.md (light, motes, beacons) and 04-architecture.md (worldd, channels, world singletons). Terms are in 09-glossary.md.

1. The Sunline: the titans’ shared vigor

The truth (00-canon.md) is that every lantern lit is a step a titan never takes, and fire given back is a step returned. The Sunline is that ledger for the whole world: the titans’ net vigor, one server-wide number that every player’s lighting spends and every banked mote restores. It is shown on the Long Clock in the Almanac and on a gauge in every hold.

The extraction loop

1. Draw. Lighting spends titan vigor: every lantern lit, every minute a lantern stays lit outside a hold, every relight after going dark, every lantern rank-up, every beacon lit or held, and each hold’s standing lamps.
2. Go out. Players put out Lampghosts. In the fields the motes bank the moment a lantern catches them; each banked mote returns vigor.
3. Go down and carry home. In the strata and the Deep motes cling to the lantern as cargo and must be banked at a titan’s Vent, a beacon or the way up. Motes lost when a carrier goes dark scatter for anyone to pick up.
4. Net. At each Turning boundary worldd closes the week: vigor + returns − draws − the titans’ age drain (a fixed weekly decline, so a world that stops playing slides).

The loop is the game’s central tension in one number: light keeps you alive and costs the world; every Lampghost put out is what pays for it, and carrying fire home from below pays the best.

Values are tuned so a healthy world nets slightly positive; 03-systems.md owns the numbers and must keep the inputs and costs above.

Strides: thresholds that change the world

The Sunline’s level sets the world’s Stride for the next Turning. Strides are evaluated only at the Turning boundary (04-architecture.md §4, world singletons) and announced on the event bus a day ahead, so the whole world changes on the same tick. The thresholds (fractions of the world’s weekly draws, W) and each Stride’s exact effects are in 03-systems.md §7.5.

Strides never take away earned progress and never lock anyone out of their bound hold (01-world.md §5.5). They change where the titans go and how easy the world is to cross that week.

The sun moves only after Morrow

Before Morrow’s birth the sun never moves, whatever the Sunline does. The titans walk better or worse; the sky stays stalled. That keeps the story’s “the sun has not risen in 303 years” true until the finale.

Dawnmarks come with the Acts

A Dawnmark is the world change at the end of an Act’s server event (00-canon.md, story state): the Pale Tenant’s resolution, the Convergence, Morrow’s birth. Acts I–II ship at launch and III–V as later updates (D1); each opens server-wide on a published date (D2), so each event happens once per world. After Morrow, each later season’s Dawnmark also raises the sun one step: every sky is re-rendered at the new height. A Dawnmark needs the Act’s event won and the Sunline at or above Steady across the event’s Turning; a world that misses it retries the next Turning. The ambient darkness tiers of regions (03-systems.md) do not change with Dawnmarks or Strides; light-dependent gameplay stays authored per map.

One world at launch

If worlds are added later, each has its own Sunline, and the gap between worlds is a seasonal leaderboard.

2. Titans are geography, and they are huge

• Always visible. A titan is in the sky of every outdoor map, at its real position on its route (05-art-audio.md signature 1). From the frontier you can see your hold walking away.
• Arrival is an event. When a titan docks, its hold portal opens with a footfall shake, a horn and the music swelling.
• Titans are places, not just transport: the Pilgrim’s Stair down Mossback’s leg, Hornheart inside Greyhorn, fights on Ystra’s back, and Wend’s Fall, a region that is one dead titan’s body.
• Scale contrast as a rule: a 112 px character against a titan many screens tall. At least one map per region frames something enormous.

3. Strata: every region goes down

Each region has two strata under its surface maps (names in 02-atlas.md). Strata are darker, denser and pay more motes per Lampghost, and they are where the extraction loop lives: the lantern burns, motes ride in it as cargo and must be carried out, and the best haul is the farthest from home. On the surface above, the grind stays MapleStory’s.

Art cost. Strata are built from strata kits (05-art-audio.md): one kit per region, reused across both strata, ≈ 10 h of curation each, 200 h for 20 strata, inside 05’s art budget. That budget is why strata are two per region and not more.

4. The Deep and Omens

• The Deep sits under the strata: seeded expeditions assembled from hand-made map pieces by the deterministic sim (04-architecture.md §5.2). Solo or party, with a weekly shared seed so the world races the same Deep, plus leaderboards. It is the endless tier, and it is cheap: new pieces (≈ 0.5 h each, 400 at launch), not new regions. Depth reached feeds the Sunline.
• A Deep run is the full roguelite. The lantern burns and every mote is carried, at the darkest tiers (03-systems.md §6.5, §7.2). Each floor offers trip boons (03-systems.md §7.9) with duos and cursed boons, and each run rolls 1–3 run modifiers from the week’s Omens on top of the seed. Leaderboards are per class, party size and modifier set.
• Omens: a weekly modifier set per region (a Lampghost variant, a titan passing close, a beacon drought). Same maps, different week. Lampghost variants are a shader, not new art.

5. A world that remembers

World-level state, shared by every channel, owned by worldd:

The Archive in the Almanac records every Act’s outcome, every Dawnmark and every world first, so a player who joins late can read the world they arrived in.

Time scale. Acts open every 4–6 weeks after launch until Morrow (03-systems.md §9.1). Seasons of 10–12 weeks bring events and, after Morrow, a new Dawnmark each. Expansions about once a year add a titan route, a region band and a cap raise; 01-world.md §9 has the hooks.

6. Discovery

• About 10% of maps are hidden: no quest points at them. Secret bosses, lore fragments and unmarked events give players something to tell each other.
• Hidden content is listed in a designer-only index and verified by bots, so it never rots unseen.

7. Social scale

• World bosses take up to 60 attackers per instance (04-architecture.md §4). A spawn window opens several instances in turn, so about three channels’ worth of players fight it across the window.
• Crossings across channels: each channel fights its own instance; the world’s result is the sum, and it feeds the Sunline.
• Careers: crafting, gathering and the market are deep enough that being a merchant or a Lampwright is a way to play (03-systems.md).

8. Content multipliers

9. Density over breadth at launch

Thin regions are what made the old design look cheap. A region ships only when it has:

• up to 6 surface maps plus 2 strata (02-atlas.md map budget);
• its own monster family, palette and music, and its titan on the horizon;
• a world boss, a quest line, at least one hidden map and an Omen set;
• one frame-worthy vista.

D1 (07-decisions.md) ships regions 1–5 at launch and the rest with their Act updates; every region must meet this bar before it ships.

10. Farming and bots

A shared number that everyone moves is a target for bots, and motes are both a currency of progress and a lever on the world. Defenses, all server-side:

• Daily caps. Each character’s Sunline contribution is capped per day; motes beyond the cap still pay the player but add nothing to the Sunline.
• Diminishing returns on the same map: each map’s mote yield to the Sunline falls off for a character after a set number of banks per Bell.
• Trust weighting. Contribution is weighted by account trust (age, verified login, play history, bot score from 04-architecture.md §9). New accounts count at a fraction for their first 7 days.
• Silent zero. Accounts flagged by bot detection keep playing normally, but their Sunline weight drops to zero, so bot makers cannot see the flag.
• Group bonus only for distinct accounts. The party multiplier counts distinct accounts on distinct devices, not characters.
• Weekly settlement. Because Strides act only at the Turning, the Sunline can be audited and corrected before it changes anything.

11. Architecture implications

For 04-architecture.md, which absorbs them:

• worldd owns world state as world singletons: the Sunline ledger (aggregated from channel reports in batches), Strides, Act state, Dawnmarks, the Archive.
• Strides, Act changes and route parameters apply at the Turning boundary.
• Cross-channel events go over Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY fanned out by worldd; event rows are the durable record.
• The Deep needs seeded, deterministic piece assembly in the sim, so bots can verify every weekly seed before it goes live.

12. How we know it feels massive

Measured in beta (event names in 10-operations.md):