The Codex - GridForge

The Grid

The Grid is the pattern that makes the world possible — and the wound that can unmake it.

It is a sentient lattice of force and memory that exists in the space between every block, beneath every stone, within every living thing. It is not a god, though some worship it as one. It is not a tool, though those with skill can bend it. It is the connective tissue of reality: the invisible structure that decides which things can hold together, how far they can be pushed, and what they must pay to endure.

The Grid remembers. A place shaped by power is never quite the same again. Structure repeated long enough becomes a pattern the Grid holds — a road walked for generations, a wall repaired for centuries, a ritual performed in the same chamber. Tear the structure down, and what the Grid learned of it lingers, like a scar in the fabric of the world.

No one has ever seen the Grid directly. At best, those with the skill of Attunement glimpse its influence: flickers of light between the blocks, currents of energy flowing along invisible paths, the unmistakable sense that the world is watching. No measurement has ever found an edge to the Grid, a beginning to it, or a place from which it can be said to come. Most scholars take that as proof that the question is meaningless.

Three Accepted Truths

The Grid underlies everything that holds together — mountains, oaths, cities, and minds.
When strained too far, it reacts — sometimes gently, sometimes catastrophically.
It is alive. Not as a creature is alive, but as a storm is alive: vast, purposeful, and indifferent to the concerns of the small.

The Ages

The First Fears

In the oldest tales, the Grid has no name. It is simply "Whatever Strikes Back."

Hunters spoke of arrows that twisted in the air. Villages reported shared nightmares spreading through every sleeper in a single night. Wanderers found roads that no longer led where they had the year before.

These early peoples lived in a world where coincidence cut too sharply to ignore, where patterns repeated with cruel intention. Without better tools, they concluded that the world itself was moody, jealous, and alive.

The First Taboos

Do not build on certain hills. Too many roofs collapse.
Do not bury the dead with iron. Too many graves crack.
Do not speak certain names near water. Too many drownings follow.

No one knew why these rules worked. Only that breaking them invited the attention of something vast and unseen.

The Age of Saints and Schemers

As settlements grew into cities, fear alone was not enough. People began to claim friendship with the unseen power.

Priests, seers, and charlatans rose together, each insisting they understood the will of the world. Temples were built at places where reality felt thin — crossroads of dream and waking, shrines where prayers seemed to echo back.

Early miracle-workers learned that ritual, repetition, and sacrifice could tilt events in their favor... if they were careful.

Some preached that the unseen power was loving and just. Others noticed that the world did not particularly care about justice. It cared about balance and pattern.

The wisest left behind journals where faith and doubt wrestled on the page. In the margins of prayer books appeared the first diagrams: circles and lines, not yet named, but hinting at structure.

The Era of Charts and Heresies

A dangerous question took root: "What if the world is not choosing, but following rules?"

Scholars, mapmakers, and madmen compared centuries of omens, miracles, and disasters. Patterns emerged:

Certain wonders clustered along invisible paths.
The same blessing performed in different regions yielded wildly different results.
Some locations muted every charm; others ignited them beyond expectation.

From these observations were born the first forbidden diagrams — not holy icons, but charts. They marked hidden lines where strange events walked, knots where history kept returning to the same troubles, and hollow places where nothing ever quite stuck.

To the temples, these charts were heresy. To the few who understood them, they were the first glimpse of the Grid as structure, not whim.

This is when the word "Gridforge" enters the surviving record. Later chart-makers used it for the living pattern itself, and that meaning became standard. The earliest copies are less tidy: articles shift, diagrams are missing, and in a few passages the word sits in a sentence as though the copyist expected the reader to know what it named. Philologists blame damaged grammar and centuries of recopying. Whatever distinction once existed, if any, did not survive the Charts.

The Event

Every surviving story agrees on three points:

Something vast was attempted.
It reached too far into the Grid.
The world has not been the same since.

Whether it was a desperate ritual to end a war, a grand experiment to reshape reality, or a quiet mistake in a forgotten tower — no one can say. The records contradict each other violently:

In some accounts, the sky shattered into geometric planes.
In others, time looped on itself for days, weeks, or years.
In still others, entire regions simply woke up different, as if they had always been that way.

What Is Certain

Boundaries changed. Roads no longer led to the same places. Seas shifted. Stars wandered.
Laws shifted. In some lands, death loosened its hold; in others, small wounds became perilous.
Belief broke. The gods failed to answer in familiar ways. Old prayers died on the tongue.

One problem has never fit the language of catastrophe cleanly. The Event was chaotic in what it changed, but many of its boundaries are unnervingly exact. Roads end at thresholds sharper than erosion can explain. Laws of magic change across lines a surveyor can follow. Whole coasts disagree with the geology beneath them. Measurement scholars argue that the Event propagated through the Grid rather than through stone and water. That explains the precision. It does not explain why a disaster should have had boundaries at all.

The Event fractured the world into fragments — separate landmasses that no longer share a contiguous geography. What were once neighboring kingdoms may now be unreachable except through gridgates: unstable Grid nodes where the lattice is thin enough to step between fragments.

Each fragment exists under slightly different Grid conditions, as if the Event left each shard vibrating at its own frequency. This is why different lands have different rules.

The old charts named the world before all this: Sael — in the Latticeword, the seal, the one whole pattern that held everything together. The oldest glosses give the word two senses — a seal that closes, and a seal that binds parts into one — and scholars disagree over which came first. The Event broke the Sael. Almost: one fragment did not shatter, and so still wears the name — the largest, safest, most stubbornly intact land, where most lives begin. Everything else is the Korsael, the broken seal: the deadlier, richer shards that did not hold. The faithful hear Korsael and mean the Broken Lands; the Reaching hear it and mean the Made Lands — where the seal did not fail, but opened.

The Present Understanding

In the centuries since the Event, four dispositions toward the Grid have taken hold. They are not churches or armies but stances — ways of answering the same unanswerable question, argued over in temples, trade-halls, and the margins of forbidden diagrams alike.

Devotion

To the faithful, the Grid is divine — the Loom on which the world is woven — and the Event was its judgment. Salvation is devotion, so the Loom never again has cause to say no.

Pragmatism

To the runners, traders, and healers who relinked the shattered world, the Grid is simply the ground you stand on. They don't theorize it — they keep the gridgates open, the roads alive, and themselves breathing.

Measurement

To the heirs of the chart-makers, the Grid is a system to be measured, mapped, and bent. The cautious among them seal the wounds they map; the radical mean to reverse the Event — at the scale that caused it.

The Waking

To the bereaved, the husked, and the radicalized, the Event was the Grid beginning to wake — and its wounds are doors, left ajar. They mean to open them. It is the stance the other three fear more than they fear each other.

Among the heirs of the chart-makers, a small minority asks a more irritating question: whether the Grid itself follows rules that do not belong to the Grid. Their diagrams have produced no repeatable result, and most chart-houses consider the distinction philosophy rather than measurement.

Most working practitioners of magic today fall somewhere between plain pragmatism and cold measurement. They may still light a candle to the old gods before a major working — not because they expect divine intervention, but because habit is also a kind of pattern, and the Grid has a long memory for patterns.

Magic as Negotiation

Magic is what happens when the Grid agrees with you.

A spell is not a bolt torn from nowhere. It is a request — framed in symbols, movements, and intent — asking the Grid to briefly permit something that otherwise could not be. Different traditions dress this in different language: contracts and prices, songs and resonance, keys and locks. Beneath all metaphors lies the same reality: the practitioner aligns their will with an existing pattern, or carves a new groove without tearing the world apart.

The Five Schools

Magery

The Direct Approach

Practitioners of Magery bend the Grid through force of will, channeling raw energy into fireballs, lightning, and kinetic force. It is the most common and most dangerous school. The Grid tolerates it, but too much raw Magery in one place leaves scars — areas where the lattice vibrates erratically for years afterward.

Resonance

The Harmonious Approach

Resonance practitioners work with the Grid rather than against it, finding frequencies that promote healing, growth, and protection. The Grid seems to welcome Resonance; spells of this school often work more efficiently than raw Magery, as if the lattice is pleased to cooperate.

Necromancy

The Coercive Approach

Necromancers force the Grid to recall what it has released — pulling echoes of the dead back into the world, draining life force, and corrupting the natural order. The Grid remembers the dead, and Necromancy exploits that memory. Places where much death magic has been worked become strange: cold, watchful, wrong.

Attunement

The Perceptive Approach

Not a school of action but of awareness. Those skilled in Attunement learn to read the Grid directly: how strongly it runs in a place and how deeply it holds a pattern there, where the ley currents flow, what a place remembers, perceiving what others cannot. At the highest levels, practitioners can feel the Grid's vast, alien attention turning toward a region.

Warding

The Structural Approach

Warders shape the Grid into walls, shields, and barriers. Where Magery tears and Resonance sings, Warding builds. A skilled Warder can make a room impervious to magic, reflect spells back at their casters, or create zones where the Grid is so rigidly structured that no magical effect can pass through.

Where the Grid Runs

The Grid is everywhere. Civilization does not create it, and wilderness does not lack it.

Places differ in how strongly the Grid manifests and how deeply it has learned the patterns laid upon it. Those who measure it speak of intensity — how much the Grid is doing in a place — and coherence — how reliably it holds a pattern there. The chart-houses argue over what else there is to measure — resonance, strain, harmonics — and no two of them agree on the whole of it.

Repetition matters. Roads walked for generations, rivers following ancient courses, migration paths older than kingdoms, walls repaired for centuries, and rituals performed in the same chamber can all become patterns the Grid remembers. The Grid does not care whether a pattern is natural or constructed. It remembers structure.

Ley Currents & Nexuses

A ley nexus is a place where the Grid gathers; ley currents run between them. They were there before anyone built anything. The greatest cities of the old world were built on nexuses because those places were already powerful, and the gridgates that survived the Event cluster around them for the same reason. A remote valley may sit over a nexus no one has found yet.

Scars

Where the Event tore the lattice, the Grid runs fierce and nothing it does holds. Spells there waver; wards fray early. There is far too much happening in a scar, and none of it is stable. More Grid is not safer Grid.

Old Places

An ancient forest can hold a deeper pattern than a fortress raised last year. A ruin can stay coherent long after the people who built it are gone. An old city built over a nexus is both at once.

The Grid is not moral. A fortress kept by tyrants is remembered as surely as a temple kept by saints. It responds to structure and repetition, not virtue.

What Building Does

A fireball is the same fireball in a city or a forest; a tamer's bond is the same in either. Building does not make magic stronger — but a place that has been lived in, repaired and defended long enough becomes a pattern the Grid holds, and the Grid holds it long after.

You do not build civilization to make magic stronger. You build civilization to make a place yours — and eventually, the Grid remembers that too.

Imbuing

Certain creatures, long exposed to the Grid, develop materials saturated with its energy: bones that hum, hides that deflect spells, organs that pulse with specific magical frequencies. When a skilled practitioner extracts these materials and works them into crafted gear, the result is equipment that carries a fragment of the Grid's power.

Imbuing is not enchanting — it is not casting a spell on an item. It is embedding Grid-resonant material into the item's structure so that the item itself becomes part of the Grid's lattice. The effect is permanent and cannot be dispelled, because it is not magic. It is architecture.

The rarest ingredients come from the most dangerous creatures — those that have lived longest where the Grid runs most intense or most torn. Champion-level monsters, ancient beasts, dungeon lords.

Gridgates & Fragments

The Event shattered what was once a single contiguous world into fragments — separate landmasses that exist in the same reality but are no longer physically connected. The Grid still links them, but the links are thin, unstable, and concentrated at specific points: gridgates.

A gridgate is a place where the Grid between two fragments is thin enough to step through. Most gridgates are fixed — anchored to ley nexuses that survived the Event. Some are temporary, flickering into existence during grid storms or when powerful magic disturbs the lattice.

The oldest fixed gates trouble chart-makers for another reason: some are too regular. Their anchor geometry repeats across fragments that have no surviving cultural connection, and a few preserve harmonic relationships to destinations no known gate can reach. The usual explanation is that the Event tore along existing ley structures. Older texts use a stranger metaphor. They call such gates joints.

Each fragment vibrates at a slightly different frequency, which is why the rules differ between lands. In one fragment the Grid runs intense and unstable — magic is powerful but unpredictable. In another it runs muted, and survival leans on physical skill and craft. In a few it holds patterns older than any record, and workings there are steadier than anywhere else.

No one knows how many fragments exist. Explorers occasionally discover new gridgates leading to uncharted lands — new Korsael, waiting to be named. Some fragments are tiny — a single dungeon, a lost island. Others are vast, with their own civilizations and their own dangers.

One fragment stands apart: Sael, the only piece of the old world that held whole, and the homeland where most begin. Safe, complete, ruled by the old laws — but the deepest rewards lie out on the Korsael, the broken shards, where the Grid runs raw and the loot is worth the crossing. Home is Sael. The fortune is through the gate.

The Grid's Sentience

The Grid listens. The Grid remembers. The Grid answers.

This is not metaphor. Practitioners who work with the Grid long enough develop an unmistakable sense of being observed. Attunement masters describe it as standing at the edge of an ocean that is also an eye. The Grid is aware — not in the way a person is aware, but in the way a vast system is aware of its own state.

It does not speak. It does not command. It does not choose favorites. But it responds to patterns: rewarding those whose actions strengthen the lattice, resisting those whose actions strain it, and reacting with terrible force when pushed past its tolerance.

Attunement masters agree on the attention and disagree on almost everything else. Attempts to locate a center of awareness have failed; every place feels local when listened to closely enough. Whether the Grid has no center, or whether "center" is simply the wrong question, remains an argument with no experiment capable of ending it.

The Event was, in the most fundamental sense, the Grid saying "no."

What it said no to — what was attempted, who attempted it, and why — is the deepest mystery in the world.

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The Attuned

The Grid listens. The Grid remembers. And in the deep places of the world, the Grid speaks back.

Long before the mortal races awoke upon the shattered fragments, the sentient lattice of the Grid began to crystallize into consciousness. In the ancient charts and archaic codices, they are named the Latticeborn, the Chorus, or the Woven. In the present era, they are known simply as The Attuned.

The Attuned are not monsters to be farmed, nor shopkeepers tied to a counter. They are a living civilization that shares the world with you on its own terms. They fell trees and work forges. They raise halls, lodges and storehouses with doors that open and chests that hold what they own. They keep livestock, send expeditions over the horizon, found new settlements when a town outgrows itself — and they remember everyone who crosses their path.

Most of all: they start knowing nothing, and they learn. An Attuned is born with no more skill than you were, trains the same way you do — by doing the work — and is bound by the same limits you are. There is no difficulty setting that hands them power you cannot reach. The ones you meet are simply the ones who have been practising longer.

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They Start At Zero

No Attuned is born skilled. Each one is born to a calling — a trade it will spend its life getting good at — and then has to earn every point of it by swinging the hammer, working the vein, and casting the spell. Same skill caps as you. Same stat caps. Same slow climb.

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A Town Remembers Its Trades

A person starts empty; a people does not. Everything an enclave's smiths have learned is passed to the next smith born there, so a long-standing town raises confident apprentices — and a settlement you break takes real time to get its craft back.

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Whatever You Can Do, They Can Learn

Their spells and recipes come from the same books yours do. Every skill in the game belongs to some calling among them — the quiet ones hide and pick locks, their menders speak to the dead, their captains work the guns. Add magic to the world and they will find it too.

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They Keep Animals

A beastward fences a paddock beside the storehouse, tames wild stock into it, and breeds it season after season. Those bloodlines become the mounts their outriders ride, the hides their tailors work, and the meat their cooks put on the table.

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A Mind That Holds A Grudge

They judge by coherence, not by good and evil. Act with a pattern — even a violent one — and you are legible to them. Build and break at random and you are noise. They only ever know what they actually witnessed, and they judge it over weeks.

The Cradle & Homeworld

A world lit not by fire or sun, but by the humming pulse of the Grid itself.

The ancestral sanctuary of the faction is The Cradle (cradle) — a vast subterranean cavern realm where the Grid is more intense, and more deeply ordered, than anywhere else in the known world. It is not special because something piled up there: its relationship with the Grid is ancient, intense and ordered all at once, which no other place is. Torches are deliberately absent throughout the Cradle: torches imply mortal hands, whereas the Attuned construct geometric instruments of quartz and ley-timber that refract the lattice's natural cyan glow into bioluminescent brilliance.

The Law of Pilgrimage

The Cradle cannot be breached by casual teleportation. Ancient wards bar the marking of recall runes (travel.allow_mark = False); any adventurer seeking audience with the Prime Weavers must undertake the pilgrimage on foot, traversing ancient cavern chasms or locating linked Gridgates across the surface worlds.

Multi-Tier Topography

An Attuned home is not confined to a single flat clearing. Major enclaves span multiple cavern levels connected by natural descent shafts and portal thresholds. Sibling levels within the Cradle share governance, trade caravans, and communal defense.

Old Attuned route-marks include a rare warning glyph that mortal scholars translate poorly as not quiet. It appears beside a handful of sealed shafts and abandoned descents. The Attuned distinguish these places from ordinary thin-Grid ground: a weak lattice can still be heard. Whatever the mark describes cannot. Prime Weavers do not explain the distinction.

Lattice Perception & Signatures

To the Attuned, you are not flesh and bone — you are a vibrating chord upon the lattice.

While mortal senses perceive physical forms, the Attuned perceive Grid Signatures. Every block placed, every spell incanted, every creature slain, and every tier of Attunement attained leaves a distinct resonance upon the local lattice:

City Founders & Grand Mages

Those who raise and hold land, work great workshops, cast grand-circle magic, or keep company with nexuses and scars ring loud on the lattice — audible to the Attuned from immense distances.

Wanderers & Rogues

Those who pass lightly, shape nothing and linger nowhere the Grid is stirred register only as faint whispers — in a city or out in the wilds.

Attunement Masters

Mortals with high Attunement skill perceive the same lattice lines, decipher the Attuned dialect with ease, and can negotiate directly with enclave elders.

Attuned Territory — The Keystone

Within a guild's claimed territory the Grid has learned whose place it is. Casters from a guild at war with its keepers find it resisting them: their spells and mana regeneration weaken, and any nexus under the hall does nothing for them. The keepers are not boosted — the invaders are resisted. Within an Attuned lattice, the Grid simply holds still: wards last longer and workings keep their shape.

Cognition: Coherence vs. Noise

They do not judge by mortal good and evil — they measure the pattern of your existence.

The ethical foundation of the Attuned is rooted in Coherence vs. Noise. The lattice thrives on structure, rhythm, and deliberate intent. A mortal whose actions form a discernible pattern — whether peaceful masonry, reliable trade, or disciplined martial honor — is deemed Coherent and worthy of respect. Random vandalism, erratic griefing, and senseless destruction generate Noise and are met with swift, calculated retribution.

The Law of Debt & Reciprocity

In Attuned society, every interaction is an exchange of energetic resonance. A favor granted, a wound bound, or a block laid in aid creates a debt the faction will actively seek to repay. Conversely, unprovoked violence creates an imbalance that their purifiers will hunt across worlds to resolve.

No Two Of Them Are Alike

Every Attuned is born with a temperament that never changes, and it shows in how they fight, what they chase, and whether they run. Six traits, mixed differently in each of them:

Acuity Slow-witted ↔ Tactical Genius

How quickly they read a fight. A sharp one picks the right spell and the right target; a dull one holds the same kit and fumbles it.

Discipline Opportunistic ↔ Unwavering

Whether they finish what they start, or drop it the moment something louder happens.

Caution Reckless ↔ Highly Defensive

How early they heal, how readily they ward, and how quickly they decide a fight is not worth dying in.

Avarice Indifferent ↔ Resource Collector

Drives the urgency to harvest rare ore veins, gather timber, salvage monster remains, and stock community chests.

Zeal Pacifist ↔ Relentless Crusader

Influences combat eagerness, pack hunting participation, and readiness to purge dissonant threats from enclave borders.

Craft Combat-focused ↔ Master Artisan

Biases goal selection toward workshop fabrication, architectural construction, masonry, and raising Grid spires.

The Three Sects

Three distinct philosophies guiding the preservation and expansion of the lattice.

Sect of Growth

The Cultivators

Genetic Mark: Color Gridtouched

The Cultivators believe the Grid is an ever-expanding garden that must be nurtured through physical construction, forestry, agriculture, and seafaring exploration. They build the grandest lodges and establish naval trade routes between enclaves.

Core Archetypes: Blade, Scribe, Seafarer Cognitive Bias: High Craft, High Discipline

Sect of Resolve

The Purifiers

Genetic Mark: Grid-Veined

The martial sentinels of the faction. The Purifiers view chaos, corruption, and dissonant intruders as blights upon the lattice. They master the martial arts, archery, and Tempering — the discipline that folds the Grid into the body and answers the same wherever it is taken — to safeguard enclave sovereignty.

Core Archetypes: Martial, Bow, Blade Cognitive Bias: High Zeal, High Acuity

Sect of Seeking

The Inquirers

Genetic Mark: Constellated

The mystic scholars, mages, and lorekeepers. Inquirers study the deep syllables of the Gridtongue, etch sacred runebooks, channel resonance healing, and design the geometric blueprints of the spires that teach the Grid to hold still.

Core Archetypes: Mage, Healer, Warder, Scribe Cognitive Bias: High Acuity, High Caution

Society & Enclave Life

A true community of specialized artisans, communal larders, and autonomous trade.

The Enclave Steward

Every founded settlement is coordinated by an autonomous Steward. The Steward analyzes enclave population needs, evaluates stock deficits, assigns open trade roles to new members, directs architectural construction programs, and posts work orders to the communal board.

The Work-Order Board

When a smith needs iron ingots or a tailor needs cured leather, the shortage is logged to the enclave board. Harvesters and hunters are dynamically pulled to needed veins and quarry to fulfill the deficit.

Communal Storage

Materials gathered by hunters and miners flow into the enclave's communal storehouse chests. Artisans requisition exact quantities needed for active crafting orders, preventing hoarding.

Artisan Commissions

Craftsmen forge arms and armor tailored to the specific skill builds of their enclave brethren. A finished broadsword is delivered directly into the hands of the settlement's blade champions.

Internal Politics & Prime Weavers

Enclaves are not monolithic hives. Senior elders known as Prime Weavers guide the social agenda of their home communities. Different enclaves may hold differing views on mortal coexistence, trade, or expansion, creating a living political tapestry that players can observe and influence.

How They Learn

Nobody is born good at anything. Not you, and not them.

An Attuned begins life knowing nothing at all. What it is born with is a calling — the handful of skills it will spend its life pursuing — and the same blank sheet you started with. From there it improves the only way anyone does: by doing the work. A smith gets better at the forge. A hunter gets better in the field. A mender gets better over the wounded.

The same ceiling as you

They train on the same curve, against the same per-skill cap and the same total, and their strength, dexterity and intelligence are bound by exactly the limits yours are. A veteran Attuned is not something the world handed extra numbers to. It is something that has been at it for a long time.

Difficulty does not change any of this. A settlement that has been marked as dangerous is not given a bigger kit — its people simply use the kit they already have better: reacting faster, focusing fire, choosing the right spell instead of a plausible one. A clumsy Attuned holds the identical spellbook and misplays it.

A town remembers its trades

An individual starts empty. A people does not.

Everything an enclave's smiths have learned between them is passed on to the next smith born there. Its stonemasons teach its stonemasons. Its menders teach its menders. So a settlement that has stood for a long time raises apprentices who already know their way around a forge, while a colony founded last week is genuinely green and has to earn its craft from nothing.

This runs both ways, and it is the most consequential thing to understand about pressuring them. Kill an enclave's smiths and you have not just removed some fighters — you have removed what the next generation of smiths would have been taught. The town's knowledge really does thin, and it really does take time to come back. A settlement you break stays broken for a while.

Herds & Husbandry

A fenced paddock beside the storehouse is how you know a place is settled.

Once an enclave has a hall to work in, roofs over its people and somewhere to keep its goods, it turns to livestock. A beastward fences a real paddock — rails, a gate that opens and shuts — and then goes out to fill it.

Taming

Animal Taming

Wild animals are talked into the pen on the same terms you would talk them in: the beastward's Animal Taming against the creature's own resistance, wherever the animal is found. It fails, and it learns from failing.

Breeding

Animal Breeding

Penned stock breeds season after season, and the offspring inherit real bloodlines — coats, temperament, and stats carried down from both parents. A more skilled beastward gets better calves and a better chance at something rare.

Tending

Veterinary

Hurt animals get looked after. It is the one place their Veterinary skill has anything to do, and a well-kept herd is a visible sign of a settlement that is doing well.

Use

Mounts, hides & rations

The herd is not scenery. Its bloodlines become the mounts their outriders ride out on, the hides their tailors work into armor, and the meat their cooks turn into traveling rations.

The pen is a real structure standing on their own ground, which means the same rules that stop them building on your homestead are the rules that let them build it — and the same lock that keeps you out of their storehouse applies to the gate. What is inside belongs to the enclave, not to any one of them.

The Archetypes

Every Attuned individual embodies a dedicated vocation with authentic skills, equipment, and societal duty.

Missions & Expeditions

They go out when the town needs something, and they send whoever is best at it.

When an enclave requires resources beyond its borders, seeks to raise a distant spire, or reaches maturity, its steward sends out a party. Who goes is decided by who is actually good at the work — measured against every calling in the settlement, not a fixed party of three. If a town cannot fill a role, it sends word to its neighbors and waits rather than sending someone unsuited.

nexus

Spire Pilgrimage

Masons, warders and inquirers walk out into empty country to raise a Grid spire, teaching the Grid there to hold still — a coherent, stable place that outlasts the stone.

Typical Staffing: Mason, Warder, Mage / Inquirer

provision

Provisioning Run

A working party sent to the richest seam of whatever the town has run short of, off the same board its artisans post to. Enclave work-order board.

Typical Staffing: Miners, Hunters, Foragers with Blade Escorts

caravan

Inter-Enclave Caravan

Heavy transport parties carrying surplus goods from thriving storehouses to fledgling or struggling sister enclaves across the world network.

Typical Staffing: Porters, Beastward Handlers, Wardens, Healers

found

Colonial Founding Party

When an enclave reaches maximum population and completes its building program, a pioneer expedition sets forth to claim new ground and found a daughter settlement.

Typical Staffing: Elder Mason, Smith, Woodwright, Healer, Wardens

rescue

Rescue & Defense Unit

They come when one of their own calls, or to bring back what is left of someone who did not make it. They answer a PLACE, never a name — if you were the reason, they will be arriving where you are. Fallen comrades' equipment from contested territory.

Typical Staffing: Martial Champions, Bow Snipers, Healers, Warders

Muster Calls & Roadside Banding

If an enclave lacks the specialized craftsman needed for a vital mission, the Steward broadcasts a Muster Call. Neighboring enclaves within reach answer by lending qualified specialists. Furthermore, two separate expeditions encountering one another on the road dynamically band together into a unified company, merging their escort and transport strength.

Living Architecture & Nexuses

Geometry as a function — structures built to alter reality and safeguard life.

The Grid Spire

Anchoring Instrument

The primary non-residential structure raised by the Attuned. Composed of geometric quartz, stone courses, and ley-timber, its completed pattern is its function: the Grid around it settles into a known configuration and holds it. Magic is no stronger there — it is steadier. Wards last longer, workings keep their shape, and the place stays coherent long after. The Attuned do not make magic. They know how to make reality hold still.

The Artisan Hall

Communal Workshop

An open-pillared stone workshop housing real functional crafting stations — anvils, forges, looms, carpenter benches, and alchemy tables. Craftsmen physically walk to these stations to forge orders and fulfill commissions.

Enclosed Lodges

Multi-Sided Dwellings

Many-sided houses that genuinely hold: solid walls, a closed roof, and a real hinged door the Attuned swing open and shut behind them. A settlement standing wide open reads as an abandoned one, so they close up after themselves.

The Stock Pen

Paddock & Gate

A railed yard with a working gate, raised once a settlement has housed and provisioned its people. It holds the enclave's livestock — tamed out of the surrounding country and bred on from there — and the animals in it belong to the town rather than to any one of its people.

The Communal Storehouse

Secure Supply Depot

The economic heart of the settlement. Houses rowed chests that physically store the enclave's surplus timber, metal ingots, leather, herbs, and finished equipment, secured under guild locks.

Player Interaction & Memory

They observe your actions, inspect your gear, and remember what you have done.

Paperdoll Inspection

Approaching an Attuned in peace mode allows you to open their Paperdoll — revealing their equipped armor, weapons, personal Gridtongue name, and genetic mark. Because they are sovereign people, Animal Lore is permanently withheld.

Persistent Memory

The Attuned maintain a persistent blackboard of player deeds. If you assist an enclave in fending off monsters or deliver needed materials, your standing improves. If you murder their scouts, word spreads across the entire enclave network.

Factual Inquiry

When spoken to, an Attuned elder will ask profound questions grounded in real historical facts recorded on the world blackboard (*"The one you felled by the river — did the Grid keep them, or did you?"*).

Stats

No levels. Stats gain passively based on which skills you use.

Strength (STR)

Determines your Hit Points (HP). Raised by combat skills, Mining, and Lumberjacking.

Pool: HP = STR | Cap: 125

Dexterity (DEX)

Determines your Stamina pool. Raised by rogue skills, Archery, Fencing, and Healing.

Pool: Stamina = DEX | Cap: 125

Intelligence (INT)

Determines your Mana pool. Raised by magic skills and crafting skills.

Pool: Mana = INT | Cap: 125

Stat Caps & Toggles

Cap	Value	Notes
Total Stat Cap	250	Sum of STR + DEX + INT cannot exceed this
Individual Stat Cap	125	No single stat can exceed this
Starting Stats	50 / 50 / 50	Every Gridborn starts even

Each stat has a toggle: Up (gaining), Down (losing), or Locked. Stats gain passively based on the skills you use. If you're at the total cap, a stat set to Up can only rise if another stat set to Down drops to make room.

Resource Regeneration

All resource pools regenerate continuously. The formula per resource:

rate = (1 / base_seconds) × (1 + (skill / 100) × gm_bonus)

Resource	Driver Skill	Base Rate (skill 0)	At GM (skill 100)
HP	Healing	1 / 3s	1 / 1s
Stamina	Focus	1 / 0.8s	1 / 0.4s
Mana	Meditation	1 / 4s	1 / 1s

Mana is the one pool the Grid touches, and only where it is doing something: ordinary ground — a city or the wilds — leaves the rate unchanged, while a ley nexus or current quickens it.

Reading a Skill

Every card below opens a Mechanics panel: what the skill decides, how it trains, and the formula behind it. Those numbers are read live from the running game — a balance change shows up here without anyone editing this page.

Expressions are written against skill%, meaning the skill value divided by 100, regardless of its configured cap. The same notation applies to named stats: str% means Strength divided by 100. Individual formulas may clamp this fraction. A higher cap does not change the divisor.

Skill Progression

How Skills Gain

Skills gain through use, and only through use. Every action tied to a skill advances it a little, on a curve that is fast early and very slow near the cap.

gain = 0.50 × the skill's own rate × difficulty × (1 / (1 + current_skill^0.5))

The skill's own rate is the Gain figure on each card above. Training difficulty is not uniform — a weapon skill climbs fastest, Animal Taming slowest.
Difficulty is set by the act, not the skill — curing a poison teaches more than dressing a cut, and a hard recipe teaches more than an easy one.
Each skill has a toggle: Up (gaining), Down (draining to make room), or Locked. Only a skill toggled Up gains at all.
Individual skill cap: 100.0. Total skill cap: 800 — enough to master 8 of 57 skills.
NPC Trainers in towns teach the basics of any skill up to 30.0, at 8 gold a point. It is the only source of skill that is not use-based.

Grinding One Action Stops Paying

Repeating a single action earns full value for a while and then tapers off. Within a rolling 60-second window, a skill gains at full rate for the first 50% of 6 points, then the rate falls away to nothing until the window rolls over. Camping one weak creature overnight is not a training plan.

Losing Skill

There is no decay. A skill you have not touched in a month is exactly where you left it. Points move in only two ways:

Making room. At the total cap, a gain has to come from somewhere — a skill you have toggled Down is drained to pay for it. Nothing is ever taken from a skill left Up or Locked, so at the cap with nothing toggled Down you simply stop gaining.
Death. Dying temporarily takes 5.0 points off every skill you have, and gives every one of them back 5 minutes later. It is a setback, not a loss.

Total Skill Cap

With 800 points to spend across 57 skills, you must specialize. A warrior who pours everything into fighting masters 8 of the 10 combat skills and has nothing left for crafting, taming or magic. A jack-of-all-trades spreads thin. Choose deliberately — or experiment freely, since the toggles are yours to change.

The Denizens

Some things the Grid remembers should have stayed forgotten.

The fragments are not empty. Field and forest teem with ordinary life; the deep places and the scarred ones teem with worse. The roster below is drawn from the world itself — every creature currently walking the fragments, from the beasts you hunt or tame, up through the Harbingers that rise where a zone is pushed too hard, the singular Wound-born birthed from the Event's own scars, and at the summit of what scholars still call denizens, the Vacant Court — Aureth's own Champions, each still keeping an office for a king who never comes. Slay the whole Court, seize their Gridhearts, and the Last Sovereign himself will answer.

Court Gridhearts are strange even by the standards of champion remains. Each carries not only the resonance of the bearer but the resonance of the office it kept. Pre-Event seals of state show similar repeating patterns, though no accepted history explains why a title of government should leave a signature in the Grid.

Search the roster, filter it by tier, and learn the rest the hard way. There are others. There are always others.

Animal Behavior

Daily rhythm and roaming

Wild animals are not idle props. Species can be day-active, night-active, dawn-and-dusk active, or active at all hours. Grazers drift between food, water, herd, and den behavior; predators patrol territory and pursue prey; monsters roam more aggressively. Personal temperament nudges the range and cadence of each individual.

Food web and scavengers

Herbivores graze living vegetation and bunch into herds. Predators hunt by species or food-web role, with land and sea ecosystems kept separate unless a creature is one of the rare few that crosses between them. Scavengers answer corpses as carrion, feeding from the kill without taking the loot players earned.

Water, flight, and habitat

Aquatic creatures hold to water instead of wandering ashore. Schools keep together, sea predators work reefs and shoals, and leviathans roam wider bands of the sea. Air-breathing sea life surfaces. Amphibious creatures can cross land and water, while flyers cruise at their own natural heights and may use tree cover.

Wild breeding

Food-web animals can breed without player ownership. Wild offspring inherit the same genetics system used by pets, begin as juveniles, and grow into their adult size before they can breed again. Wild pairs breed within their own species; the rare cross-species lines are a breeder's art — see Taming & Breeding.

Nests and eggs

Egg-laying species do not appear as instant newborns. Birds and chickens use canopy or ground nests, sea turtles use beach nests, and drakes use secluded lairs far from players, settled land, and other nests. Each egg carries the exact rolled offspring: species, generation, parentage, and genome. When the hatch timer matures, the nest hatches that creature.

Players can take an egg from a nest. That is a real ecological choice: the hatch no longer happens, and the egg item keeps its creature data for future incubation systems instead of becoming a generic trophy.

Species cards below show what's known of each creature's behavior: food-web role, herd or pack tendency, aquatic habits, scavenging, wild breeding, and nest style where relevant.

Taming & Breeding

The Grid remembers what breeds true. So can you.

A companion is not a purchase — it is a project. You tame a wild creature, raise it through combat, bond it to you over days, and — if you have the patience and the skill — breed a line that improves with every generation. Training makes an individual better; breeding makes the bloodline better. What follows is the whole journey, with the real numbers drawn from the world itself.

Every figure on this page reflects the world exactly as it stands right now.

Taming — the Gateway

What can be tamed

Only creatures marked tameable will answer to Animal Taming — find them in the Denizens roster (filter by Tameable). Each carries a taming difficulty: the better the beast, the harder the break. A giant rat asks almost nothing; an ember drake asks nearly everything.

Taming success

Taming is an interruptible channel. Your chance the moment your skill meets the creature's difficulty, then rising as you outclass it:

chance = 45% + (Animal Taming − difficulty) × 1.2%

Clamped between 5% and 95%. The creature and your skill decide it — not the ground you stand on. You may begin an attempt from 20 points under difficulty. Outclass a creature by 60+ and the tame is guaranteed and instant — skill overwhelms it.

Control slots — how many you can command

Your command capacity is the average of two skills:

max slots = f( (Animal Taming + Animal Lore) ÷ 2 )

Each creature costs a number of slots (a bigger beast costs more). The thresholds, live:

Average of Taming & Lore	Control Slots
…

Basic mounts are free

A horse or camel is a basic mount: anyone can ride one with no skill, no channel, and it costs zero control slots — up to 2 at once. The proud mounts (nightmares, drakes) stay behind the full taming gauntlet.

Commands — the Companion's Orders

A tamed thing is only as useful as the word it heeds.

How you give orders

Two ways, both instant. Speak to your companions aloud — say “all follow me”, “Gray Wolf stay”, “all guard me” — addressing every pet with all or one by name. Or right-click the creature for the same orders as a menu. A few commands then ask you to click a target: a foe to set upon, someone to guard, a route to walk.

Follow, Stay & Stop

Follow (“follow me” / “come”) — the default: it shadows you, closing the gap when you outpace it.
Stay — it holds this exact spot until told otherwise.
Stop — it breaks off the current fight but keeps its posture. A guard that stops chasing keeps guarding; a follower that stops keeps following.

Guard — a post, a person, or a place

Guarding defends — the pet holds near its charge and turns on anything that threatens it. Three forms:

“Guard me” — it shadows you and answers threats to you.
Guard someone — click a person or another companion; it protects them, following wherever they go.
Guard a spot — click the ground; it holds that place and clears what wanders in.

Attack & Patrol

Attack — say “kill” or “attack”, then pick the quarry. Every addressed pet sets upon it.
Patrol — mark two points between 4 and 48 paces apart and it walks the beat between them, clearing threats along the route like a moving guard. It resumes the walk even after a restart — and after a fight: set a patrolling pet on something and it returns to its beat when the quarry falls.

Friend — let an ally command your pet

Name a trusted player a friend of a pet (up to 5 per companion) and they may give it the battlefield orders — follow, stay, guard, attack, stop — while you're around. They can never release, hand off, or retrain it; those stay yours alone. A friend must have the Animal Taming and Lore to handle the beast in the first place.

Transfer — hand a companion over

You can give a pet to another player outright. They must be close, willing (they confirm the offer), and skilled enough to control it — enough Animal Taming for its difficulty and a free control slot to keep it. The catch: the bond does not travel. Ownership passes cleanly, but the new keeper starts the bond from nothing — days of company and feeding, all over again. A companion is earned, never simply received.

A Mind of Its Own — Intelligence

A dull beast obeys the letter. A clever one understands the intent.

Wits shape behavior

A companion's Intelligence is not just a mana pool — it governs how well the creature thinks. Cleverness scales across a band, from the dullest at INT 10 to the sharpest at INT 100, and every point in between buys a little more sense. Raise it by training the stat, or by taming and breeding a naturally clever species.

Smarter beasts move smarter

Intelligence is judgment, not muscle — a clever companion plans a better path (footing itself is a matter of the body; see below).

Routes around walls instead of grinding into them, and searches farther for a way through.
Anticipates you — it leads a moving owner rather than trailing your heels.
Keeps up on its own — a bright companion paths back to you across real distance instead of blinking to your side.

Smarter beasts fight smarter

Defends you — from about INT 55, a companion turns on whatever strikes you (or whatever it guards), instead of fixating on its first foe. It only ever retaliates — it will never start a fight with another player on your behalf.
Picks its mark — a keen beast finishes the wounded, presses the most dangerous foe, and shuts down an enemy caster, rather than simply biting whatever's nearest.
Reads the ground — from about INT 69, it steps out of fire and poison rather than standing in the flames. A dull beast just burns.
Fights from the wing — a winged companion harries from the air: nimble hoverers hold station and dart in, while wheeling fliers circle and perch between strikes. The sharper its wits, the tighter that peck-and-retreat rhythm.

Body — Speed & Footing

Not everything is cunning. How fast a companion moves and how well it clears rough ground is athleticism — led by Dexterity, with a little Strength behind it. A quick, powerful beast lopes faster and vaults a ledge up to 1.7 m high, where a sluggish one manages about 1.0 m and picks its way around anything taller. (This is true of wild creatures too — a bounding stag out-climbs a plodding boar.)

Nerve — when a companion breaks off

Courage is temperament, not a stat. A timid beast that is badly wounded in a fight it wandered into will retreat to save itself; a bold one holds the line to the last. Neither ever abandons a guard post or an order you gave to attack — self-preservation yields to duty.

These numbers reflect the world exactly as it stands right now.

Magic Companions

A beast that knows a spell is armed. A beast that knows when to cast it is dangerous.

Trained to cast

Through training a companion can learn the magic schools — Magery (arrow, fireball, lightning), Necromancy (curse, life-drain), Attunement (grid-lash), Resonance (mend & cleanse), Warding (a shielding ward) — alongside its breaths and special attacks. Casting spends the pet's mana (an INT-fed pool, so a clever beast has more to spend) and trains the school skill, exactly as it does for you.

Casting the right spell

A dim beast flings whatever it knows at random. From about INT 40, a companion reads the fight and picks its spell to suit —

Finishes the wounded with a hard single strike instead of chipping a fresh foe.
Opens up on a crowd — saves the fireball or the breath for two or more enemies bunched together, not one straggler.
Roots the runner and silences the mage — a spell with a snare or a stagger goes to a fleeing target or an enemy mid-cast.
Strikes the weak spot — it favors the element a foe is soft to and won't waste fire on something that shrugs it off.
Spends wisely — low on mana, it leans on cheaper magic (or its teeth) and saves the big spell for when it counts.

The same wits sharpen wild spellcasters, too — a high-INT enemy mage is a far deadlier fight.

The healer at your side

A clever companion with a supportive school doesn't just save its own skin — it tends you. It will mend your wounds when you drop low, cleanse poison and curses from you, and throw a ward over you before a fight breaks out. A dull beast only ever patches itself; the difference is judgment, and judgment is Intelligence.

The intelligence threshold above is read live from the world.

Breeding — the Requirements

Before two creatures will breed

Both are tamed and yours, present, and within 6 paces of you and each other
Neither is on breeding cooldown, a ghost, or in combat
They are a compatible pairing — the same species, or one of the cross-species pairings below
One is male and one female, in the same world, and neither is summoned or being ridden
Your Animal Breeding meets the minimum (0 by default; some pairings ask more)

Success & cooldown

A breeding attempt succeeds on:

chance = 50% + Animal Breeding × 0.5%

This is the base curve, with Animal Breeding counted up to 100. A listed cross-species pairing multiplies it by its own chance; failed attempts at that pairing add a capped bonus tracked on the mother and cleared on success. The final chance is held between ?% and ?%. Failed attempts also put both parents on a short cooldown. On success, the base rest period is 48 hours, modified separately by each parent's expressed cooldown traits.

Genetics — How Traits Pass Down

Alleles, dominant and recessive

Every creature carries a pair of alleles for each gene — coat color, three stat lines, a special affinity, temperament, and cosmetic pattern. An offspring inherits one allele at random from each parent per gene, and exactly one trait expresses per gene:

A dominant trait shows with a single copy.
A recessive trait shows only when a creature inherits it from both parents.

This is why the rarest coats hide. A recessive Molten-core can ride invisibly through generations as a carrier — unseen until two carriers finally meet. Reading a creature's hidden carriers takes Grandmaster Animal Lore. Fixing a legendary trait into a line is a real, multi-generation project.

Mutation — where new rares come from

Each inherited allele has a small chance to mutate into something neither parent carried:

mutation = 2% at Breeding 0 → 10% at Grandmaster

Counter-intuitively, higher skill breeds more mutation, not less — a master's line throws prizes. A genuinely rare mutation neither parent showed is announced to the world when it's born.

Generations

A wild-tamed creature is generation 0. Each offspring is one past its higher-generation parent — a visible pedigree of the work you've put in.

Wild Eggs & Nests

Same genetics, different delivery

Player breeding and wild nesting use the same inheritance engine. The difference is timing: a successful player pairing produces the offspring for you, while an egg-laying wild pair stores that rolled offspring inside a nest until the hatch timer matures.

Why eggs matter

An egg is not a generic item. It carries the species, generation, parents, and full genetic payload of the creature that would have hatched. Taking it from the nest prevents that wild birth, but preserves the bloodline data on the egg item for later incubation rules.

Stat Inheritance

Breeding improves the baseline; training improves the individual

An offspring's starting stats use its parents' average after removing point-bought training. Your Animal Breeding skill determines the quality fraction:

offspring stat = min(untrained parent average, species cap) × quality × trait bias ± 5%

quality = 60% at Breeding 0 → 95% at Grandmaster

The result is rounded and bounded by the species' base stats and ceilings. Expressed stat traits can bias it upward. Point-bought training does not carry forward; genetic stats and passive life gains can contribute. Every offspring starts at level 1 with no training points.

The Trait Catalog

These are the alleles a bloodline can carry — the whole living catalog, pulled from the world. Every trait with a look wears it on the wolf below; the rest carry their effect in the blood. Rarity is set by how often a trait turns up in the wild and in mutation:

Rare Super Rare Ultra Rare — legendary

Rarity follows live selection weight: Rare below 1.0, Super Rare below 0.3, and Ultra Rare below 0.1.

Cross-Species Pairings

Most companions breed only within their species. The authored exceptions below are read live from the world and show the required Animal Breeding skill, offspring, and success adjustment.

The pairing records are resting. Reload once the world is reachable.

Worked Examples

1 — A dependable pairing

Two of your own Grandmaster-bred warhorses, same species, side by side. Your Animal Breeding is 100, so the pairing takes near-100% and the foal inherits about 95% of its parents' average stats — then starts at level 1 for you to raise. Both parents rest 48 hours.

2 — Fixing a recessive coat

You tame a plain Bay stallion that secretly carries recessive Molten-core, and a mare that carries it too. Neither shows it. Breed them and, by the coin-flip of inheritance, roughly one foal in four draws Molten-core from both sides — and finally ignites. Breed that foal onward to fix the ember-coat into the whole line.

3 — Chasing a mutation

At Grandmaster Breeding every allele your foals inherit rolls a 10% mutation. Pair enough generations and one morning a coat appears that neither parent ever carried — a Prismatic, cycling through every color the Grid knows. "A LEGENDARY mutation appeared!"

Flora

The Grid remembers roots as readily as it remembers blood.

Botany is a full cultivation loop, not a decoration. Foraging turns up seeds; a planter and patience turn seeds into reagents for Alchemy, ingredients for Cooking, and rare woods that argue with the lattice itself. Cross two compatible plants and you can coax out a hybrid that grows nowhere in the wild — and, very occasionally, something stranger than the cross you intended.

Every figure on this page is read from the living world.

Growth & Tending

The growth tick

Planted crops advance on a world tick of 1 hour. Growth rate folds together elapsed hours, your Botany skill, soil moisture and fertility, wilt, biome fit, and whether the plant likes wild or tended ground — so the same seed matures at different speeds in different ground. Growth uses the owner's current Botany while online and the Botany value saved at planting while offline. A dry pot stops growing; ground saplings can continue slowly when unattended ground growth is enabled.

Biome fit

A plant in its preferred biome grows at 1.5× rate; one planted well outside its range drops to 0.7×. Each plant's catalog entry lists its biome and ground preferences, and the Grid-touched woods name the kind of Grid site they prosper in. A plant with no biome preference grows at the neutral biome rate; underground planters count as cave ground.

Tending, wilting, and death

Tending gives a Botany-scaled boost once every 1 hour. Leave a crop alone for 72 hours and it begins to wilt; leave it 168 hours and it dies. Outdoor planters drink the rain on their own. Ground saplings remain vulnerable during their sapling phase, but once they become standing trees they no longer wilt or die from neglect.

Grid-touched saplings

An oak, maple, or birch sapling grown at a ley nexus, an ancient place or an Attuned lattice has a 5% chance to come up leyshade; grown inside a scar, the same chance comes up gravemourn. Ordinary ground — town or wild — grows ordinary trees.

The Living Catalog

Every cultivable plant currently seeded in the world, with the seed it grows from and what it yields.

Crossing & Mutation

How a cross happens

Two compatible plants within 3 blocks of one another, both at growth stage 2 or better, can cross-pollinate. Plants must share a cross-pollination group or have a listed hybrid rule. Without an explicit rule, the minimum is Botany 20 and the base chance is 10%. A listed rule supplies its own minimum and base chance. Skill adds (Botany / 100) × 50 percentage points to that base. The source plant rests between attempts, with a shorter recovery after failure.

The mutation window

A successful cross usually yields the seed the pairing calls for. But 2% of the time — rising to 10% at Grandmaster — the result is drawn from the available exotic plant catalog. Without a mutation, a listed rule supplies the result; a compatible pairing without a rule yields one parent's seed.

Controls

Camera & Movement

GridForge uses a third-person orbit camera with a free cursor. You can interact with the world, windows, and other players without locking your view.

WASD — Move your character
Right-click hold — Move toward the cursor; release to stop
Right-click hold + Left-click — Lock cursor movement on; left-click after releasing right-click to stop
Left-click — Interact (gather, place blocks, pick up items)
Q / E — Rotate camera
Scroll wheel — Zoom in / out
Space — Jump
Num Lock — Toggle autorun

Movement Speed

Every player moves at the same speed on foot, whatever their DEX, gear or stamina:

foot speed = 5 m/s

Only temporary effects change it — slows and roots, heavy snow, and a few spells and stances — and riding, where the mount sets the pace.

Carry Weight & Encumbrance

Everything you carry has weight, and what you can bear scales with STR:

carry_limit = (150 + effective STR × 2) × racial carry multiplier

Go over that limit and every meter you walk costs stamina — charged by distance, never per movement packet, so a faster connection never pays less for the same walk. The drain scales with how far over you are, so being a hair overweight barely registers and being twice your limit is punishing:

stamina_per_meter = min(8, 2 × overage_fraction)

At zero stamina an overloaded body cannot move. An unloaded body always can, however exhausted — being pinned in place is always something you can fix by dropping loot.

Overage is measured as a fraction of your own limit, so the penalty means the same thing to a novice and a strongman.
Carry capacity reads your effective STR, so a Bless, a Curse or a stat ring moves it like it moves everything else.
Movement speed is never touched — not by weight, not by stamina. The only costs are the stamina drain above and the stop at zero.
Turning on the spot is never refused: only a move that actually displaces you is blocked.

Grid Mechanics

The Grid Is Everywhere

Ordinary ground — a city street or an open forest — leaves every spell, every mana tick and every skill exactly as it is. Building does not make magic stronger, and wilderness does not weaken it. What moves things is a place where the Grid is doing something. Attunement reads three things about a place:

Intensity — how much the Grid is doing. Raised at ley nexuses, along ley currents, in scars, and across some whole fragments.
Coherence — how reliably the Grid holds a pattern. Ancient places, long-lived-in settlements and Attuned lattices hold one.
Stability — whether what the Grid does there holds. Scars and blighted ground are intense and unstable.

Grid Sites

Site	Intensity	Coherence	Stability	What it feels like
Ley nexus	1.80	0.30	1.00	The Grid gathers here. This place is already powerful.
Event scar	2.20	0.00	0.35	Far too much is happening, and none of it holds.
Ancient place	1.15	0.85	1.10	This place feels old.
Attuned lattice	1.00	0.90	1.30	Someone has taught the Grid to hold still here.

Values are at a site's heart and ease back to ordinary at its edge. Nexuses, scars and ancient places were there before anyone built anything — they are found, not made. Ley currents run between nearby nexuses.

What Intensity Moves

spell power × (1 + (intensity − 1) × 0.5)

mana regen × (1 + (intensity − 1) × 1.0)

On unstable ground a spell's power wavers by up to ±35% as instability deepens. Tempering folds the Grid into the body and ignores all of this.

What Coherence Holds

sustained duration × stability × (1 + coherence × 0.25)

Fields and barriers last longer where the Grid holds a pattern and fray early where it is torn — never less than 0.5× nor more than 1.3× their written duration.

The Grid Remembers

A built place that stays lived in slowly teaches the Grid its pattern — up to 0.0015 memory an hour for a fully built stretch of ground, learned faster for skilled work and easing off as it nears the whole. A new wall changes nothing on the day it is raised. Tearing a settlement down does not undo what the Grid learned: ruins stay coherent.

Combat & PvP

Death & Loot Rules

Death rules vary by fragment. Each map has its own ruleset:

Ruleset	On Death
Full Loot	Carried and equipped items drop to a corpse; corpse access rules still apply
Limited Loot	Bag and hotbar items drop; equipped gear stays with you
No Loot	Items stay with you; no loot corpse is created

Death Penalties

Healer resurrection temporarily reduces each non-zero skill by up to a base 5.0 points for 5 minutes
On death you become a ghost. An NPC healer resurrects you where you stand and applies the temporary penalty, adjusted by racial modifiers. The Resurrection spell also revives you in place but does not apply a new skill penalty
Skills recover automatically after timer expires

Murder System

Killing an innocent outside self-defense adds a murder count. You become a murderer when that count reaches the fragment's threshold. Defending yourself against a recorded aggressor does not add a murder count. Safe zones forbid PvP; guarded zones enforce their own criminal-combat rules.

Ranged Combat

Arrows, bolts and thrown weapons fly on a real arc and terrain stops them. They are most accurate from a standstill: a shot loosed at a walk loses 15% of its hit chance and one loosed at a run loses 40%. Crossbows suffer more and thrown weapons less, and weapon skill softens it. Pause for a moment before you release and the penalty is gone. Full numbers are under Formulas › Accuracy.

Maps & Gridgates

Fragments

The Event shattered the world into fragments — separate maps connected by gridgates. Each fragment has independent settings for PvP rules, loot rules, its own Grid (how intense, how coherent, how stable the whole fragment runs), NPC presence, skill gain rates, and monster difficulty.

Gridgates

Fixed Grid-powered portals can connect fragments or locations within the same fragment. Some gates carry you directly to a destination; others offer a configured destination picker. Visibility and travel permissions can differ between gates.

Map Types

Prime Map: The main world. Full-featured.
Medium Maps: Themed areas (dungeon-heavy, wilderness, PvP arena)
Small Maps: Dungeons, instanced areas, event zones

World Systems

The practical rules for making a home, organizing people, working the land, and traveling beyond it.

Housing & Building Rights

A housing lot controls building access inside its boundary. Personal lots admit their owner and explicitly granted characters; an optional ally setting also admits mutual allies while the owner is online. Guild lots admit members of the owning guild and explicitly granted characters. Public access opens a lot to everyone; otherwise, characters outside its permitted circle cannot place or destroy blocks there.

Lot permissions do not override protected regions: a no-build region still blocks ordinary construction for everyone. Housing governs building authority, not combat, loot, or criminal status.

The plans themselves — every house, hall and fortress you can raise, with its price, its footprint and the lot it claims — are in Homes & Halls.

Guilds, Contracts & Stations

Guild organization

Guild membership belongs to a character. Members can use guild chat and contribute gold to the vault. Officers can invite characters, remove regular members, and withdraw vault gold. The leader also manages ranks and can remove officers or disband the guild. Guild war requires both leaders to agree; either leader can end it.

Contracts

Guild contracts support the organization: gold enters the guild vault and Prestige advances its standing. Any item or skill rewards go to the adventurer who completes the contract.

Guild stations

A guild-owned production station amplifies a real crafter. It consumes loaded reagents, uses the crafter's skill recorded when the recipe is set for output quality, buffers finished goods, and charges upkeep to the guild vault.

Boats & the Open Sea

Crafted boat deeds launch persistent vessels at suitable water. The captain controls the helm while passengers board, disembark, or move across a weather deck; the server owns the hull and passenger positions.

Hull types differ in capacity, durability, handling, and skill demands. Fishing and racial situational effects can recognize when you are aboard or at sea. A destroyed hull sinks and spills its crew into the water.

Quests & Journal

NPCs offer data-driven questlines that can track conversations, travel, combat, collection, delivery, skill use, crafting, and escorts. Some stages branch through choices or conditions, and the journal follows each character across sessions.

Botany & Cultivation

Till soil or prepare a pot, plant seed or sapling, keep it watered, and tend it through growth to harvest. Plants respond to biome and to wild or tended ground; the Grid-touched woods prosper at particular Grid sites. Use Cross-Pollinate on two nearby, sufficiently grown plants you own: compatible pairings can yield a parent seed or an authored hybrid, while rare mutations can produce exotic lines.

Companions, Bonding & Storage

Training

Tamed companions grow within species limits. Combat against wild creatures earns experience and training points, which adults can spend on stats, resistances, regeneration, and available abilities. Skills and stats also grow through use. Intelligence improves navigation and tactical behavior.

Bonding

A companion bonds after the required ownership time and feedings; personality and inherited traits can shorten that time. When slain, a bonded companion becomes a ghost with a limited resurrection window before it fades permanently. Restore it with a bandage and sufficient Veterinary skill, or a Resurrect Pet spell; its owner needs enough free control slots. An unbonded companion is permanently lost when slain.

Stables & pack animals

Stablemasters board eligible living companions for a fee, subject to stable capacity; dismount and leave combat first. Pack species carry a separate, weight-limited hold; unload it before ownership transfer. Release permanently removes the companion and drops its cargo on the ground. A bonded ghost retains cargo during its resurrection window, while an unbonded death spills it as recoverable ground items.

Trade & the Player Economy

Gold moves through NPC trade, mail, guild vaults, land claims, crafting, and player vendors. Player vendors hold priced stock in the world; purchases transfer and charge for only the quantity that fits in your pack. Mail escrows attachments until claimed; mail-claim overflow drops as recoverable items at your feet.

Homes & Halls

A world you can dig up is only half a sandbox. The other half is the door that closes behind you.

A holding is a square of ground that is yours. Inside it you build and break as you like, and nobody else can unless you let them. You may hold 1 at a time.

Claiming Ground

Two ways in

Raise a finished building from a plan — pick one, turn it to face where you like, and place it — or buy a bare lot and build it yourself from nothing. Bare lots run from 4 m to 64 m a side; on your own you can claim up to 60 m, and only a guild reaches past that.

Where it can stand

You need open ground clear of other holdings, towns and safe country. A hillside is fine — the ground is levelled under the building for you.

The Plans

Every plan comes in four material sets — a house is its shape, not its stone. Pick a set to see them all wearing it.

Deeds & Charters

Personal deeds

Bought from a Provisioner. The price buys the ground; what you put on it is up to you.

Guild charters

A charter claims ground in the guild's name. An officer buys it from the vault, the leader plants it, and a guild may hold 1 hall.

Guild Halls

Standing buys ground

A guild's reputation moves it up the ladder, and each rung unlocks a larger charter:

The fortresses are guild-only — bigger than any one person may claim, because a guild needs a council floor, quarters, an armoury and a wall around all three.

Guild stations

A guild cauldron works on its own: load it with materials and it keeps producing, paid for out of the vault. A guild needs tier 2 standing to place one and may run 2 at a time.

Living In It

Doors and signs

Front doors are wide and tall enough to ride through, and a shut one really does stop people. Every holding gets a sign beside its door with your name, a motto and a welcome on it, so callers know whose house this is before they knock.

Who gets in

Name someone and they can come and go. Open the place to your allies, or to everyone. A guild hall admits the guild.

Giving it up

Walk away from a holding and the land goes back to what it was — a levelled hillside comes back as a hillside.

Magic

Magic is what happens when the Grid agrees with you — and the Gridtongue is how you ask.

A spell is a request, framed in word and will. The Gridtongue (the old charts name it the Latticeword) is not a human language and was never invented: it is the set of frequencies the lattice answers to, the audible surface of the Grid's own structure. To cast is to pronounce, correctly, a pattern the Grid recognizes as its own. The words appear in the air above the speaker because the lattice resonates them back as light — you are not shouting; the world is answering.

Why can it be spoken at all? Because some of it can be read. The scholars of the Era of Charts catalogd the syllables they could safely pronounce into the Charter; deeper readers chase the rest still. The deepest words — what the Event itself was — remain unspoken, and the wise leave them so.

The Charter is a mortal reading of the tongue, not proof that the tongue ends where the Charter does. A handful of pre-Event inscriptions violate its cleanest rule: they contain magnitude, operation, element, or shape, but no Voice at all. Chart scholars classify them as damaged clauses. Attempts to supply the missing Voice produce nonsense or silence. Attuned readers recognize the structures and decline to pronounce them.

Six Voices, One Tongue

Each school addresses the Grid in a different mood, and the tongue bends to match — the commanding schools fall hard, the cooperative ones flow soft, and the martial voice turns inward, steeling the body that speaks it.

Magery — Vor

"I bid"

Command. You bend the Grid by force of will; spoken too often in one place, the lattice vibrates erratically for years.

Resonance — Ael

"I join"

Harmony. Resonance sings; the Grid welcomes it, so its words flow and bind soft.

Necromancy — Morr

"I recall"

Coercion of memory. You force the Grid to give back what it released; the words come heavy and mournful.

Attunement — Esh

"I hear"

Inquiry. Not command but listening — breathy, sibilant, a question put to the lattice.

Warding — Thar

"I hold"

Structure. Where Magery tears and Resonance sings, Warding builds — blunt, solid words.

Tempering — Gar

"I steel"

Discipline. The lone martial voice — where the others spend the Grid, Tempering folds it into the body itself, and so answers the same wherever it is spoken.

Dragons and primal beasts speak an older, un-catalogd dialect (Kaazh, Gruth) — the tongue as it sounded before anyone tamed it into the Charter. And because each fragment vibrates at its own frequency, the same word is pronounced a little differently from one land to the next.

The Charter — How a Phrase Is Built

Every incantation is built from a handful of root words by one rule:

[Voice] (Magnitude) Operation['Element] (Shape)

So Fireball reads Vor vael kor’emb: I bid — great — strike-fire. Learn the roots below and you can read any caster's intent from the words over their head.

Reading the Charter…

The Spellbook, Read Aloud

Every spell currently abroad in the world, and the words it speaks. Read from the lattice itself — new magic appears here as it enters the world.

Items & Gear

Tools for survival, weapons for war, and armor to endure the cataclysm.

The fragments are harsh, but they provide the raw materials to shape your own destiny. The catalog below lists the items and gear of the realm — weapons, armor sets, shields, and mystical accessories — drawn from the vaults of the realm. Search by name, category, or description, and click any piece for its full details.

Rare Recipes

Sealed techniques recovered from champions, dungeon depths, and guild contracts.

Everyday crafting is innate — walk up to any station and the work you already know is simply there. The recipes below are different: each survives only as a sealed recipe scroll found in the world. Consume the scroll and that character knows the technique forever; until then it trades like any other item. Minimum skill still gates the crafting attempt. Where a recipe supports exceptional output, a separate chance roll applies once you meet its exceptional skill threshold. Learning a scroll does not require that crafting skill; a scroll for a technique you already know remains intact.

Dyes & Dye Tubs

A bottle carries the color. A tub remembers it.

Every dye works in every tub. Cloth, leather, and metal tubs decide what can receive the color; the dye decides its hue and finish. Bottles hold multiple uses, tubs hold charges, and dyeing never changes an item's combat power.

The same dye is not the same on every material — cloth takes a fraction of a finish that metal takes whole, so a metallic reads as a sheen on a tunic and as polish on a breastplate. Open any color below with the to turn it on the real armor and see it on all three.

The Tubs

Weapon Specials

A special move is not a button you press at something. It is a decision you make before the blow.

Every weapon grants two special moves — a cheap primary that unlocks early and a stronger secondary that asks a great deal more of your skill. Readying one costs nothing. It simply waits. The next blow that connects spends the stamina and lands the move; a blow that is parried, blocked, or swung out of reach leaves it primed for the next attempt. Only one may be readied at a time.

Both moves gate on the weapon's own driving skill and on Tactics, so a specialist reaches their secondary long before a generalist does. Fighting unarmed is the exception: Wrestling draws from a much wider pool and lets you choose which two you carry, because flexibility is what the empty hand is for. Creatures fight the same way — a wolf's maul and a tamed wolf's trained maul are the same move, from the same list below.

Affixes

Two swords off the same anvil are the same sword. Two swords out of the same barrow are not.

Gear that drops in the world can carry affixes — rolled properties bound into the piece itself. Every affix below rolls somewhere in a range, so the same name is a different piece each time you find it: one Arcing blade throws lightning on rather more strikes than another. What an affix does is never hidden. Hover any item, anywhere, and it reads out its plain mechanic.

An on-hit affix carries a chance, and that chance is rolled too. The bigger the working, the less often it fires — a spark answers most blows, a shardfall answers very few. A weapon may also carry a spell no one alive could learn to cast, because the cost of a hit spell is the swing rather than the Grid.

Affixes marked Imbuable can also be bound at an imbuing bench rather than waited for. The rest are found or not at all.

The Fleet

The sea between fragments does not care how good your sword is.

Every hull below is Carpentry-crafted from a deed and launched onto open water. A rowboat is a seated oar craft; everything larger carries a walkable weather deck you cross on foot while the ship is underway, and the capital ships are separate structures rather than cosmetic variants. Movement is entirely server-authoritative — you send helm intent, the world decides where the hull actually goes.

Every figure on this page is read from the living world.

Launching & Handling

Where a hull can float

A launch needs open water deep enough for the hull's draft along its whole footprint, and a harbor within 90 m rated for her class — a landing will take a rowboat, a great harbor is required for a Man-of-War. You may keep 2 boats at once.

Seafaring and speed

Each hull has a Seafaring gate and a base speed. Speed scales with Seafaring / 100 at a weight of 0.5. Intact sails multiply it by one plus 0.35; sail damage and cannon load also affect the result. A captain below the hull's skill requirement handles it at reduced speed. Base steering rate is 1.2 radians per second, further modified by skill, rudder condition and cannon load. Deck walking speed is 6 m/s.

Boarding

Board from within 6 m of the hull's edge — measured from the oriented hull, not its center, which matters a great deal on a capital ship. Double-click the boarding line or rope ladder; right-clicking anywhere on the boat opens the full command menu.

The Hulls

Naval Combat

Destructible components

A ship is not one health bar. Sails drive her, a rudder steers her, and each cannon is its own emplacement with its own durability. Shred the canvas and a sail hull drifts; smash the rudder and she barely answers the helm; dismount a gun and that barrel is gone from the broadside. A round shot that lands well can knock a gun out of action outright — a 22% chance.

Firing a broadside

Every loaded, functional gun on the chosen side whose own range and broadside arc admit the selected target fires at once. Guns that cannot take the shot stay loaded. Gunnery drives accuracy from a base of 0.4 at weight 0.5, damage at weight 0.6, and cuts hands-on loading time by as much as 40%. The cannon pattern adds its own accuracy modifier; accuracy falls with distance relative to that gun's range and remains bounded, so even a valid shot can miss. Damage also depends on the shot type, cannon quality, and a random spread.

Loading reserves a round from the shared magazine and occupies that crew member until the gun is ready. Moving, taking damage, firing, casting, using an item, or taking the helm interrupts the job and safely returns the reserved round. Different trusted crew can work different guns in parallel.

Craftable cannon patterns

Every cannon fits every hardpoint. Its pattern — not the hull — determines range, damage, accuracy, loading time, durability, and weight.

Shot types

What you load decides what you break. Each shot type answers a different part of the enemy ship.

Magic at sea

A hull is a legal spell target in its own right: Warding sheathes her in an absorbing ward, Resonance mends her planking, and a damaging spell sunders her timbers. Fishing from a deck also pays a 1.5× bonus.

The Twenty-Three

Artifacts & Trophies

Every great foe leaves a collection with a history: a guaranteed remnant, an authored artifact, and a trophy that proves the victory.

Bind four matching remnants with an exceptional base to assemble the artifact, or win the finished relic as a rare direct drop. Search the complete collection by boss, relic, effect, material, or trophy. Every entry below uses its live in-game model.

Titles

A name carries more than a name. What you have done, what you have mastered and what the world thinks of you all travel with it — each in a place of its own.

A character’s titles sit in five slots, and every slot keeps one rule. Some you choose, one your guild gives you, and the rest the world works out from how you play. Every rank, band and word on this page is the rule the game plays by, read live from the world.

The name line — your name and guild tag, with an honorific once you are famous enough.
Overhead titles — up to 3 titles you pick, stacked over your head.
The guild title — what your guild leader calls you, on a line of its own.
The skill title — your best work, named on your paperdoll.
The reputation title — your Echo and your Karma, read together.

The Name Line

The first thing anyone reads: your character’s name, then your guild’s tag. It anchors the plate over your head and heads every other place your name appears — the name chips, the hover card and both paperdolls. Nobody picks what goes on it.

Overhead Titles

Wear up to 3 titles at once, chosen from every title you have unlocked, and set their order in the Titles window. They stack over your head above your name, and they also show in the hover card and on both paperdolls. Any player can hide other players’ titles for themselves under Options › Display › Show other players’ titles — a staff office always shows.

Staff Offices

Staff do not choose overhead titles. A staff character wears exactly one office — the highest they hold — and it cannot be taken off: a rank that could be hidden or swapped would protect nobody from someone pretending to hold it. Staff never carry an honorific on the name line either; the office already says who they are. Their guild title still shows beside it.

Guild Titles

A guild leader can give any member a title that says what they do for the guild — Quartermaster, Keeper of the Vault. It rides a line of its own on the plate, under the chosen titles, and shows in the hover card and on both paperdolls.

Never costs a slot

A guild title sits outside your overhead titles, so you never trade something you earned for what your guild calls you. Staff wear theirs beside their office.

No color of its own

It always shows in plain parchment. A color a guild leader could choose is a color a player could use to pass for staff.

Never a staff office

A guild title that is exactly the name of a staff office is refused, and one given before that rule is not shown.

Yours to hide

It shows the moment it is given. Turn it off in your Titles window; leaving the guild takes it away.

Skill Titles

Raise a skill far enough and it names you on your paperdoll: a rank for how far you have taken it, then the name of the practitioner. The ranks and every skill’s practitioner are below.

Only your best

A skill title comes only from the skills at your single highest rank. If five of your skills share that rank, you may show any one of the five.

Automatic until you pick

Until you choose, your highest skill shows on its own. If the skill you picked stops being one of your best, the title goes back to showing your highest.

Death never costs a rank

A rank reads your skill as it stood before any death penalty, so dying never lowers a skill title.

The Reputation Title

Echo and Karma make one title together. Your Echo picks a column — how widely you are known — and your Karma picks a row — what you are known for. The word where they meet goes before your name, and the most famous column adds an honorific. Nobody chooses it: it moves on its own as your Echo and Karma move. It shows on both paperdolls and on your public stats, and staff carry one too.

Formulas

The Grid remembers every number. Here are the equations that drive the world.

These are the actual formulas that drive damage, healing, skill gains, and more. No hidden modifiers — everything you need to understand the numbers behind the world.

Melee Damage

Raw Damage

Every physical swing — player or creature — passes through the same pipeline.

str_bonus = (STR / 100) × 0.50

skill_bonus = (weapon_skill / 100) × 0.60

tactics_bonus = (Tactics / 100) × 0.30

anatomy_bonus = (Anatomy / 100) × 0.20

lj_bonus = (Lumberjacking / 100) × 0.25 (axes only)

raw = weapon_damage × (1 + str_bonus + skill_bonus + tactics_bonus + anatomy_bonus + lj_bonus)

Variable	Source	Default
weapon_damage	Weapon item properties (or 4 unarmed)	4
STR	Your effective Strength stat	50
weapon_skill	Swordsmanship, Fencing, Mace Fighting, Archery, or Wrestling	0
Tactics	Tactics skill value	0
Anatomy	Anatomy skill value	0

Armor Reduction

Armor uses diminishing returns — stacking armor has less and less impact. The softening constant k controls how fast returns diminish.

armor_reduction = armor / (armor + 50)

Armor	Reduction
10	16.7%
25	33.3%
50	50.0%
75	60.0%
100	66.7%

Final Damage

After raw damage is computed, it passes through all defensive layers multiplicatively.

final = max(1, raw × (1 − armor_reduction) × (1 − race_resist) × (1 − tempering_resist) × (1 − buff_resist))

Damage can never drop below 1. Race resist can be negative (a vulnerability), capped at −75% to +95%.

Total Mitigation Ceiling

Every layer above is limited on its own, but they multiply — so there is also a ceiling on what they come to together. Armor, resistances, a Tempering stance and a Warding buff stacked as high as each one allows can never keep out more than this share of a blow.

total_mitigation ≤ 70%

Past the ceiling another layer of protection buys you nothing, so a defensive build reaches a wall rather than an asymptote. It applies to anyone fighting in real gear — you, and the Attuned. A creature's own hide is authored per species and is not bound by it: something built to shrug off fire still shrugs off fire.

Equipment Requirements

Armor and the heavier weapons carry a Strength or Dexterity requirement, shown on the piece. You cannot equip what you cannot carry, and a buff or a stat-bearing ring counts toward meeting it.

There is no casting penalty for heavy armor here — the requirement is the cost. A caster who wants plate has to spend the Strength to wear it, and against a 250 total stat cap that is Strength taken out of Mana.

Parry & Block

Parry Chance

Parrying is player-only. A held shield raises the cap; without a shield you still parry with your weapon at a lower cap.

base_chance = (Parrying / 100) × cap

dex_bonus = (DEX − 50) × 0.001

parry_chance = min(base_chance + dex_bonus + shield_bonus + tempering_bonus, 0.60)

Condition	Cap
With Shield	45%
Weapon Only	30%
Hard Cap (absolute max)	60%

A successful parry consumes the hit for 0 damage and trains Parrying.

Swing Speed

Attack Cooldown

How often you swing depends on your weapon speed and DEX.

dex_factor = max(0.1, 1.0 + (DEX − 50) × 0.005)

cooldown = 1.5 / (weapon_speed × dex_factor)

clamped to [0.5s, 4.0s]

At DEX 50, the dex factor is neutral (1.0). At DEX 125, you swing ~37% faster. Unarmed speed is 1.3.

Accuracy & Shooting on the Move

Hit Chance

Every melee swing and every arrow, bolt or throw rolls to connect after the defender's parry. Skill never pushes you below the base; it only answers a defender who invested in evasion.

accuracy = ((weapon_skill + Tactics) / 2 / 100) × 0.20 + gear_hit_chance

evasion = (defender DEX − 50) × 0.0015 + gear_defense_chance

hit_chance = clamp(0.95 + accuracy − evasion, 0.55, 0.99)

Evasion only counts for defenders who fight on real gear (players, guards, hirelings, the Attuned); a wild creature's toughness is its hit points and armor.

Shooting on the Move

Bows, crossbows and thrown weapons lose accuracy when loosed on the move. What counts is how fast you covered ground in the last 0.35 seconds before the shot, so a brief stop clears it entirely. Stop, shoot, move.

pace = your speed ÷ walking speed (walk = 1, run = 1.6; below 0.15 counts as standing)

penalty rises from 0 to 15% at a walk, then to 40% at a run, and stays there however fast you go (mounts, Haste)

penalty ×= weapon_factor × (1 − weapon_skill / 100 × 0.35)

final_hit_chance = hit_chance × (1 − penalty)

Weapon	Factor	Walking	Running
Bow	×1	×0.85	×0.60
Crossbow	×1.25	×0.81	×0.50
Thrown	×0.6	×0.91	×0.76

Multipliers on your hit chance at weapon skill 0. The penalty applies after the 55% floor, so a shot on the run can land less often than the floor. Melee is unaffected, and the shot is judged the moment you let go: moving after the release changes nothing.

Spell Damage & Healing

Spell Power

Every spell — from a cantrip to a dragon's breath — flows through one power formula.

skill_mult = school_skill / 100 (capped at 1.0)

power = base_power × skill_mult × grid_mod × school_mult

The base_power is set per spell in the spellbook. school_mult is your race's affinity for that magic school (neutral at 1.0).

The Ground Factor

Where you stand is ordinary almost everywhere — a city and a forest cast alike. Only a place where the Grid is doing something moves it.

grid_mod = 1 + (intensity − 1) × 0.5

Where	Intensity	grid_mod
City or wilderness	1.00	×1.00
On a ley current	1.25	×1.13
Heart of a ley nexus	1.80	×1.40
Heart of a scar (wavers)	2.20	×1.60 ±

A fragment can run intense or muted throughout, and spells such as Quicken Ground, Blight and Overcharge push a place for a while. Inside a guild claim at war with yours, the Grid resists you. Tempering folds the Grid into the body and ignores the ground entirely.

Spell Damage Mitigation

Spell damage passes through the same resist layers as physical. Physical-type spells also reduce by worn armor.

final = max(1, power × (1 − mob_resist) × (1 − armor_red) × (1 − race_resist) × (1 − buff_resist))

The same total mitigation ceiling of 70% applies here: spell and physical defense are bounded by one shared rule, so neither can be stacked into immunity.

After resist, Magic Shield absorbs remaining damage from a finite pool before it reaches HP.

Spell Mana Cost

Mana costs are modified by your race and equipped gear.

effective_cost = base_mana_cost × race_cost_mult × item_lower_mana_cost

Tempering spells spend Stamina instead of Mana (the body's coin, not the Grid's).

Bandage Healing

Heal Amount

Bandage healing scales with both Healing and Anatomy skills, modified by race.

heal = 15 × (1 + Healing / 100) × (1 + Anatomy / 200) × race_healing_mult

Healing Skill	Anatomy	Approx. Heal
0	0	15
50	50	28
100	100	45

Bandage Application Time

time = 6.0 × (1 − (Healing / 100) × 0.50)

At skill 0: 6 seconds. At GM (100): 3 seconds. Moving cancels the bandage.

Poison — Intensity & Damage

Poison lands in five tiers — Lesser, Regular, Greater, Deadly, Lethal. An ungraded flask resolves to tier 2. The applier's Poisoning skill caps how much of the flask grade can land (one tier per 25 skill), with 0 extra tiers of skill-cap headroom. A poison spell is capped by the caster's magic skill instead.

landed_tier = offense_tier − ⌊(magic_resist × 1 + own_poisoning × 1) ÷ 45⌋

The target's Magic Resistance and their own Poisoning skill blunt the intensity — enough of both can shrug a venom off entirely (landed tier 0). That is a separate axis from poison resistance, which only softens the damage each tick deals and never lowers the tier.

damage_per_second = 3 + (tier − 1) × 2, then × (1 − poison_resist)

duration = 12 + (tier − 1) × 3 seconds

Tier	Damage / sec	Duration
1 (Lesser)	3	12s
2 (Regular)	5	15s
3 (Greater)	7	18s
4 (Deadly)	9	21s
5 (Lethal)	11	24s

Poison Cure + Resurrection

Curing is a per-attempt roll: a higher tier is harder to clear, so a Deadly or Lethal poison resists a mediocre healer and may take several tries. The same roll gates a bandage, the Cure / Mass Cure spells, a pet's cure, and a Cure Potion.

cure_chance = 50% + (cure_skill − requirement) × 2%

clamped to [5%, 95%]

requirement = 30 + (tier − 1) × 20

Tier	Skill for an even chance
1 (Lesser)	30
2 (Regular)	50
3 (Greater)	70
4 (Deadly)	90
5 (Lethal)	110

Resurrection requires Healing 80+. The target returns at 25% HP.

Poison Blocks Healing

While poisoned, applied healing restores nothing — cure first.

Heal spells, heals over time, healing potions, gear procs, lifesteal and a pet's mend all bounce off a poisoned body. A poisoned target's health bar reads venom green on every bar in the game, so you can see the condition on an ally before you waste the cast.

Still works while poisoned: Healing bandages · Veterinary bandages · Feeding a pet — each of these rolls to cure the poison before it heals, which is the way out. Natural regeneration and resurrection are never gated.

Resource Regeneration

Regeneration Rate

All resource pools regenerate continuously, driven by a related skill.

rate = (1 / base_seconds) × (1 + (skill / 100) × gm_bonus)

Resource	Driver	Base Rate	At GM
HP	Healing	1 / 3s	1 / 1s
Stamina	Focus	1 / 0.8s	1 / 0.4s
Mana	Meditation	1 / 4s	1 / 1s

mana rate × (1 + (intensity − 1) × 1.0)

Ordinary ground leaves mana alone in a town or the wilds; a ley nexus or current quickens it. Ley Tap draws a thin share of its surge anywhere and the whole of it on a current or at a nexus.

Potion Potency & Equipment Affixes

Enhance Potions & Alchemy Potency

Drinking potions (Health, Greater Health, Mana, Greater Mana, Stamina, Strength, and Cure) scales with your Alchemy skill and worn Alchemical gear affixes.

skill_bonus = min(50%, Alchemy × 0.5%)

gear_bonus = min(100%, ∑ gear_enhance_potions)

potency_mult = 1.0 + min(100%, skill_bonus + gear_bonus)

Potion potency combines Alchemy and worn gear, up to the live limits above. See the Affix Catalog for current potion-affix rolls and eligible equipment.

Spell Damage Increase (SDI) & Lower Mana Cost (LMC)

Magical gear affixes modify your spell power output and mana efficiency.

sdi_multiplier = 1.0 + min(50%, ∑ gear_spell_damage_increase)

effective_mana_cost = base_mana_cost × (1 − min(40%, ∑ gear_lower_mana_cost))

Arcane Amplification (`arcane_amplification`) boosts outgoing spell damage up to the SDI cap (50%). Mana-Sparing (`mana_sparing`) discounts spell mana costs up to the LMC cap (40%).

Faster Casting, Luck & Vital Regeneration

Utility affixes quicken spell formulation, improve loot quality, and restore vital pools.

effective_cast_time = base_cast_time × (1 − min(50%, ∑ gear_faster_casting))

affix_drop_chance = base_chance × (1 + min(200%, ∑ gear_luck))

Spellweaver Haste (`spellweaver_haste`) reduces spell cast time up to 50%. Fortune-Blessed (`fortune_blessed`) increases rare loot drop odds up to 200%. Essence Flow (`essence_flow`) adds flat +1..+3 points/sec to HP, Mana, and Stamina regeneration.

Skill Gain

Gain Per Use

Skills gain through use on a logarithmic curve — fast early, slower at high levels.

gain = 0.50 × skill_rate × difficulty × (1 / (1 + current_skill^0.5))

skill_rate is the per-skill training multiplier — the Gain figure on each card in Skills & Stats. It runs from Animal Taming at the slow end to the weapon and gathering skills at full rate, so the table below is the full-rate case.

Current Skill	Approx. Gain
0	0.50
10	0.12
25	0.08
50	0.06
75	0.05
100	0.05

Some actions have a difficulty multiplier (e.g. curing poison = 2.0). Skills only gain when toggled Up, and the result is rounded to one decimal.

Anti-AFK Throttle

What the curve computes is not always what you receive. Each skill carries a rolling 60-second window with a cap of 6 points: gain flows at full rate for the first 50% of it, then tapers linearly to zero at the cap, and resumes when the window rolls over.

granted = gain × (1 − accrued/cap) / 0.5 past the free fraction

Players only — creatures and companions run the raw curve.

Skill Loss

There is no passive decay. Points leave a sheet in exactly two ways:

At the total cap, a new gain drains a skill you have toggled Down. A skill left Up or Locked is never touched, so at the cap with nothing toggled Down you simply stop gaining.
Death removes 5.0 points from every non-zero skill and restores all of it 5 minutes later. Dying again while the penalty stands stacks it and resets the clock.

Stat Gain

Stats gain passively as a side effect of skill use. Each skill gain has a 10% chance to trigger a +1 stat gain for the skill's associated stat (STR, DEX, or INT).

Stats only gain when toggled Up. If at the total cap (250), a stat set to Down must drain first.

Movement Speed

Player Movement

speed = 5 m/s — the same for every player on foot

No stat, gear or stamina changes it. Only temporary effects (slows, roots, heavy snow, some spells and stances) move it, and a mount replaces it with its own pace while you ride.

Pace matters to archers: a shot loosed while walking or running loses accuracy. See Shooting on the Move.

Stamina Blocking

Full-Stamina Gate and Push Cost

Living players and creatures are solid. At maximum stamina you may shoulder through a body without moving it; the successful push immediately drops your stamina below full.

eligible = current_stamina ≥ max_stamina > 0

physical = 0.70 × effective_STR + 0.30 × effective_DEX

raw_cost = 8 + (blocker_physical − mover_physical) ÷ 15

cost = floor(clamp(raw_cost, 4, 15) + 0.5)

stamina_paid = min(cost, max_stamina)

The formula uses effective stats, so equipment, buffs, and debuffs count. There is no minimum DEX: a character whose entire stamina pool is smaller than the calculated cost may still push at full, paying the whole pool.

Matchup	Mover STR/DEX	Blocker STR/DEX	Cost
Equal	50/50	50/50	8
STR-favored mover	100/50	50/50	6
STR-favored blocker	50/50	100/50	10

If one movement step contacts several new bodies, stamina is charged once using the strongest blocker. Paid clearance lasts until every contacted body is cleared by an additional 0.10m.

Collision Bodies

contact when swept_distance ≤ mover_radius + blocker_radius + 0.05m, with vertical overlap

radius = min(width ÷ 2, 4m)

Body	Default Width	Default Height	Radius
Player	0.6m	1.8m	0.3m
Passive creature	0.9m	1.4m	0.45m
Boss	2.4m	3.0m	1.2m

Authored creature dimensions and size scaling replace these defaults. Mountable creatures use a ×2 body scale. Ghosts, hidden players, dead/preview creatures, ridden mount bodies, and vertically separated flyers do not block.

Refill Time and Map Rules

refill_seconds = stamina_paid ÷ ((1 / stamina_base_seconds) × (1 + Focus / 100 × focus_gm_bonus))

Cost	Zero Focus	GM Focus
4	3.2s	1.6s
8	6.4s	3.2s
15	12s	6s

Global default: Enabled. Each map may override it. Players pass freely through players when either is in a safe zone; creatures still block. Large sharded maps also allow player pass-through because player authority is split between workers, while creature blocking remains active.

Crafting Quality

Quality Roll

When you craft an item, quality is rolled based on how far your skill exceeds the recipe minimum.

skill_factor = min_skill ≥ 100 ? 1 : clamp((skill − min_skill) / max(1, 100 − min_skill), 0, 1)

floor = 0.55 + 0.30 × skill_factor

ceiling = 0.95 + 0.05 × skill_factor

quality = random(floor, ceiling)

For recipes below 100 minimum skill, at minimum skill quality ranges 0.55–0.95. At full headroom: quality ranges 0.85–1.00.

Quality Scaling

For ordinary equipment, quality scales supported damage, armor, mana bonus, range, durability, and gathering-speed properties:

stat_scale = max(0.80, 0.85 + quality × 0.30)

The recipe's exceptional bonus multiplies the scale before its minimum is applied. Ordinary equipment durability also multiplies by the crafter's race durability multiplier. Cannons use separate quality curves for damage and structural health; quality does not change their range, aim, or loading time, and racial durability bonuses do not apply to them. Artifacts retain their fixed properties, and dyes have no quality variation.

Exceptional Chance

Exceptional items can only roll when your skill meets the recipe's exceptional threshold (default 95).

exceptional_chance = 10% + race_bonus

Any racial exceptional craft bonus adds to the base chance. Recipes must grant a positive exceptional bonus to qualify. Dyes have no quality or exceptional variation.

The Grid

Intensity at a Site

A site's effect is full at its heart and eases smoothly to ordinary at its edge.

t = smoothstep(1 − distance / radius)

intensity = fragment_intensity × (1 + (site_intensity − 1) × t)

On a ley current's line intensity rises to 1.25×, easing off within 10 m either side. Currents join nexuses up to 900 m apart.

Coherence

coherence = 1 − ∏(1 − source)

Every source — the fragment's own, a site, the Grid's memory of the ground (×0.9), an established settlement (0.5) — adds, and together they never pass 1. Coherence carries Attunement's read further and holds sustained workings longer; it never makes a spell hit harder.

Grid Memory

memory += rate × hours × built_share × (1 − memory)

built_share = min(1, (built_blocks + 0.5 × carpentry_bonus) / 400)

rate is 0.0015 an hour. Each placement adds 1 + carpentry% × 1.5 to the carpentry bonus. Memory only rises: tearing a building down never lowers it.

Guild Claims

enemy_factor = min(1, grid_mod) × (1 − 1.0 × (1 − 0.8))

Only a caster whose guild is at war with the claim's keepers is resisted, and the claim can never strengthen anyone.

Cast Time & Cooldowns

Effective Cast Time

Cast time is modified by equipped gear (Faster Casting) and race.

cast_time = base_cast_time × faster_casting_mult × race_cast_mult

Clamped to a maximum of 6 seconds. God mode casts are always instant.

Spell Cooldown

cooldown = base_cooldown × race_cooldown_mult × item_casting_speed

Race and item multipliers stack multiplicatively. Cooldowns start after the cast completes (not when it begins).

Melee Rider Effects

Life Leech (Curse Weapon / Sanguine Pact)

heal = max(1, damage_dealt × leech_fraction)

Buff	Leech %
Curse Weapon	15%
Sanguine Pact	25%
Hollow Form (mana)	20%

Reactive Armor

reflected = min(damage × 20%, attacker_hp − 1)

Reflects a fraction of incoming damage back. Can never be lethal — the attacker always keeps at least 1 HP from the reflect.

Original Soundtrack & Dynamic Score

The Sounds of the Grid

From the quiet lattice hum of the wilderness to the thunderous battle themes of the Vacant Court.

Every corner of the fragments is scored live by the world itself: biomes, weather, day-and-night cycles, and the proximity of ancient apex predators. Below you can preview, filter, and listen to the full soundtrack, or jump straight into the signature battle theme of any champion or Harbinger.

♫

Soundtrack

Select a Track

Browse the catalog below or choose a theme to begin playback.

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