Docs

The world is alive before you click anything. Trees move, water catches the light, and your six settlers are standing round a firepit with the smoke going straight up. There is no tutorial and nothing is waiting for you to dismiss it.

Your first act is an order, not a purchase: select somebody, right-click a wood, and watch them walk to it. That walk is the whole game in miniature — the distance is real, the time it takes is real, and the log they carry back goes to a building you decided the position of.

Within a few minutes the chronicle writes to you: one line about where you are and what you have. Then the view opens, and there is country in every direction that is obviously worth walking into.

You can put any building anywhere. There is no rule that a mill must stand on a particular tile, and no placement the game refuses on principle. What there is, is distance — and distance costs throughput continuously, with no threshold where the price suddenly jumps.

So a woodcutter three tiles from the treeline and one twenty tiles away are different buildings with the same name. A granary beside the field and a granary across the valley are different economies. A holding is a layout rather than a set of stamps, and the layout is the part you will still be improving in a month.

That is a gentler rule than a hard restriction and a much sharper one in play. Nothing tells you a placement was wrong; the number is simply lower than it could have been, and one day you notice.

A tile holds a finite reserve. Rock does not grow back. Living ground does — and working it harder than it grows strips it to nothing, then lets it recover the moment you send the crew somewhere else. Both are visible while they happen. That is the reason a holding eventually has to spread rather than thicken.

This is the centre of the game — not the war and not the exploring. The chain that turns ground into bread, and ground into a tool. A player who never fights should still have a full game.

Hands you fix in a moment: take somebody out of the bakery and put them in the sawpit. A building with nobody in it produces nothing and says so plainly, on the building, in a sentence rather than an icon.

Food takes hours to grow and hours to run out. It is the limiter you cannot fix this afternoon, which is what makes it the interesting one — a holding can fail in two directions, and only one of them forgives you for arriving late.

Neither ever switches a building off. A shortfall scales output down. Switching off is punishing and opaque — you open the game and cannot tell what happened. Scaling down is legible: the number falls, and the cause is written where you are already looking.

Every good has to go somewhere, and every store has a ceiling. When a store fills, the chain behind it backs up rather than leaking: the hauler stops delivering, the workshop stops consuming, and the gatherer keeps what they are carrying. Nothing is silently destroyed for want of a shelf.

That is why the storage buildings are not an afterthought. A cellar keeps food cool and slows what would otherwise rot; a granary holds grain; a warehouse is the building that lets a holding stop worrying and start planning.

Food rots. Bread carted four days is not four days of bread, and that single fact is what turns a distant holding from a map pin into a supply problem.

Click a building and it opens: what it makes, what it holds, who is working in it, what raising it a level would buy and what that would cost — and, if it has stopped, the sentence saying why. There is no separate production screen and no global build queue.

The panel is assembled from what the building can do rather than from what it is called, so a barracks queue will one day be one more section in the same panel rather than a second interface to learn.

A construction cost is an amount of work, not a countdown. Ninety builder-seconds means three builders finish in thirty, one takes ninety, and nobody at all takes forever. Pull the crew off halfway and the progress stays banked — the estimate moves and the wall does not un-build itself.

Raising an existing building a level is the same arithmetic. There is one way construction works, not two.

A woodcutter does not draw logs out of an abstraction. It sends people to the trees that are actually standing there, and the forest visibly recedes as they work it. Leave it alone and it grows back at the rate the ground already regrows.

It is the one building whose consequences you can see from across the valley, and it is the clearest statement the game makes about what kind of world this is: you are changing it, slowly, and it is not indifferent.

Research is a small number of named advances rather than a sprawling tree, and each one is written in words rather than statistics: production speed, wherever a baker works. If a technology does not change something you would notice, it is not in the game.

Every advance costs study time in the same worker-seconds that build a wall, so learning competes with building for the same hands. That is the decision it exists to create.

There is one kind of person in Koria, and it is a villager. Not a worker class, not a unit type with a role locked in when it is made — the same six people who arrive with your charter are the ones who fell the trees, carry the logs, stand in the sawpit and raise the wall, depending only on where you have put them.

What a villager is doing is a fact about the building they are standing in, not a fact about them. Take them out of the bakery and put them on a quarry and they are a quarryman, this afternoon, with no retraining and no cost.

The Old Work left Seals: worked stone objects that cannot be broken, cut, melted or read. The only way to know one is genuine is to bring it near another — they answer, in a low sound you feel through the ground.

Whoever holds a Seal feels the others, so exploring gains a direction. And whoever holds a Seal is also heard — so advantage and exposure rise in exactly the same proportion, and the strongest steward in the country is always the easiest one to find. That is not a catch-up rule bolted on to punish a leader. It is a property of an object, and it applies to everyone identically.

All that answering, summed, is the Echo: a number the world knows because the ground carries it. It only ever rises — a Seal is never destroyed, only handed on.

None of this is built. It is the last of five horizons, after the economy, the war, the far country and the world’s own life. It is written down now so that a ruin placed in the ground today is placed somewhere that will still mean something when it arrives. State of the realm is the honest list of what does and does not exist.

Not decided. A world that ends keeps the front door open, so nobody arriving is two hundred hours behind. A world that never ends is what the rest of this page describes — patient, persistent, a holding rather than a session. Both are real arguments and the game has not made the call.

It turns on one question that has to be answered by playing: is losing everything to a neighbour survivable? The register carries the fuller version, and the answer when there is one.

There is no tick. Every rate is constant between events, so what your holding did overnight is worked out when somebody looks rather than simulated in a loop. The game is always running, and it is never running fast. Nothing you own dies because you slept.

Being there is an advantage — you can watch and intervene — but being away is not helplessness. When armies exist they will carry a standing order and a rally point, so a war is lost by having authored the wrong plan rather than by having been asleep during it.

• Not a lobby game. One persistent shared world. Nothing begins because somebody pressed play.
• Not a clicker. If a system is improved by being watched every ten seconds, it is designed wrong.
• Not grimdark. The world is old and has lost things, and it is still warm, green and worth living in.
• It does not sell power. Money buys appearance, titles and keepsakes — never goods, never build time, never an edge in a live contest.
• Not a story with a player-shaped hole. There is no chosen one. The world’s great age happened without you.