Getting started

Raising a world, making a character, choosing where to land, and the first hour on the shore with nothing in your hands.

Raising a world

Every world begins as a seed: words or a number. The same seed always raises the same Isles, so a friend who types your seed walks the same coastline, rivers and towns. Roll casts a random seed of old names. The first time a seed is used the game draws its atlas (the landmass, the rock beneath it, the rivers, climate and lordships), which takes about ten seconds and is kept for later.

The rest of the form sets how the world runs:

Setting	Range	What it changes
Day and night	4 to 120 minutes	Real minutes from one dawn to the next (24 by default).
Daylight	35% to 75%	How much of the day the sun is up at the equinox. Summer days run longer, winter days shorter.
Season length	8 to 90 days	Days in each season (24 by default). Sowing, harvest, weather and the turning leaves follow it.
Come ashore at	start, middle or end of any season	Spring is kindest: mild nights and the whole growing year ahead. Winter is for the hardy.
First landing among	your faith, Christians or the old gods’ folk	Whether the first landing is in a land whose court keeps the Church or the old gods. Every later newcomer lands there too.
The woods grow	as the years run, briskly, in the old tales’ time, swiftly	How fast trees grow from seedling to old growth. The old woods stand from the first day either way.
Difficulty	Gentle, Normal, Harsh, Brutal	How hard hunters bite and how quickly hunger, thirst and cold tell.
Creatures	Sparse to Teeming	How thickly beasts, birds and monsters roam.
Strongholds	Rare to Everywhere	How often barrows, hollow hills, caves, forts, keeps and lairs break the land.
The Fair Folk and other horrors	on or off	Without them the Isles hold only beasts, and strongholds lack their darker lords.

A year is four seasons, so with the defaults it is 96 days, a little over 38 hours of play.

Making a character

A character is made once and carries their level, skills, passives and pack from world to world. The creator has six tabs, each with a dice button for a random choice:

Body: frame, height, build, legs, arms, head and skin.
Face: 27 sliders over the eyes, brows, nose, mouth, cheeks, jaw, chin and ears (right-click resets one), with nose and mouth shapes as starting points, six brows, five ear shapes (out to the long points of the Sidhe), freckles, colour in the cheeks, the lines of age, four scars and five face paints.
Hair: fourteen styles and ten beards, each in its own colour.
Clothing: the colours of the threadbare things you come ashore in.
Piercings: ear hoops, studs and rings up the rim, nose, septum, brow and lip rings, in seven metals.
Who you are: your faith (the Church or the old gods) and the people whose way you keep it, how you are addressed, whom you are drawn to, whether you can have children of your own, and your age (16 to 45).

Faith matters from the first day: Christians and pagans greet you differently, priests will not bless the heathen, and a court of the other faith treats you as a guest at best. Only the clergy of the other faith can turn you, in the world. See Kingdoms, war and faith.

Choosing where to land

The last step is the atlas of the Isles. The world’s first landing fixes the centre of difficulty: the area level is 1 there and rises by one for every kilometre away from it, up to 90. Creatures, garrisons and stronghold lords grow harder as the area level climbs, so the country around the landing is the gentlest in the world. A guild town always stands within easy reach of the first landing, and the land right around it is kept free of any lordship’s houses and fields so a homestead raised there can grow into a town.

The first hour

You come ashore in a threadbare tunic or kirtle, worn trews and rag foot-wraps, with nothing in your hands. Everything else is gathered, made, found or bought.

Pick things up. Press E at a stone lying on the ground, one bedded in the earth, or a fallen branch. A loose piece comes up whole if you can heave it and enough of it is free of the soil. Flint and other stones that knap well are what your first tools are made from. Bare hands also pick herbs, flowers and plant fibre.
Make your first tools by hand. Open the inventory (I) and craft by hand: a stick, two plant fibres and two knappable stones make a flint hatchet, and the same go into a flint pickaxe, shovel, sickle, hoe and knife. Twine comes from plant fibre or nettles.
Fell a tree. With the hatchet in hand, strike a trunk. The axe notches the tree where it strikes, and once the notch is deep enough it hinges over and crashes down as one body. Buck the trunk into logs; one log makes eight sticks.
Set down a workbench and a fire. A workbench kit is four logs and two knappable stones; a campfire kit is six stones and four sticks. Hold a kit in hand and strike to set it down where you look. Stations unlock their recipes when you stand near them, and fires warm you.
Eat, drink and keep warm. Hunger and thirst fall with the world’s clock. Fresh water, food and a fire are the first things to find. See Staying alive.
Walk to the guild town. It keeps an adventurers’ guild with commissions on its board, merchants to trade with, an inn to sleep at and a priest to heal you.

Recipes are learned as you go: some from the start, many the first time you hold one of their ingredients, others when you first stand near their station or reach their level. The crafting list only shows what you know. See Crafting.

Saving and leaving

Worlds and characters save as you play and when you leave. Pause (Esc) and choose Leave for the Title to go back to the title screen. A character’s charts of each world (what they have walked or looked over) travel with them.

Written from the game's source and content as of commit 02e81b2 (2026-11-01).