.25.0] — 2026-09-04
Live. A second district with a mansion in it, five animals that are not chickens, a room where strangers leave things for each other, twenty-two more crates hidden across the land, and a graveyard in every realm.
Staked torches now open doors. That is the theme of this one.
Player City
A district of your own, reached by a gate on the harbour road five paces east of the Chamber’s door. A street runs up the middle with a terrace of shopfronts down one side — the eight Chamber shopfronts have moved here, tenants, leases and stock intact. The Chamber stays the office where you sign for one; the City is where it actually stands.
Two guild halls opened at the same time. The Taco Hall, low and hung with paper banners, where somebody is always eating. And the Gold Guild, gold overhead and gold underfoot and louder than it needs to be — with an inner lounge behind a door that costs ten GOLD to pass, which is quieter and much better furnished.
Dominic’s Stake House and Grille Palace
The big one. A mansion on the east side of the City with a pitched roof, lit windows and a porch, and inside a hall you can get lost in: a long bar, couches round two rugs, a gallery of tables down the east wall, and an office end where people in suits are visibly working.
The bar serves you. Marisa pours, Odalys has something on today, and the two waitresses carry plates. A round each per day, on the house.
The counter at the back sells bots.Trading ones, staking ones — whatever Sneed has published. You sign for it yourself with your own wallet: the realm never touches your money and never holds what you buy. What comes back walks beside you as a familiar.
The egg room sells five animals that are not chickens: a falcon, a white Siberian tiger, a flamingo, a giant snail and a wolf. Five GOLD an egg, and five hundred staked torches to be allowed to buy one— the highest bar in the game, and the reason they are allowed to do anything at all:
|
|
| Falcon |
sees one tile further |
| White Siberian tiger |
hits harder |
| Flamingo |
carries one more thing |
| Giant snail |
takes less damage |
| Wolf |
finishes off what is already nearly dead |
Hold a Tendys neuron and you may have one free — but only one, and claiming another lets the first go.
Gifts Left by Other Travellers is a room of shelves upstairs. Leave something and a stranger finds it. Nothing in there rots, which is the whole point. Leave nothing and you may take one thing, ever; leave things and you may take as many as you have left. It is not generosity, it is bookkeeping.
Down the back there is a fenced yard with graves beside the pool, and the pool keeps its own fence — the two women in it are still not taking visitors.
Graveyards, in every realm
Luméira has had Hallowmere from the beginning. Waterworld’s had no gravekeeper and no way in at all, and Space World had no graveyard whatsoever. Both do now, each with a Sexton who will explain, at some length, what a staked torch is actually for.
Any world minted from here on comes with one. That is enforced rather than remembered.
Torches open doors now
- The Chamber of Commerce: 300 staked torches. It is where shopfronts and guild charters are bought, so the people in it should be the ones already invested in the world. This is a wall and it is meant to be one.
- Racing: 5. Not a wall — a filter, so a lobby is people with something at stake rather than an account made an hour ago to spoil one.
- An exotic pet: 500. See above.
Wardens pass all of these, as they pass everything else.
Crates: eight became thirty
There were eight named fixture crates across sixty-six thousand tiles, which meant a player who had walked the world for a week had seen every one. There arethirty now. The twenty-two new ones are caches — no famous item, no key, just guards and a haul, and each may be opened once ever.
And a new rule across all of them: one fixture crate every ten days. They are permanent and they do not disappear when opened, so what stops them being a tap is now the wait rather than the walk.
Sneed Hall’s bath house
The chapels in the guild hall are baths now. Five people work the wing, two of them with a tray, and the lesser potions are on the guild’s coin rather than theirs. The guild voted on it, which is the most Sneed thing that has ever happened to a building.
Smaller things
- No more white page between worlds. Crossing to Waterworld or Space World used to blank the screen while everything reloaded. There is a proper transition over it now, dressed for wherever you are going.
- Your pets look like themselves. The exotic animals were drawing as chickens.
- The conjuring bath means something. The ritual used to work from anywhere in the world; it wants the font now.
- A seventh clerk sits in the Chamber, selling guild charters at a hundred GOLD — half of it burned in front of you.
- A raw T-bone exists. There is exactly one grill in the world and it is not open to the public.