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Worldspace

Written 2026-10-27 from the project's own design docs.

How big each floor is, which parts of the world are generated on demand, and when the game may throw world data away. Decided 2026-10-26. Only tuning numbers are open.

The governing principle

Don't risk breaking continuity with any players for the sake of memory, otherwise clean up.

That's the founder's own summary (2026-10-26). Later that day the founder corrected it from player to character continuity. Every other rule on this page serves it.

Decided

  • W0. Never risk breaking a character's continuity to save memory. Otherwise, clean up. Continuity belongs to each living character, not to the person playing it. A player's new character is owed nothing about what that player's dead earlier character saw.
  • W1. Floor 1 is the only floor with a scaling map and temporary ("ephemeral") space.
  • W2. Floor 1 grows to fit the population. New players spawn at random within a set distance (called X) of each other, and the world is generated as it's needed.
  • W3. Floor 1 space that no player is using is cleaned up after a set period. Under W0, nothing is removed while any player could still notice it's gone.
  • W4. If a character dies on Floor 1 without having interacted with another player's space, its part of the world can be reset. In the founder's words, an early death is "effectively hitting the reset button without saving".
  • W5. Floors 2 and later are fixed in size. Each has a known number of participants when it's created and is sized to fit them, in both productions.
  • W6. A character's changes to Floors 1 and 2 are deleted when it reaches Floor 3, unless a character still on Floors 1–2 has seen them. The floor's layout survives, since it regenerates from the season's seed (the number that a generator turns into the same map every time).

How W6 was settled

The founder first proposed wiping Floor 1 and 2 memory as soon as characters reach Floor 3, since they can never go back. That collided with another rule: Floors 1–2 stay open all season for new characters, so some of them may have seen what an earlier character changed. Three options were laid out:

  • (a) Per character: delete each character's own changes when it reaches Floor 3, unless someone still on Floors 1–2 has seen them.
  • (b) Whole floor: wipe all changes at a moment when nobody is on those floors. With the floors open all season, that moment may never come.
  • © Wipe regardless: accept the occasional continuity break.

The founder chose (a). On Floor 1's sparse, spread-out spaces it almost always allows deletion; on Floor 2, a fixed shared map, often not.

An earlier idea, where players who interacted merged their world "networks" which could then be collapsed node by node, was withdrawn by the founder. W0 replaced it.

Readings (the assistant's analysis)

  1. W0 turns the tracking mechanism into an engineering detail. The rule is simply that whatever a living character has seen or touched stays consistent for that character. How that's tracked is up to the engineering, and cleanup has to be conservative: when in doubt, keep it.
  2. A likely approach (a suggestion, not a decision): Floor 1 is generated from the season seed, so any spot always generates the same way. Each area keeps a log of changes made to it. An area can be cleaned up only if no living character has seen or changed it, or everyone who has is gone.
  3. W5 makes Floors 2+ ordinary shared maps. Their size is set from the participant count when they're generated. The books' structure already supplies that count, because each floor opens when the previous one collapses.
  4. Server cost: Floor 1 costs what its active players cost, not what its nominal size would. From Floor 2 on, cost follows the known participant counts.
  5. Destruction: on Floor 1, destruction a player has seen must persist for as long as they could see it again. On Floors 2+, it persists for the floor's life.

In the vertical slice

The slice generates Floor 1 from a seed (a lattice of corridors, rooms, safe rooms and stairwells) in a small shared library that the server, client and bots all use, so they agree on the map without sending it over the network. Tests check that generation is deterministic and that walls really block movement; the wall test was shown to fail with collision switched off. Floor 1 cleanup (W0, W4, W6) and sizing later floors (W5) were not built yet when the project was parked.

Open (founder's call)

  1. What counts as "interacted with another player's space" (W4). The suggested conservative definition: any contact a living character could remember, such as seeing another player or seeing their changes. To be confirmed or narrowed.
  2. Tuning numbers: the spawn distance X and the cleanup timer.

See also: Vision (V3, world scale) and Seasons, death and the B-Roll (why floors stay open).