The Tidebook

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Getting started

You wash up on a small palm island with nothing. There is a grave a few steps from where you wake. Dig it twice. The first dig turns up a bronze axe, an old lighter and a coil of rope. The second, deeper, gives a carving knife, an iron pickaxe and a weathered map. That is your whole kit, and it is enough to cut wood, light a fire, break rock, carve rope and, in time, build a boat.

The island is safe by day. At night crabs come up out of the sea, and they are the first thing worth fighting. Cook their meat on a fire and eat it to heal. When you can hold your own, build the boat and sail to King's Land, where the towns, the quests and most of the game are.

Your account lives on the game's server: make it once and sign in from any computer. Progress is saved automatically every few seconds and again when you log out or close the tab, and a copy is kept in the browser in case the connection drops. Marla's shop stock, felled trees and fires are still remembered per browser for now; that half moves to the server when players can see each other.

Controls and the screen

The panel on the right has four tabs. Bag holds 24 slots; gold, rope, ore and most materials stack. Click an item to use it, right click it for options, and to use one item on another click the first and then the second. Armour shows what you are wearing and lets you pick a fighting style. Skills lists your levels. Quests lists what you are on and what you have finished. The minimap is at the top right with your health and, when swimming, your air, drawn as rings around it. The log at the bottom left tells you what just happened.

Day, night and death

A full day is twenty-four minutes: twelve of daylight, two and a half of sunset, seven of night, two and a half of sunrise. The night matters. Crabs come ashore on the island only after dark, and bears roam the woods of King's Land at night. Firelight keeps crabs away, so a lit fire on the beach is a safe place to stand.

Health heals slowly on its own on dry land, four tenths of a point a second — under half a mid-game character in a minute, so food is worth carrying. Food heals at once. If your health reaches zero you die, a screen tells you what killed you, and you respawn where you last arrived. You keep everything in your bag and everything you are wearing. Lose the fight on the road below the city during the King's quest and you wake in the castle with the quest set back one step, nothing worse.

You can swim, but only for as long as your air lasts. Out of your depth for too long and you drown. The ring on the right of the minimap is your air.

Playing with others

Marriage. Talk to Father Ambrose at St Alder's and he lists everyone else on the island. Choose one and a letter of marriage lands in both your bags (or your bank, if the bag is full). Read it: the terms are that all business and all bank deposits, now and to come, belong to both of you, while each keeps their own bag. Sign it, or tear it up. When both have signed, either of you brings it back to the priest and the banns are called: every player online sees the wedding is in three minutes, the parish fills the pews, and once you are both in the church when the clock runs out the ceremony plays for everyone there. After it you are married and your two banks are one, at any bank counter. If one of you is Beauty riding her Beast, the other can press Space beside him to climb up behind her and ride along (she steers; a bow still shoots from his back); Space again to get down.

Everyone signed in on the website is in the same world. Other players on the same land as you are drawn as their class's figure with a blue name over them and their combat level after it, Rob (lvl 21), coloured by how they compare with you (see combat levels). They are violet dots on the minimap, and the world map marks them. People in the tomb or the cave are only seen by others down there.

Following. Right-click another player and choose Follow: you keep a couple of steps behind them wherever they walk, round walls and all, until you click somewhere else, pick a fight, or they leave the land.

Trading. Right-click another player and choose Trade with; if they are more than a few steps off you walk over first. They are asked in the answer box, and if they say yes a trade window opens on both screens. Click things in your bag to put them in (right-click for 5, 10, X or all), click them in your offer to take them back out, and Offer coins for gold. What you put in leaves your bag while the window is open, so it cannot be eaten, sold or dropped by mistake. When you are both happy, both press Accept. Anything either of you changes takes both accepts away again, and if the other player takes something back out after you looked, the window says so in red. Then a second screen lists exactly what you give and what you get; the trade happens only when you both accept that too. Esc, the cross or Decline calls it off at any point, and walking more than about twenty metres apart does too; whatever you had put in goes straight back to your bag. Each side shows roughly what it is worth at Marla's, and how much room the other player has in their bag — you cannot accept more than yours can hold. Quest things (keys, letters, rings, notes and the like: anything Marla gives nothing for, bar seeds, acorns and the lobster cage) cannot be traded. A trade that has gone through is kept safe by the server: if a connection drops or a tab closes at the wrong moment it is finished the next time you sign in, never lost and never done twice.

Chat. Press Enter to open the bar under the log, type, and press Enter again to send. Esc cancels. What you say appears as a bubble over your head and in the log of everyone within earshot on your land, about eighty metres, and theirs appears to you the same way. While the bar is open the ability keys are just letters.

One world. The day and night are the same for everyone: the server keeps the clock, and your game follows it. Trees you fell, rocks you break, fires you light and Marla's stock are shared too, and a player who arrives later finds them as you left them. The wild creatures on the three lands live on the server as well: the crabs on the shore, the cows and bears of King's Land and the scorpions and jackals of the Amber Sands are the same animals on every screen, so two players can fight one bear together. Each player's own blows count, whoever did the most damage gets the drop, and only they see it on the ground. Quest creatures, the raid and the rat cave are still yours alone.

The log also tells you when someone comes ashore or leaves. Signing in as the same character in a second window or computer moves them there; the first window goes quiet, and wakes again the moment you come back to it. Two windows can be two different characters.

The four classes

You choose one when you make the account. Every class can train every skill and wear most gear; what differs is what you fight with when your hands are empty, which skill that trains, the head start you get, and which of the King's four weapons will answer to you later.

Everybody begins at level one in everything. The class decides how you fight — which weapons you can hold, which four abilities you get, and which combat skill you raise — not what you start with.

How fighting works

Health comes off your combat level. Seven, and two and a half more for every level of it: a new character has 10, a combat level 20 has 57 and a combat level 45 has 120. There is nothing to train for it separately — everything that makes you better at fighting makes you harder to kill. Every point of damage you deal is a point of experience in the skill your weapon trains.

Attacking. Click a creature, or press A with the cursor near it, and you walk into range and swing at your weapon's own speed. Clicking again does not make you swing faster. If something hits you while you are standing still with no target, you swing back at it on your own. Clicking the ground drops your target and you walk away.

What a blow does. Damage is the weapon's base plus your level in its skill plus any attack or magic bonus from gear, and every blow lands for somewhere between three quarters of that and all of it. Offensive style adds ten percent.

What a blow does to you. First your Defence level is the chance it misses you altogether — one blow in eight at Defence 10, one in five at 20, a third of them at 60, climbing for ever and never reaching a half. What lands then meets your armour, which takes a share of the blow measured against how big the blow is: armour worth twice the hit halves it, so plate shrugs off a crab and is honestly poor against the Sand King's mace. No amount of armour ever makes you untouchable, and a blow that reaches you always costs at least one. The defensive style takes its fifteen percent last. Some things, the traps in the tomb and its burning floor, deal true damage that nothing reduces.

Fighting styles, chosen in the Armour tab. Offensive: ten percent more damage, and your blows train Attack. Defensive: fifteen percent less taken, and your blows train Defence instead of the weapon's skill.

Abilities. Whatever is in your hand gives you four, on QWER, each on its own cooldown. Most that say "at the cursor" fly to where your mouse is; most that say "your target" need something clicked first. Cooldowns keep running when you put the weapon away.

Your combat level, shown after your name, (lvl 21), is half your Defence, three quarters of whichever of Attack, Ranged and Magic you are best at, and a quarter of your second best — so a ranger who has never thrown a punch is not marked down for it, and Beauty is paid for both her sparks and the Beast's claws. Gathering skills do not count. It is also what your health is built from, so offence is weighted above Defence on purpose: the number over your head answers how dangerous you are, and a defensive character takes the reward as health instead.

Creatures have combat levels too, shown when you point at one and on its right-click menu. A creature's level is the level of player it would be an even fight for, one on one, with no food: both of you would take the same time to kill the other. It is worked out from its health, its armour and how hard and how often it hits, so the number means the same over a crab as over another player. Bosses come out high on purpose: they are meant to be fought with friends and a bag of food.

The colour of a level says how it compares with yours: yellow within five levels either way is a fair fight; orange, five to fourteen above you, is one you should expect to lose alone; red, fifteen or more above, is one you will; green, five or more below, is one you will win. Past combat level 50 the steps widen to a tenth of your level, because at 120 five levels is a few per cent and at 8 it is double.

Weapons and their kits

Six things can be held as a weapon, plus the four bare-handed attacks. Each only answers to its class, and Marla only ever shows you yours: the spear to a monk, the mace to the beast, the bow to a ranger, the staff to a wizard. It sits on her shelf from the day she starts trading with you, struck through in red — you can see what it costs and read what it does, but she will not sell it for 3,000 gold until you have finished the King's quest.

Marvah steel. Dagan the smith in Marvah sells each class weapon a tier up - the Marvah glaive (King's spear), the steel maul (great mace), the steel-limbed bow (great bow) and the steel-shod staff (Lotus staff), 18,000 gold each, your combat skill at 30 to wield. The kit on the bar is exactly the one above for the weapon it is made from; the base blow is heavier (15, 13, 9 and 10 against 10, 8, 5 and 6).

The war-megaphone. The Master of Marvah will sell his army, the Unspoken - all thirty, as one thing - for one million gold or a dragon's egg; his factor at the foot of his steps speaks for him once you have heard the price. What you are handed is a bronze speaking-trumpet. Wielded, its only ability is W, Call the Unspoken: they come at a run from out of the distance - or, in a tomb or a cave, step out of the walls all round you - and kill everything hostile they can see. Each has 200 health, fights at Attack 30 with a spear, and can be killed. With nothing left to fight for forty seconds they form up and march off, and a man who cannot keep up - on a camel you are faster than he is - comes up out of the dust behind you rather than being lost.

What you bought is a company of thirty, not a spell, and it is only as strong as you have left it. Calling is cheap: three minutes, counted from the moment the last of them marches off or falls, so a call spent on nothing costs you the three minutes and nothing else. Dying is dear: a man who is killed is thirty minutes coming back, and until he is back he does not answer, so shout for thirty after a bad fight and twelve may come. The count of who will answer sits in the corner of the W socket and turns red when the company is short. The Master's factor will replace the fallen on the spot at 5,000 gold a man if you would rather not wait. Both waits are dates kept with your character, so they run on through weapon swaps, deaths and signing out. Everybody else in the place sees them come, fight and fall, and hears the call; and what they strike turns on them - the wild things of the shared world go for a soldier who has hit them exactly as they go for you.

Armour and worn gear

There are seven slots: hand, tool, head, body, legs, feet and back. Hand is what you fight with; tool is what you work with, and a tool has to be wielded there to be used at all — carrying an axe in your bag will not fell anything. The two are separate so you never have to put your weapon away to cut wood: you keep the bow in your hands and the axe on your belt, and the figure swaps to the axe for as long as the chopping lasts. Defence on a piece counts towards the share of each blow your armour turns aside — see how fighting works. Speed bonuses multiply together. The bearfur set has a hidden bonus when all three pieces are worn: +5 attack on every blow, and all five Mythos pieces together are worth +10 magic. The Mythos set is for wizards only and its magic bonus is added to every spell the same way attack is added to a swing. The monk's Khamsin plate, the ranger's Vigil cloth and Beauty's Rosebound gown say what the whole set is worth on every piece's tooltip, and count the pieces you have on: all four Khamsin pieces give +15% attack speed, +3% movement speed and +3% life steal on top of what the pieces give; all five Vigil pieces make every ranged attack land 20% harder; all five Rosebound pieces give +6 magic, and make the Beast hit 20% harder and mend twice as fast. Every Rosebound piece does something for him as well as for her — it is on the tooltip as "The Beast: ..." — and with the whole set on, rose petals come off her as she goes. His own deep iron plate (forged at Ashfall, below) is worth +6 defence, +6 attack and 15% more health again when all three pieces are on.

Skills

Twelve skills in two halves. The combat half is Defence and the one way of fighting your class was built for — Attack for a monk, Ranged for a ranger, Magic for a wizard, and both Attack and Magic for Beauty, since her sparks are hers and the Beast's claws are his. You are never shown a combat skill your class cannot train. The trades half — woodcutting, fishing, mining, smithing, carving, construction, business and farming — is the same for everybody. All of them are on the same curve: the first level costs 100 experience and each level after costs about 10.6% more than the one before, which puts level 50 at 130,000, level 60 at 357,000 and level 100 at twenty million. There is no cap. Hover a skill in the Skills tab to see how far the next level is.

Cooking gives no experience. It is done by using raw meat or a raw lobster on a lit fire, and it is worth doing anyway: cooked food heals, raw food does not.

The world

Three lands and the sea between them, west to east: Zafira and the Amber Sands, the small Island where you begin, and King's Land with its walled port. Press M for the map: drag it about, scroll to zoom in until every house, road, wall and pier shows, and point at a symbol for its name (the key under the sheet explains them; only lands and cities are written on it). Underground places, the rat cave and the tomb, sit off the map; you enter them by clicking their doors. The pyramid's door is walled up with brick until the Cartographer's Debt is paid.

The Island

King's Land

The main land. A road climbs from the harbour through King's Port to the castle on its mount; the country around it has farms, woods and a cave.

Zafira and the Amber Sands

Reached by ship from King's Port once the King has given you leave to sail west. A desert port and the dunes beyond it.

The glassworks. North-west of the bank, between the market and the harbour lane, Farouk's workshop stands against a brick beehive kiln with its mouth to the main street and smoke off its flue day and night; shelves of blown glass show through the arch. At night the city is lit from that kiln: glass lanterns blown in the workshop stand on adobe pillars down every street, and iron braziers burn round the market square, the harbour gate and the quay. While your wood is coming ashore and going into the fire they burn full and warm; with the furnace cold they drop to a low ember. His money bag for your wood sits on a stone beside him in the street, in front of the glassworks. See The wood trade under Trade and gold.

The harbour. Below the harbour gate the quay road runs along a stone wall with the water at its foot, and a long pier reaches out from it to the platform where the Amber Queen ties up in deep water, with a lesser jetty either side of it. Dhows lie at the east jetty and at anchor out in the basin, and rowing boats are tied up under the wall and at the jetties. Bashir the harbour master keeps his ledger at a table under a striped awning by the pier's foot; Sami and Yunus hump sacks from the heaps on the quay out along the pier to the ship all day; Old Nabil fishes off the pier's side, Umm Salma mends her nets in the boat tied up under the wall, and Tariq walks his camel Sabah up and down the quay road. Everyone can be talked to. When your timber lands, the ship's own deckhands carry it down the pier to the stack by the pier's foot and Farouk's slaves take it from there.

Marvah

The second city of the Amber Sands, on the north coast: a long walk or a camel ride north-west from Zafira, over the last big dune and down. Fired brick the colour of rust, roofs of copper gone green, soot down every wall from the smelter's two great stacks, spoil heaps taller than the houses outside the west wall. Marvah does not sell goods. It digs copper, and it sells people, and the one gate opens only to someone with business in that trade: see The Tally Ring under Quests.

Walking in uninvited - round a mole, off a boat - gets you walked out again by the city guard, politely. A ring that is forged or stolen gets looked at by a guard now and then, at most once a visit, and mostly he waves you on; when he does not, you lose the ring and the gate, and need another.

Ashfall

A volcano in the northern sea, north-west of King's Land: a black cone with a lake of fire in its crater and the south-west wall of that crater fallen away, a skirt of old flows and grey ash round its foot, a cove of black sand, a field of sulphur vents in the east and a headland of basalt columns in the west. Nothing grows there. Every other land in the game stays as it is. Ashfall does not: the island is on a timer, and it keeps that timer whether or not anybody is there.

Getting there. No ship calls and your own boat will not make it. Ned Pike rows it, from a little landing stage on the north-west shore of King's Land's western tip (past the church; the world map marks it). Fifty gold, there and back: you pay going, and he waits at the cove and rows you home for nothing, so nobody is ever stuck on the island for want of a coin. He will tell you what mood the mountain is in before you pay. He will not put out while it is erupting, but he will always take you off. If you die on Ashfall you wake on the cove beside him.

The mountain's round

A round takes between seventeen and twenty-five minutes, never the same twice, and goes through four things in order. Nothing on the screen tells you which: the ash, the shaking and the light in the rock do. Everybody on the island is in the same round at the same moment.

Lava

Nothing stops you walking into it: a running bed, the lake in the crater, a gout of spatter on the path, a pool in the tubes. It comes to your hips. In it you move at three tenths of your pace and burn for 15 damage a second; out of it you go on burning for two seconds more, at 5 a second. Armour does nothing about any of it. (Spatter burns the same but is only ankle deep: it does not slow you.) A click that would take you through lava goes round it where there is a way round; click in it, or beyond it where there is none, and in you go.

The climb

The top of the cone - from a little over halfway up, all the way round, and the inside of the crater - is too steep to walk and is climbed: hands and feet, at a third of a walking pace, about a minute from where it steepens to the rim. Any face of it will go; so will the walls of the North Fall's gorge. The rim trail is still the easy way up when its bridge is there. From the rim you can climb down inside, to the lake. The sea cliffs, the crags lower down and the cut behind the forge are still cliffs. It is the most dangerous place on the island to be when she goes, and the climb down takes as long as the climb up.

The beds, and what a full one opens

There are five beds the lava keeps to. Empty, a bed is a gully you can walk down into and across. Running, it is lava to the hips (see above): crossable, and ruinous. Cold, it stands a little proud of its banks: a bridge over its own gully, and out past the shore a delta, land where there was sea. Which beds run is different every round and never the same two rounds running, so the island changes shape, and what you can reach changes with it.

Mining, but hot

The flows are the glass. When a flow has gone cold enough to stand on, its crust - the black rock that shines under the moon - is volcanic glass. Wield a pick and click the crust: he breaks it out where you clicked, a slab at a time, and keeps at it, working the patch round him, until your bag is full or the flow falls in at the end of the next swelling. It never runs out while it is there. Slabs do not stack, so a full bag is a trip to the bank. (Without a pick the crust is ground like any other; with one, Walk here is always on the right-click menu.)

Iron stones. About one boulder in ten on Ashfall is an iron stone: the same dark rock, stained rust-brown and veined with it. Mine one like a tree is felled - it stays where it is and gives one ore at a time, one to eight in all, and then it is plain rock for five minutes until the iron shows again. Ore does not stack.

Glass and iron are slow on purpose, and every level after the first you can mine them at is 6% quicker; the steel pick is 40% faster than iron, the tempered pick you make in The Deep Line 20%, and the dwarven pick 60%. What you have taken is your own: nobody is racing anybody but the mountain.

Boats and ships

Your boat. Use rope on logs to open the build menu. A boat needs 12 logs of any sort and 12 rope, is built on the shore plank by plank, and can be left half done and finished later. Board it and the sea chart opens; pick a heading. It carries you between the Island and King's Port, and it moves to wherever you sail so it is always tied up where you are.

The big ships call at the Island's western jetty, King's Port and Zafira. They are the only way to the desert. The pier guard at King's Port turns you back until the King's quest is done.

Marvah's ships. Two big ships lie either side of King's Port's pier head: the Sunward Lady, for Zafira, and Marvah's own Tally of Iron, which sails straight to Marvah's great pier. At Marvah the Tally of Salt carries you back to King's Port. Marvah's ships take only those Marvah has counted: the purser at the Tally of Iron's plank turns you away until you have done the Tally Ring. When the orcs come in the King's quest she stands out to sea until it is over.

Ned Pike's skiff is the only way to Ashfall: fifty gold there and back, from his stage on the north-west shore of King's Land's western tip. See Ashfall.

The crossing. Setting a heading no longer puts you straight on the far quay. The fade comes up at sea: about ten seconds on the deck under sail, with the run of it while she goes - the ship's waist between her two castles, with the master at the wheel and two hands who will talk, or the planks of your own boat with the swell level with your knees. A second fade puts you ashore. A crossing is yours alone; nobody else sees it, and a game saved on the way wakes at the quay you were bound for. Sailors say that one crossing in five is not as quiet as the others, and takes the best part of a minute; that the ones who have seen why do not talk about it ashore; and that whatever it is, it has so far only been curious.

Bram's row boat. Tied up beside him on the east jetty in King's Port. During his quest it takes you out to the wreck on the reef; after it, click her to row out to the reef for bonito or past the Marker for marlin, and use Row home to come back. You row her yourself, so she is slow, and she is yours alone: nobody else sees the trip.

Quests

Ten quests, tracked in the Quests tab, which also counts your quest points. A blue question mark on the minimap is a quest waiting to be picked up; a yellow mark is where the one you are on points.

The raid and the cave

The Sand King's Tomb

Under the pyramid in the Amber Sands. Click the dark doorway between the two sphinxes to go in. Every kill of the King is counted in your log as a kill-count, saved with your account.

• The hall of pillars. The way in and the way out. Click the steps to climb out at any time.
• The trap corridor. Four dart plates on the floor, marked as discs: step on one and darts cross the corridor a moment later. Five unmarked spike spots: a click, then spikes slam out of both walls. Both deal 2 true damage, which armour cannot reduce. Keep walking and they miss.
• The hall of the sleepers. Four mummies, 225 health each, hitting 9 to 21. They do not slow and do not stun. The door to the King does not open until all four are dead.
• The burial chamber. The Sand King: 2,500 health, 12 to 33 a blow, and he calls each trick a second before it lands. "Off my floor" is the lift: you are held helpless in the air for three seconds. "The sands answer me" is the storm: a ring appears around him and bites for 24 a second later, so step out of it. "Burn" is the floor: for eight seconds every tile you stand on glows red the moment you stop and bursts into flame 0.8 seconds later; it burns five seconds for 7% of your whole health a second, as true damage, so keep moving. At half health he raises two more mummies, at half their health. Three skeletons stand about his throne and throw stones (200 health, 4 to 12 a stone, from up to 14 metres; two more for every extra member of a party). Killed, they lie in a heap of bones, and 20 to 70 seconds after the last one falls he raises them again: he calls it, lifts his hands and stands still for two and a half seconds while the dark gathers on the bones, and they get up whole.
• The sarcophagus. When he falls: 120 to 220 gold, two sunstones, a golden mask one time in four, a birch acorn one time in ten, and one time in thirty a piece of your own class's set: the Mythos cloth for a wizard, the Khamsin plate for a monk, the Vigil cloth for a ranger, the Rosebound gown for Beauty. A way opens in the far wall to climb out.

Ashmaw, the Wyrm under the Mountain

A dragon, twenty-seven metres from nose to tail, level 350. Asleep on his hoard until somebody comes within twenty-odd metres of him or lands a blow; then the eye opens, the gold pours off his back, and he gets up. He is the same wyrm for everybody online: everyone in his hall fights him together, and he grows with the party that wakes him - 45,000 health for one, and 16,000 more for every other player down there (up to ten). His scales take a share of every blow, as armour does. Very hard to kill alone below level 100 - unless you bring the Unspoken with you.

• His fire. He rears back and draws it in - you can see it glowing through the scales of his throat and chest - and then pours it out, sweeping his head across the hall from one side to the other. Anyone the stream touches who has nothing between them and his mouth burns: a quarter of their health every half second, and armour does not help. Get behind a pillar, or one of the fallen drums. The fire splashes on the stone and goes round it; where it hits, the stone glows. It comes every twenty-odd seconds, sooner as he tires.
• Teeth and claws. In front of him: a bite (150-240) and a sweep of his wing-claw across one side (95-170, and it throws you).
• The tail. Stand behind him and it comes round: 90-160, and it throws you a long way.
• The wings. Crowd round him and he rears up and beats them: everybody near is blown away across the floor - out from behind whatever they were hiding behind - and once he is angry, the fire follows straight after.
• The dais. At two-thirds of his health, and again at a third, he leaps up onto the dais at the far end, out of reach of anything but arrows and spells, and from up there pours fire over the whole hall and throws burning rock down onto the floor (the floor glows where it will land; it burns for a while after). Then he comes down again, and the floor shakes where he lands.
• His rage. Near the end he stops talking and fights: everything comes quicker.
• If everyone leaves or dies, he goes back to his bed after a while and sleeps, and his wounds close. Killed, he lies dead for ten minutes before another wyrm is on the hoard.
• The hoard. Everyone who put a blow into him searches the chest by his bed for their own share: 3,000-7,000 gold, three to six wyrm scales, three kills in ten one of Ashmaw's fangs, for a Beauty one kill in 50 his dragon claws for her Beast - and one kill in 130, a dragon egg. Every kill is counted, like the Sand King's.

The rat cave

Under the rock arch in the woods north-west of the castle. Six rooms: the mouth, a tunnel, a bend, the nest, a crawl, and the Matriarch's den where the goblin ring sits on its plinth. Fifteen giant rats in packs, 60 health each, hitting 1 to 7, which come back half a minute after they die, so it is a place to train as well as to raid. The Rat Matriarch guards the ring: 340 health, hitting 8 to 18. She hisses and shows a red line on the floor a second before she lunges down it for 24, so step aside. At 60% and 30% health she shrieks and three rats come out of the walls. Blink cannot cross the cave's walls.

Creatures

Trade and gold

Marla in King's Port buys anything with a value at that value and sells it back at 30% over, always at least a coin more. Her shelves hold only what players have sold her, shared by everyone in the world, and nothing keeps: whatever a player sells her is cleared off her shelf five hours after it was sold, so the shop never fills up with everybody's leftovers (pointing at a thing on her shelf says when the oldest of it goes; buying takes the oldest first). The exceptions are what she always has in: water bottles at 15, rope at 8, and the King's four weapons at 3,000 gold each after the King's quest.

Hilda at the harbour buys lobster, crab, bonito and black marlin, raw or cooked, at Marla's prices, so you need not walk up the hill with a bag of fish.

Yusuf's bazaar in Zafira sells dates for 5, salt 4, glass beads 14, saffron 40 and silk 60. He buys raw lobster at 25 and cooked at 30, crab meat 10 and cooked 14, palm logs 10, evergreen 14, yew 30, beef 8 and cooked 12, leather 20, scorpion tails 20, jackal pelts 35 and sunstones 90. Marla pays 32 for beads, 90 for saffron and 130 for silk, so carrying the bazaar's goods east is the game's trade route.

Madame Orra in the ribcage on the dunes sells the Grim Plow for 15,000, the Grim Axe for 20,000 and the Ancient book for 10,000. Fixed prices, endless stock, and she takes nothing in trade — gold only. Nothing else in the game costs anything like this much, so plan on a few thousand logs or a lot of saffron.

Marvah. Dagan the smith sells steel and buys nothing: the steel axe 5,000, the steel pickaxe 5,500, the four steel weapons 18,000 each. The ore exchange sells copper ingots at 30 (Marla pays 48), coal 24 and stone ore 15, and pays 12 for stone ore, 20 for coal, 26 for copper and 80 for sunstones - half again Marla's price for what you mine. Hessem the broker will sell a tally ring outright for 50,000. The Master's factor sells the Unspoken for 1,000,000, a replacement trumpet for 1,000, and a replacement for each of your fallen soldiers at 5,000 a man.

Durran Emberhand at the Mountain Forge, once the Deep Line runs, sells iron bars at 140, striking hammers at 60 and nails at 9, and pays 72 for iron ore, 105 for an iron bar, 150 for deep iron ore, 240 for a deep iron bar, 78 for volcanic glass, and fair money for rail iron and tempered picks. He does not buy swords.

Other gold. The lobster cage quest pays 100, the Shopkeeper 120 and 500 more for the Farmer's shop, and the Sand King's sarcophagus 120 to 220.

The lighthouse business. Once it stands, Master Gilles will keep it for you: trim the wick, take the money at the door, keep the business afloat. He keeps the light booked a stretch of days ahead, counted in sunrises — 3 to begin with, 5 at Business 15, 10 at 30, 15 at 50, 20 at 70. That figure is the most he will ever have on the clock: renew with days still to run and he signs only for the ones missing (at Business 30 with 5 left, he signs 5 more), and with a full contract he will not sign at all until it has run down. The fee is 50 gold a sunrise however many you buy, so his opening contract is 150 gold and the longest is 1,000. Those are the game's standard contract terms: Oscar at the fields signs on exactly the same ones. While the contract runs, about three people a minute climb up from the port, hand him ten gold at the door and spend ten seconds inside looking at the lamp turn. Every one of them is 30 Business xp to you wherever you are, and the money goes in the leather pouch on the stone by the door. Click the pouch to take it. When the contract runs out the trade stops until you hire him again.

The wood trade. Farouk the glassmaker keeps a beehive kiln north-west of the Zafira bank, and a glass furnace eats more wood than the desert grows. Talk to him and seal a deal — he will not deal below Business 22 — and from then on he pays twice what Marla pays for every log that lands on his quay — palm 8, evergreen 12, oak 20, yew 30, and 40 for birch — into a money bag on a stone beside him, and every coin is 3 Business xp the moment the load lands, wherever you are. Click the bag to take the gold. Getting the wood there is Ossi the carter's job: he sits on his chopping block by your log pallet in King's Land with Bramble, his bay cob, and a timber wagon. Once you have the deal he signs on the standard contract terms (50 gold a sunrise, 3 sunrises ahead to begin with and up to 20 as Business rises), and while it runs he loads the wagon off the pallet, ten logs a trip and the cheap wood first, a few seconds after you last stacked it. He drives the farm road, in at the west gate, down the high street and out of the south gate to the quay, and leaves the load by the ship's pier. The crew carries it aboard, the ship takes two minutes to cross, the Amber Queen's two deckhands, Pell and Dario, carry it down the pier to the stack on the Zafira quay, and Farouk's two slaves, Musa and Tahir, carry it up from there six logs to the armful and stack it on the woodpile beside the kiln; the furnace burns through the pile a log every few seconds, flaring as each goes in. With nothing to carry the deckhands loaf on the pier head and the slaves sit on their bench. A load already on the wagon, on the quay or at sea is still delivered and paid for if the contract runs out; nothing new is loaded until you hire him again. The pallet only fills with what you stack on it, so the trade is as big as your axe work.

The bank in King's Port holds any amount of anything, and it is the same bank wherever you open it. Take things out as themselves or as notes: a note is a whole stack on one slip of paper that takes one bag slot and does nothing until it is turned back at a bank. The foreman and the quest givers want the real thing, not notes. You can also build a storage chest anywhere for 4 ore, 8 palm logs and 2 rope.

Making things

Every item

Value is what Marla pays for one. Prices at the bazaar differ; see Trade. Green names are uncommon, violet are rare. Where to get it is the shortest honest answer for each thing — who sells it, what drops it, or what you have to do. The filter searches that column too, so typing bazaar, Marla or tomb lists everything from there.

Music and sound credits

The music and sound effects are the work of these people, who share them for free. Tracks and sounds under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) are credited here as their licences ask; the rest are public domain (CC0) and credited because they deserve it.