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Getting started

Every new character begins aboard the Halcyon, a merchantman three days out for King's Port, on the night the kraken takes her: the crew fight it with the ship's guns and lose, an arm sweeps her deck and sets her alight, the mainmast goes by the board, and she is broken across the middle. You go into the sea between the halves and wake on the sand of a small palm island, Crab Island, with nothing, remembering nothing. There is a grave a few steps from where you wake. Dig it once. It gives a bronze axe, a carving knife and an iron pickaxe: the tools a castaway lived by. The axe cuts palms for logs, the knife cuts their leaves and carves the leaves into rope, and the pickaxe breaks Crab Island's boulders for stone ore. The first boulder you break always carries a lump of coal, and a coal, a stone ore and a log make a lighter from the Build menu. From there it is a fire, a crab, a cooked supper and, in time, a boat. Cut two logs before you make the lighter: it is made out of one of them, and the other is the one you burn. The tutorial walks you through all of it, your character thinks aloud if you stand about not knowing what to do, and the crabs leave you alone until you have cooked your first supper (strike one yourself and it fights back).

Crab 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 (on a cliff, your grip), 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 Crab 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 on its own on dry land: 0.43 a second plus 0.23% of your whole bar a second. A new character is whole again in about 22 seconds, a mid-game one in under three minutes, and a level-90 one in about four — so food is still worth carrying. Eating is one bite every 3 seconds, and for the first second and a half of it you cannot attack or use an ability. The great mace and the steel maul double it. The Beast mends by the same rule from his own bar, faster in the gear that says so. 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: once your air is gone the sea takes a tenth of your health every second. The ring on the right of the minimap is your air. Swimming, you crawl; stop, and you tread water. Things in the sea are not shown on the minimap (crabs are).

First hours in King's Land

A short route for a new character, from the boat off Crab Island to the King's door. Nothing here is required, and you can do it in any order. This order wastes the fewest steps, because each wait is filled with the next job.

1. Read the minimap. A blue question mark is a quest waiting to be picked up. A yellow mark is where the quest you are on points. Follow the blue marks in King's Port and you will find every quest below.
2. Fisherman's lobster cage, first. You land at the harbour and Tobias the fisherman is right there. Give him the crab claw and he builds you a lobster cage. Fish one lobster off the harbour and hand it to him raw. That is 100 gold, the Fishing skill and your first quest point, a minute's walk from the boat. Lose the cage later and he binds you another for a crab claw; or eat a cooked lobster, keep its claw, and use it on a log in your bag.
3. Farmer's shop: your first business. Find Jim beside the empty plot on the east street and talk to him twice to take his deal. Click the site with your logs in the bag and they go into the walls. Mine the 10 stone ore from the boulders outside the city and lay those too. The shop stands once all 25 logs and 10 ore are in, so sail back to Crab Island for the last logs when you run out. Then go out of the west gate to Greta the plower on the farm road. She gives you twenty potato seeds and twenty tomato seeds. Plow squares in the fields and plant them all.
4. While the crops grow, hunt cows. The crops take five minutes. Bob's farm is just along the same road, west of the city. Cows are level 3 and hit for very little. Kill them until you have 12 raw beef, and keep any leather they drop. Keep one log back, light a fire with it and your lighter, and cook all twelve.
5. Harvest on the way back. The fields are between the cows and the gate. Harvest every square, carry the vegetables to Jim's shop and fill the boxes outside, or hand them to Jim. The quest is done: 500 gold, Business, Farming and Construction xp. From now on the townsfolk buy from the shop and you earn Business xp wherever you are. Empty the money bag on the counter when you pass.
6. The Shopkeeper. Marla is on the high street. Give her the 12 cooked beef for 120 gold. She trades with you from then on, so sell her the leather and whatever else you do not need.
7. Bob's Farm. Talk to Bob at his farm. He wants five bears dead, and bears come for his herd at night, so go at dusk with cooked food in the bag. Then find the mother bear asleep in the woods behind the castle. She has 600 health and every attack of hers is shown before it lands: step out of each one.
8. The King's quest. With the lobster cage, The Shopkeeper and Bob's Farm all finished, the castle guard lets you in to the King. That is the main story of King's Land.

Habits worth having

• Replant every time you pass the fields. A stocked shop sells while you are away, and Business levels open bigger things: hired hands, Darryl's tree plots, the lighthouse.
• Use the bank inside the south gate. It holds any amount of anything. Quest givers and building sites want the real items, not notes.
• Sell fish to Hilda at the harbour. She pays Marla's prices, so you need not carry a bag of lobster up the hill.
• Hire Oscar when you can spare 50 gold a sunrise. He wheels the harvest from the fields to the shop for you.
• Fight at your level. Cows first, then bears. Every creature shows its level beside its name: check it before you swing.

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.

Looking someone up. Right-click another player and choose Look up: a card opens with their figure as they stand, everything they wear and hold (point at a piece for what it does), what it all adds up to - health, armour, dodge, attack, magic, speeds, life steal and any whole sets - and every skill with their total level. For Beauty it shows her Beast's three pieces and his numbers too. You also see a health bar over other players while they are fighting or hurt, the same as the one over your own head.

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, and nor can any pet (the crow, the jaguar, the parrot, a Cilibi seed; a dragon egg is not a pet yet, and can). 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: the share is armour ÷ (armour + 2 × the hit), never more than three quarters. So armour worth twice the hit halves it: +4 armour takes 29% off a 5-damage bite and 2% off a 100-damage blow, and 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 on your Character card (the Character button on the panel, or C). 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 fifteen, as one thing - for 3,500,000 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 - in two trades: eight guards who stand close about you and fight only what comes within 15 m of you or has struck you in the last ten seconds, and seven hunters who go for anything hostile they can see. As men fall they keep it even - a hunter killed, a guard goes hunting; a guard killed, a hunter comes back - and the last man standing guards you. Each has 200 health, fights at Attack 30 with a spear, and can be killed. With nothing left to fight for a minute 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 fifteen, not a spell, and it is only as strong as you have left it. Calling is cheap: three minutes from the shout, and while they are still out a second shout only tells you they are already on the battlefield. 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 fifteen after a bad fight and six 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.

The Storm Trident

Pale bone bound in black coral, three barbed tines, always wet. The Kraken drops it, one box in twenty, and anyone can fight with it, whatever their class: it trains what your class trains (Attack, Ranged or Magic), and every ordinary blow is a thrust, 3.6 m, base 18, that goes on through whatever stands in the line 2.5 m behind your target. It cannot be traded, and you can own one at a time: if a second comes out of a box it turns into two Kraken Hearts instead. Lose it and find another, and it is still yours as you left it.

Kraken Hearts (one box in six; they bank, and cannot be traded) are what it grows on. Open the trident's window with Upgrade on the trident, a click on a heart, or from Old Tamir at Driftmouth Cove, and spend a heart on one of five slots. The first heart in a slot unlocks it (until then it is greyed out on your bar), the next three make it stronger, and the fifth is a breakpoint that changes how it plays. Five hearts a slot, 25 in all, and they are spent for good: there is no taking one back. Collect them before you have a trident and none are wasted. The trident itself changes as it is fed: faint blue lights along the shaft at 5 hearts, glowing tines with water rising off them at 15, and at 25 the suckers down the shaft pulse and its thrusts leave a trail. Everyone sees how far yours has come.

Beauty uses the trident on her feet with the passive, Q, W and E; her R is always the Beast, so the trident's R (the Hurricane) takes no hearts from her: 20 hearts fills her trident, and it looks as grown at 20 as anyone's at 25. Riding him, his own kit is on the bar, but his Q is the trident's Thunderstrike, called down from his back with her Magic.

Gear by class

Everything each class can hold or wear, and what it does. Each table lists the class's own weapons and set first, then what anyone can wear. Base damage is before your level and your gear are added. "Attack" on gear adds straight onto your hit: every blow and every ability rolls between three quarters and all of its base + your level + your gear's attack, and percentage bonuses (the offensive style, "every blow 7% harder") multiply that. "Magic" on gear works the same, but only for spells. "Armour" takes a share off every blow that lands on you, a big share of small blows and a small share of big ones (see how fighting works); it is not your Defence level, which is your chance to dodge. Speed is how fast you move; attack speed is how often you strike. A whole set row is extra, on top of the pieces, for wearing all of them at once. Tools (axes, picks, the rod and the cage) are under Skills.

Jump to: Monk · Ranger · Wizard · Beauty and the Beast

Monk

Ranger

Wizard

Beauty and the Beast

And for the Beast himself: three slots of his own (head, body, paws), worn from his menu. Only Beauty has a Beast, so only she can get these.

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. Armour on a piece counts towards the share of each blow your armour takes off — 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 +12 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 +18% attack speed, +4% movement speed and +4% life steal on top of what the pieces give (each Khamsin piece also carries 5% more health); all five Vigil pieces make every ranged attack land 24% harder; all five Rosebound pieces give +7 magic, and make the Beast hit 24% harder and mend 2.2 times 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 armour, +6 attack and 15% more health again when all three pieces are on.

Every piece of armour, class by class, with what it gives and how to get it, is in Gear by class.

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. Past 100 the climb eases: 9% more for 101, less and less after, and only 0.2% a level by the end - level 110 is 50 million, 150 is 382 million, and 200, the top, is one billion. From about 150 on every level costs much the same, 11 to 13 million. At 200 the level stops but the experience keeps counting: on the highscores, of two players on the same level, the one with more experience is ahead. Hover a skill on your Character card 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, little Crab 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.

Crab 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.

Blackwater

The cartel's spirit, made legal for the sea. A crate from Samira never goes in your bag: Samira asks you first, then it goes down to Zafira's quay. When your ship is in Zafira's harbour, two dockhands row it out in a harbour boat and hand it up onto her deck (side by side under the forecastle, between its stairs). A ship carries two crates at most. Anybody aboard can click a crate and take a bottle into their bag (the crate shows how many are left, 9/10 and so on); a bottle takes a bag slot of its own; drink it from the bag, at sea or anywhere but ashore in Zafira.

• Each drink lasts 3 minutes, and drinks stack: how drunk you are is how many are still running. In the last 30 seconds of each you sober slowly. The ring by the minimap shows how many.
• 1 drink (Tipsy): 1 in 10 fish you catch comes up with a second one. A little sway.
• 2 drinks (Drunk): 1 in 7. More sway; your walk wanders.
• 3 drinks (Wasted): 1 in 4. You stumble and walk at half pace, you can pass out for 5 seconds (about once a minute at most), and you can be sick - for 4 seconds you cannot attack or use an ability. You cannot take a fourth drink. Neither happens while you are at the wheel.
• The second fish counts for every catch: lobster, rod fish, bonito, black marlin, and every fish in a net when you haul 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.

Jadewater

A jungle island in the southern sea, south-west of Zafira, in two halves either side of a mountain. The eastern half is the one you land on: a horseshoe cove of white sand shut in by limestone walls, water you can count the pebbles through, and behind the beach a wall of forest. The mountain (Cloudcap) has a river coming off it over a fall; there is a delta of mud and mangrove in the south, a hill in the east whose seaward side is cut into terraces, and in the deep forest of the north-west, trees a house could stand inside.

The western half is the Tangle, and it is as big again: low, wet, and nothing but rainforest from shore to shore, so thick that from above you cannot see the ground. No road goes into it. (A fishing boat of your own does: Construction 20.) What goes into it is a river, the Coil: it comes out from under Cloudcap at a pool called the Kettle, winds the whole length of the Tangle in great loops, and reaches the sea in the bight between the two halves of the island. Arms leave it and join it - the Backwater to the north-west coast, the South Arm to the south, the Sister from the north-east, and Blackwater Creek, which you would not find unless you were looking - and all of it is slow, dark and deep enough to float a boat. A hunters' trail runs from the end of the delta's low path round the bight to the Coil's mouth, and stops there. On foot in the Tangle the limestone towers that stand up through the trees are the only things to steer by; the water is the easy way through.

Getting there. The quest Seeds from Nowhere opens it (Nasir the gardener, whose walled garden is inside Zafira in the north-east quarter, a little north of the east street; you need The Keeper's Key first). After it, Anan takes you in his longtail from Zafira's west jetty: 120 gold, there and back. You pay going; he waits at the cove's jetty and brings you home for nothing. If you die on Jadewater you wake on the sand of Pearl Cove.

The rain

It rains on Jadewater every afternoon, a little before or after the same hour, for about four minutes, and some nights there is a shorter shower. Everyone on the island is in the same rain. The light goes flat and a wind moves the treetops about a minute before. While it rains:

• You cannot see far, and the sun goes.
• The rivers rise. The fords on the low path across the delta go under, and so does the low ground beside the river; they stay up for a few minutes after the rain stops. The roads and their bridges stay dry.
• Fires go out, and nothing will light.
• Whatever is planted grows two and a half times as fast: the terrace crops, and the trees on Tam's plots. Plant before the rain.
• Constrictors come out in the wet; the stinging swarms are beaten down by it; the crocodiles come up with the flood.

The great trees

Two trees grow here and nowhere else, wild in the deep forest and on plots you can buy.

A stroke takes as long as a log does: at Woodcutting 50 a mahogany stroke takes about twice as long as a birch log at 37, and a meranti stroke at 85 is about a quarter quicker than that. They are felled in stages. Every stroke deepens a notch at the foot; past halfway a crack starts up the trunk and climbs with each stage. The cut stays in the tree: you, or anyone, can leave it and come back. On the last stroke it falls along its ride (stand to the side: under the trunk costs you over half your health). Then the trunk lies there, and you cut it up from the top end for its logs. The wild ones grow back after an hour and a half (mahogany) or three hours (meranti).

Tam's Clearing, up the Old Cut from the landing: Tam sells four tree plots, one at a time: the first for 5,000 gold at Business 50, the second 8,000 at 66, the third 12,000 at 80 and the fourth 20,000 at 96; and the seed (mahogany 1,500, meranti 6,000). A bed is plowed before it is planted, as Darryl's are in King's Land: click your plot to turn the whole of it (120 Farming xp), and again after every tree, because the roots tear the ground up when it falls. A plot's tree is yours alone; felling it pays 9,000 Farming xp for a mahogany and 30,000 for a meranti. In the middle of the clearing, between the four plots, is a timber stack for the logs. By the stack waits Lamai, an elephant with a big timber wagon, and her two handlers, Kiet and Pao. At Business 67, once Timber for Gullhaven has opened the timber pallet at Sawpit Landing, hire them from Kiet for 70 gold a sunrise (as many sunrises as your Business allows, like any contract; no Business xp): they load 25 logs at a time off the stack, meranti first, walk Lamai down the Old Cut road to Sawpit Landing, unload onto the pallet and come back for more.

The Stairs

The seaward side of the hill in the east, cut into terraces from the shore to the crest; its other side is forest like any other. Old Suri at the Stairfoot sells seedlings by the five (sugarcane is grown in Zafira now). Clear a bed, plant it, wait, pick.

Cilibi

Somewhere in Jadewater's jungle there is a little green flying thing with leaves for a crown and very big eyes: Cilibi, the forest's own small god. There is only ever one, it is on no map, and it drifts from flower to flower. Leave it be and it leaves you be.

Finding her. Listen. Each sign comes again about a minute after the last, so you can follow her as she moves:

• A laugh off in the trees: she is within about 120 metres.
• The jungle goes quiet and she sings: you are close, within about 50 metres. She stays where she is while she sings.
• She laughs and the world turns to a dream for a few seconds: she is within 20 metres. Look up.

Fighting her (level 80). She stings with seeds of light, drops you into the dream for a few seconds, calls a jaguar out of the trees or the apes down, and sometimes sings: hear the whole song and you wake somewhere else in the jungle and have to find her again. Killed, she is gone for two minutes, then there is another somewhere else.

The Cilibi seed. One kill in 120 leaves a seed (yours: it cannot be traded or sold). Wake it and a little one flies with you. It throws seeds at what you fight, and now and then puts it to sleep for three to seven seconds. Once every half hour, when a blow would kill you, it saves you instead: you fall and lie in its green dust, unable to move but untouchable, while it sings over you. When the song ends, every enemy within 30 metres is thrown 20 to 30 metres away (not the kraken, nor anything that cannot move), and you get up with half your health.

What you hear

There is no music on Jadewater. What you hear is the forest: birds and insects by day, a different forest altogether at night, and a third for the half hour either side of dusk and dawn. The rain quietens all of it.

Jaguars

The jaguar (level 60) is the one thing on the island that hunts you, and by day you will never see one. Each keeps to ground of its own in the deepest forest - seven such grounds in the Tangle, two in the old forest of the north-west - and nothing marks them, on any map or on the land. Be on a jaguar's ground after dark and sooner or later it finds you: usually once to three times in a night.

• The warning. A low growl out of the dark, close by. That is all you get: a jaguar is never a dot on your map, and before it comes all there is to see of it is its eyes.
• Run at once and it lets you go. Stay within thirty paces of where you stood and five to ten seconds later it comes: flat out, a leap, and a first blow half as hard again as the ones that follow.
• It does not give up. It is faster than you are, and it fights until one of you is dead.
• What it leaves. Always its pelt. One kill in fifteen, a jaguar claw, whole.

To hunt them: find their ground (the growl tells you when you have), and wait there at night.

The apes of the Tangle

The jaguar has the Tangle's nights; its days belong to a troop of apes (each level 24, four to six of them). It is rare - twice in a day at the very most, and only while you are in under the deep forest's trees - but now and then they decide you are on their ground.

• The call. Somewhere off in the canopy one ape calls, and others answer. That is your warning, six to nine seconds of it. Get out from under the trees before they come - onto a river, out to the shore - and the calling falls behind you.
• The troop. They come hand over hand through the canopy, fast, and drop out of the branches all round you.
• The fight. Two press you at a time; the rest keep a ring, screaming and slapping the ground, and take their turn.
• Show them strength. Kill two and the troop weighs it up, once: half the time they have had enough, go back up into the trees and are gone. The other half, they stay to the last.

Nothing in the thick forest shows on the minimap - not the apes, not a snake, not the cartel's men. In there it is your eyes and your ears.

The Barrowroot staff

A wizard's earth staff: three roots grown round one another, opening at the head into a cage round a green stone, with pebbles turning about it. Madame Orra sells it, to wizards only, for 150,000 gold, and it takes Magic 50 to wield. Its blow is a stone flung off the head; its four are rock out of the ground, bone hands out of it, a way under it, and the dead up out of it to fight beside you (see the table above).

The Iron Jaguar Claws

Two jaguar claws and two bars of deep iron, forged on an anvil (Smithing 30, twenty-four blows, 1,400 xp; the pattern is Durran's, known once The Deep Line is done). A pair of gauntlets: deep iron over the back of each hand, three of the cat's claws along the knuckles. Or buy them from Madame Orra for 90,000 gold (she shows them only to monks and to Beauty). Wearing them takes Attack 50, on a monk's fists or the Beast's paws. Their E, the Pounce, goes in a poof of dust.

• A monk wears them on both fists. Short reach, but every blow is a rake across whatever is in front of him, one hand and then the other; he strikes 30% more often, and every blow lands 6 harder.
• Or they go on the Beast's paws (Beauty puts them on him): he strikes 30% more often in them, and every blow lands 6 harder.

Raincatch

There was a village on Jadewater called Raincatch. It is not at the foot of the Stairs, whatever the old charts say, and no road or path goes to it. People who have been up Blackwater Creek say there are men there now who are not villagers, that they are armed, and that they do not want to be found. Nobody who went to look has said what they are growing.

What else lives there

Constrictors (40) hang over the forest paths when it is wet; one takes a turn round you and you cannot move until it is hurt enough to let go. Stinging swarms (28) drift by the river on dry days; a weapon does almost nothing to them, but stand by a fire and they are gone. Crocodiles (52) lie in the delta's water the colour of the river, sunk to the eyes: you will barely see one, there is nothing to point at and nothing on the map until it moves, and it moves when you come within a few strides of the water. They come up with the flood.

On the forest floor (all three give way the undergrowth so you can see them once they show themselves). Pit vipers (25) lie coiled in the leaf litter of the thick forest with a leaf or two fallen across them. You do not see one: you tread on it, or beside it. It rears, and a moment later strikes - a moment is enough to be out of reach if you were already running - and its bite is venom for two minutes. They are rare: a day and a night of walking the deep forest meets about one. Bullet ants (7 each), a hand long, nest in the ground under the trees: a bare mound in a cleared patch. Come within ten metres of it and the whole nest - nine to fourteen of them - comes for you. Each dies of almost anything and bites hard for its size; six can get at you at once. Wandering spiders (16) hunt on foot by day and night, about as often as the apes come: one or two come out of the leaves near you, lift their front legs and show the red of their jaws, and then run at you. Their bite is venom too, forty seconds of it. Carry anti-venom from the Lodge.

Seeds. The big trees' seeds turn up on small things now: a mahogany seed off an ape, a spider, a cartel guard or a constrictor now and then, a yellow meranti seed very rarely - and most often off a pit viper. Elsewhere, a rat, a cow or a crab drops an oak, birch or yew acorn one time in fifty, and a rat a mahogany seed one time in 300; the Rat Matriarch drops the seed of any tree at all, mahogany and yellow meranti among them, one time in seven. Bears carry the odd oak or birch acorn, scorpions and jackals a birch acorn or (rarely) a mahogany seed.

In the heart of the forest, behind the Root Temple, there is a wall of living root and something breathing behind it. It is asleep. Leave it so.

A ship of your own: The Keel of Driftmouth

Ships are not built from the build menu: you finish one. At Driftmouth Cove, a little rocky inlet on the east coast of the Amber Sands, Old Tamir sits mending a net he does not need beside the black skeleton of the best ship he ever built. Twelve years ago the Sandholder's men burned her on the slip, because a ship that carries timber by sea makes his wood road worthless. His hands shake now. At Construction 25 he will teach you; you do the work. All told it is about 82,500 Construction xp: a builder who starts at 25 comes out of it near 45.

• The yard. Mend the slipway (20 logs, 4 iron bars), rebuild the sawpit (12 logs, 16 stone), build a steam box (10 logs, 5 iron bars), and strip the burnt timber off her keel.
• The long timber. Nothing on the desert coast grows long enough for a keelson. On Jadewater, Rafi's lumber crew at Sawpit Landing will mill it if you fell a mahogany giant and bring them twelve mahogany logs (or fell it for you, for 1,200 gold), and ship it to Driftmouth for 300 gold. The Sandholder hears of it: his enforcers and Captain Varek are waiting on the beach to burn it. Every man of them not fighting you puts a torch to the cargo. Varek carries a ledger.
• Building her, each stage on the slip for all to see (once she has a deck, a ladder goes up her side: click her and you climb up and get on with her masts, rigging and sails): keelson and ribs (16 mahogany logs, 4 iron bars), planking (40 mahogany logs), fastenings (96 iron nails), caulking (20 pitch, 30 oakum), deck and hold (30 mahogany logs, 6 iron bars), masts and rigging (12 yew logs, 40 rope), sails (24 sailcloth). Part loads are kept. Her timbers must be mahogany - Woodcutting 50, or bought from another player - though the yard's works take any logs. Pitch is smith's work: a bloom of Ashfall's sulphur rendered at any smith's basin, or in Tamir's kettle, gives two (Smithing 10, 45 xp). Oakum is carved, and it is slow: three ropes unlaid and picked apart with a knife make one hank (Carving 10, 40 xp).
• The night before. Keep watch with Tamir after dark. Saboteurs come down the cliff path with torches; those you are not fighting set her alight. Fill a bucket at the water's edge and throw it on the fire. A fire left burning too long damages a section, which wants 8 mahogany logs and 6 pitch to mend.
• The launch. At dawn Tamir hands you the mallet: knock out the four chocks and she goes down the slip into the bay. You name her. Take the helm and sail her out of the cove.

Afterwards Tamir stays on as the cove's shipwright: he brings your ship home to Driftmouth, repaints her band (200 gold) and gives her a new name (100 gold). Once you have finished the quest, a builder of Construction 45 can lay down a ship from scratch from the build menu, on any beach with deep water off it. She takes everything Tamir's ship did: 86 mahogany logs, 10 iron bars, 96 iron nails, 20 pitch, 30 oakum, 12 yew logs, 40 rope and 24 sailcloth, for 51,000 Construction xp as it goes in (one ship to a captain).

Click her to go aboard: from a shore or a pier within seventy metres you are rowed out; from the water you climb her ladder (starboard side, amidships); from your fishing boat you come alongside. Click her deck to walk it - the quarterdeck and the forecastle are up their stairs - and click the wheel to take her. W sets more sail (half, then all of it), S takes it in (and with it all in, held, backs her off a shoal), A and D put the helm over, Space leaves the wheel: she holds her course while you walk about. The bar at the foot of the screen shows her sail, her speed, the wind across her and the state of the sea, and has Go ashore and Over the side.

She sails by the wind, which blows the same way for everyone and veers slowly through the day. Across it she is fastest; running before it nearly as fast; close to it she labours, and dead into it she stops and her sails shiver - bear away. The more wind, the faster; a gale slows her again with the sea it raises. Left with nobody aboard, she comes up into the wind and lies there.

Friends can come aboard the same way and walk her deck as she sails; only her captain takes the wheel. She is seen by everyone near her.

Her captain can drop anchor (the bar at the foot of the screen): she takes her sail in and lies still, head to wind - until the anchor is weighed. At anchor out in deep water you can fish over her side: bonito on the handline anywhere out there, and far out from every land, black marlin with the deepwater rod and a bonito for bait (the same as at the Marlin Deep, Fishing 30). On her deck are four fish barrels (thirty fish each; anyone aboard may put raw fish in, her captain may take them out again), and a log pallet (sixty logs) for mending her. Her hull can be hurt now - by the kraken - and where it is she is sprung: planks started on her deck and the sea spurting through. Click one to mend her with a log off the pallet and a rope from your own bag. Let her hull run out and she goes down, with everyone aboard in the sea (to swim, or drown there like anyone else), and everything in her barrels and on her pallet with her. She is not lost for ever: Old Tamir at Driftmouth Cove raises a sunk ship and mends her for 30,000 gold, her name, colours, sails and beak as they were. Leave her out on the open sea with nobody aboard - killed out there, say, or gone off from her - and after a little while Tamir's men sail her home to the bay at Driftmouth Cove, where she was built; the same if you sign out at sea and are not back within ten minutes. Left off a shore, she stays where you left her. Tamir at Driftmouth Cove will dye her sails black with five kraken ink (and bleach them again for 200 gold), and set a kraken's beak on her bow.

The Kraken (level 175)

A raid fought from your own ship, made for a crew - though a very strong and very careful captain may win it alone. It is easier than Ashmaw, and far harder than the Sand King.

• Calling it. Sail into the far southern sea - south of every land but Jadewater, and well away from any shore - and drop anchor. Carry a barrel of fish to the rail (click the barrel, Empty it over the side) and pour it out. The fish float in a spreading slick for a minute or two; shoals come up into it, and sharks circle under it. Each barrel has its chance of bringing the kraken half a minute to a minute later: a third, for a full barrel of black marlin; less for a part barrel, or bonito, or lobster. It does not come near a shore.
• Its head rises out on one beam - crested and horned, its eyes burning yellow - and stays up the whole fight. From her deck it is out over the water: the work of bows and spells. Every blow on its head counts in full.
• Its arms do the harm. Three strike at her deck - one over each rail and one standing high over her middle - and each picks somebody aboard. Nothing marks where a blow will land: watch the arms. It lands where you were when the arm began it, so keep moving and most blows miss. An arm that rears up high comes down hard and slow; one that lifts a little whips down quick; one drawn back low out over the water is about to sweep right across her deck, harder to get out of, throwing whoever it catches four to seven metres along her; one that reaches over you, curling, is a grab.
• Grabbed, you are lifted off her deck - cut the arm through quickly and it drops you - and then thrown twenty or thirty metres out into the sea, where its sharks are. Click her to swim back to her side and climb aboard before your strength goes, or drown.
• Striking an arm hurts the kraken too, at 70% of a blow on its head, and wears the arm down: worn through, it is cut off, bleeds ink and sinks away, and grows back in 8 to 20 seconds. Arms have no health bars of their own. Bows hurt it most, but cutting arms is what protects the crew.
• The coils. Now and then two great thick arms come up and wrap round her fore and aft like a constrictor, and squeeze: her timbers scream and her hull goes fast - about 2% a second. Cut both off her before she breaks. If she breaks, she goes down and everybody aboard is in the sea, far from any shore, with the sharks - and she lies on the sea bed until Old Tamir raises her (30,000 gold).
• Her hull is shown under its health. Keep her mended - logs on her pallet and rope in your bags. Each arm holding her cracks her a little, and each blow on her deck a little more.
• It comes bigger for every hand aboard when it rises. Killed, a box floats up where it went down, and lines haul it aboard: each of you who hurt it opens it for your own share - gold, black marlin to fill the barrels again, kraken ink, and rarely the kraken's beak (one in eight), a leviathan pearl (one in twenty), or the Cloak of the Ninth Tide (one in thirty), a cape any class may wear.

The weather at sea

The sea between the lands has moods, the same for everyone: calm (glass, and at night the moon laid across it in a path of light - nights are mostly calm), fair, fresh (white horses everywhere) and gale. Within a few hundred metres of a coast the sea lies down; the harbours stay harbours. Now and then a storm is born out on the open sea and drifts across it down the wind, a tower of black cloud a few kilometres across, growing, raging and dying away over about an hour. You can see one from far off and run from it: it moves slower than you sail. Most come up from the south over the Marlin Deep, which sees the most of them; one rains on King's Land every three and a half hours or so, and its rain lasts most of an hour. Inside, the seas are mountains. In a calm, shoals of fish pass under you, and a ship under way is sometimes met by dolphins that ride her bow.

A fishing boat in a gale ships water when the seas take her on the beam; in a storm's heart she fills faster than you can bail - head her into the seas, or better, get out. Now and then a sea bigger than all the rest comes out of the rain: take it on the bow and she climbs it; anywhere else, she goes over. Foundered or capsized, she is gone for good, and you are in the water. On a ship in a storm the sea comes over her rail: when it is called, Space holds on. Caught unbraced, you are swept across her deck - and from near her lee rail, in the worst of it, over the side. Swim for her ladder.

A fishing boat of your own

At Construction 20 the build menu on any shore offers a fishing boat: 16 logs of any sort and 26 rope, laid in a piece at a time (she waits on the sand if you run short), 1,600 xp when she floats. She is not the boat that crosses by the chart: she is the one you steer. Click her to go aboard; W gets her under way, S slows and backs her, A and D put the helm over, Space steps ashore (into the shallows, on a shelving beach; twice asked, over the side to swim). At sea she goes under a tan lug sail at about three times walking pace; in a river she is poled, more slowly, and more or less finds the channel herself. She goes anywhere there is water under her - along a coast, across the open sea to another land, and up Jadewater's rivers, the Coil and its arms, which is the easy way through the Tangle. She will not leave the world, and she will not climb a beach. She stays where you leave her; if that is somewhere you cannot get back to, the build menu on any shore has her brought round. Other players see her under you.

Her boat. Every ship tows a little rowing boat on a line astern. Where she cannot come in (over a reef, up a shelving beach), anchor her and choose Into the boat on her bar: you climb down into it and row it yourself, W to pull, S to back, A and D to turn. It wants only a hand's depth of water. Space by a shore steps you out and pulls the boat up, where it waits for you (click it to row back out); Space by her side climbs you aboard, and the boat goes back on its line. While her boat is away from her and she is at anchor, she is never sailed home to Driftmouth.

Her firebox. At sea her speed comes from a little iron firebox aft, driving a paddle wheel on each side. It burns Emberpitch: 3 pitch and 1 volcanic glass, rendered together at any smith's basin (Smithing 17, 70 xp), make 5. Use Emberpitch from your bag beside her or aboard to pour it in: 20 fill her, and a full box is about five minutes of running hard (it burns only while W drives her; coasting, backing and poling cost nothing). The ring by your health shows what is left, and the log warns you at a tenth. With her fire out she still goes under sail, but a quarter as fast. In a river she is poled as before, fire or none. While the fire drives her, her sail is brailed up: the wheels do the work.

Wind and drift. A boat at sea that is not held drifts down the wind: about 1 knot in a calm, up to 4 in a gale. Your fishing boat drifts while you lie still in her; stepping ashore makes her fast, but go over the side and she drifts off without you. A ship drifts the same unless her anchor is down. When you are rowed ashore from your own ship, her crew let the anchor go first; over the side, they do not. Lying still close to land in your fishing boat, a line under her reminds you: Space to step ashore.

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.

The Nightcrown's country

The further north-east you go on Thornreach, the more dangerous it is. Anvilmere, the Thornwood, the Vale and the Veil Pool are safe; from about the Old Watcher on, gloam moths come for you out of the north-east; past the east pass Duskborn walk too, and under the Gloam they come in packs, with hollowed Rootwalkers among them - more of them, more often, and stronger the nearer you are to the Starfall Spire, the dead tree-tower in the heart of the Gloam. Go back south-west and they stop coming. The Spire's gate stands open: walk into it and you are on the terrace at the top, where Veyra the Nightcrown waits with four of her Duskborn. The game tells you as you cross into each deeper part of her country.

Gullhaven

A fishing village of driftwood on the beach of the Western Sound, Thornreach's west coast, with the Thornwood right behind it. Take the Elder Way, the Mossfolk's footpath, west from the Glimmerpool. Generations ago the Mossfolk let people settle the beach on one condition: never cut a living tree in Thornreach. Every great tree there was once one of them. The village has kept the pact and built everything from what the sea washes up. So no tree in Thornreach can be cut: the axe will not bite.

Last winter's storm wrecked half the village: families live in tents and under upturned boats, and the longhall is down. As timber comes in, the village rebuilds: the longhall in red mahogany (the quest), the families out of the tents and into the first mahogany cottages at 1,200 logs delivered (the quest's 150 count), a proper pier a ship can come alongside, a market on the green and gardens at 2,500, a timber sea wall, porches, lamps along the lane and a bank (Pell Saltpurse at the strongroom north of the hall, your one bank account as everywhere) at 6,000, and at 13,000 a thriving village: two-storey houses with flowers at the windows, a full market under bunting, and the Gull & Timber tavern, with a few of the old driftwood houses and the chapel kept as they were. Every player sees the village as their own deliveries have made it.

Selling timber. After Timber for Gullhaven, Reeve Oswin buys mahogany and yellow meranti brought up the beach: 64 gold a mahogany log and 272 a meranti log, paid into the money chest by his door. Carry logs up to the timber yard in your bag, or anchor your ship off the beach with logs lashed on her deck and choose Have your ship unloaded at the yard. Gullhaven's boats row out to her.

Timber by sea. From the quest's timber stage on, you have a pallet at Sawpit Landing on Jadewater, by Rafi's jetty (it holds 2,000 logs). A ship cannot cross the reef into Pearl Cove, so anchor outside it. Rafi's crew carry the logs down the jetty, raft them, tow them out over the reef and sway them up her side: up to 150 logs on her deck.

The Timber Contract (never required): Oswin's sailors crew your ship between your pallet and Gullhaven, up to 100 logs a trip. A round trip takes about 47 minutes (two crossings of about 16 minutes each, plus the loading and unloading), and the chest pays 72 gold a mahogany log and 296 a meranti log. Wages are 500 gold a sunrise, signed for on the same Business ladder as every other contract. To start it, anchor your ship off Gullhaven and agree with Oswin or at the contract ledger by the longhall. While it runs she is the crew's: you can board her and ride along, but you cannot steer her. You may build another ship in the meantime. She keeps sailing while you are signed out (up to a day), everybody online sees her at sea, and an empty pallet keeps her waiting off the landing. Now and then a squall slows her down or washes a few logs overboard. When the wages run out she is handed back off Gullhaven; end it early and anything on her deck goes back on the pallet. Once Gullhaven has its pier she comes alongside it to unload.

Herringholm, and net fishing

One cottage on a rocky bay on Thornreach's south-east coast, where the land comes down in grass and bare granite to the sea and low islands with pines on them lie out in the sound. Take the east road out of Anvilmere; where it bends north at the far side of the lake, a footpath goes off east through the meadows and down to the shingle at the head of the bay. Old Maudie Tarrow mends nets on a fish box by her door; her grandson Pyry is all over the beach. An old fishing rod leans on the back wall of her cottage: take it if you would rather fish with a rod (another stands there a few minutes later). The bay is shallow: anchor a ship out between the islands, where it is deep, and row in.

Net fishing

Learnt from Maudie in Nets at Herringholm (Fishing 50). After it, any net works anywhere - but only from a rowboat: Maudie's, or your own ship's boat (the one she tows). Never from the deck of a ship. In a rowboat, three buttons at the foot of the screen:

• Sound (with Old Tarrow's sounding line): the depth in metres where the boat lies, and what the tallow brings up off the bottom: clean sand, grey mud (deep), grit and shell (broken ground) or grit and weed (rough ground).
• Cast net: the boat lying still, in ten metres of water or more, at least fourteen metres from another of your nets. Its buoy marks it, on the water and on your world map. You can have one net out at Fishing 50, two at 55, three at 65 and four at 75. Four is the most.
• Haul net: alongside one of your buoys. It comes up with the catch still in it - a net full of fish, one space in your bag.
• Pick it: ashore at Herringholm, hang the full net on one of the two sets of net poles south of the cottage, past the fish racks and pick the fish out one by one, into your bag. Roach you toss aside as they come out, and the gulls fight over them. Each fish picked, roach too, gives its Fishing experience. When your bag is full, tip the fish into the fish barrel by the smokehouse door (it holds any number; not roach) and go back for the rest. A picked net can hang to dry, or come down into your bag.

Timing. A net fills over five hours, holds its best for two more, then loses 4% an hour to crabs and spoiling, never going below 30%. Hauled early, it has as much as it has had time to catch. It goes on fishing while you are signed out. Cast before bed and haul thirteen hours later: about three quarters of a full net.

What is in it. At its best a net holds about seventy fish at Fishing 50 (sixty to eighty), a few more with every level after, about a hundred by 99. It fills evenly over its five hours, so a net hauled at half time holds about half. Rough ground - by the rocks, round the islands, anywhere the bottom climbs fast - holds a third more fish, and the rock-loving ones, but nets snag there. A net that has been through a storm comes up a little fuller. Deeper water gives the better fish:

Now and then something else comes up in the mesh: a tangle of kelp, driftwood, an old boot, a message in a bottle (about one haul in forty), or a pearl (about one in fifty; more over rough ground).

Drift. A net floats, and goes where the water takes it: in fair weather up to about 100 metres from where you cast it, in a storm up to 500. It stops for good in water too shallow for it, on the shore, or snagged on rough ground, and it never leaves the waters you cast it in. Its buoy goes with it, so look at the map before you row out.

Making a net (Carving 27, 450 xp): 24 twine, 6 net floats and 6 net sinkers, knife in your tool slot; use the twine. Floats are carved from driftwood (three to a piece; driftwood washes up along Herringholm's tideline, and comes up in nets), sinkers notched from flat stones off Herringholm's shingle (Carving 15).

Climbing, falling and the rivers

In Thornreach, ground too steep to walk is climbed: click beyond a cliff and you go up it hand over hand, about a metre of height a second (a route goes round a cliff when round is not much further). On the rock the ring by the map shows your grip, and it runs down, faster the sheerer the face; rest on a ledge and it comes back. Let it run out, or take a hard blow while you hang there, and you fall. A few metres costs nothing; every metre past that costs more, and twenty-six metres will kill you. Deep water at the bottom breaks a fall. Swim in a river and the current carries you downstream - and over a waterfall, if you let it, into the pool below.

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 Crab 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 Crab 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. A passage costs 75 gold, paid to the master when you choose where to go (your own boat and your own ship sail free).

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 ten 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. Once you have killed the kraken yourself, your crossings are quiet.

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.

The Marlin Deep. Open water south of every land, on your own boat's chart (and the world map) once Past the Marker is done. Choose it and she sails out for half a minute into the deep blue, hands her sail and lies to the swell; then it is the same as past the Marker: Put a bait over, Fish for bonito (with Bram's handline), and Sail home, which takes you back to wherever she was tied up.

Storms at sea. Lying out for marlin, at the Marlin Deep or past the Marker, every seven to fifteen minutes of it the weather turns. It comes slowly: first a black wall of cloud standing up out of the horizon with rain hanging under it and lightning you cannot hear yet, about two minutes off. Then its edge comes overhead, the sun goes, the swell gets up and the thunder arrives. Then the rain: that is the sign to go home. Turning for home is always in time - the storm holds where it is and is behind you by the quay. Stay, and the sea keeps getting up until one bigger than the rest rolls the boat over. Nobody hauls you out: you drown, and the sea keeps every fish in your bag, raw or cooked. You wake as after any death, and the boat is found drifting and towed home.

Quests

Eleven 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. Nobody goes down without putting 2,000 gold into the iron-bound death chest by the right-hand post. Climb out alive and you get it back. Die down there and the tomb keeps the 2,000 - and everything you wore and carried goes into the death chest. You wake beside it (with an arrow over it while it holds your things), open it, and take your things back. Every kill of the King is counted in your log as a kill-count, saved with your account.

When the King falls, every member opens their own sarcophagus, and beside it is the raid's board: everyone who was down there, how much damage they did in the raid (to anything - the dead, the mummies, the King) and how much they took. A chance at a rare piece of your class's set needs 400 damage of your own in the raid; the board tells you whether you made it. The piece is always one you have not got - not in your bag, worn, banked or in the death chest - until you hold the whole set; after that any piece can come again.

• 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, 259 health each, hitting 10 to 24. 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: 2,875 health (1,500 more for every extra member of a party), 14 to 38 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 28 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 8% 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 (230 health, 5 to 14 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 his lid slides open on your own share: gold every time, then each line of the table below rolled on its own, so one kill can bring several or none of them. The worst kill is the gold alone. In a party every member opens a sarcophagus of their own. 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, and it is a wider torrent now, fifty-odd metres long, swept a third of the way round him.
• The cover does not last. Every second of his fire on a pillar or a stone wears it: it splits and the splits run with fire, then it blackens, then it gives - a pillar's middle melts out and the rest comes down in pieces, a fallen stone slumps into slag - and it shelters nobody after. Hide behind something and he knows: the breath comes narrow and slow, straight at your cover, and burning rock chips at it too. A pillar lasts two or three of his breaths. Everything stands again when a new wyrm is on the hoard, or when he has gone back to sleep.
• Fire at a distance. He does not chase you round his hall: stand off out of reach of his teeth and he spits fire at you, every few seconds (35-60; a pillar in the way stops it and is chipped by it), and now and then throws burning rock at everybody at once (55-90).
• Burning ground. Wherever burning rock lands, the floor burns for a while - 3% of your health every half second you stand in it - and it sets you alight: out of it, you burn on for a few seconds more.
• He fights what fights him. The Unspoken, soldiers, the Beast: he turns on them with teeth, claws and tail when they crowd him, and burns them as readily as you. They do not wake him, though, and cannot keep him awake on their own.
• 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.
• Underneath him. Get in between his legs and he rears up and stamps: 90-150 to everything under him, and it throws you out. There is nowhere on him that is safe.
• 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 since they last died or left his hall searches the chest by his bed for their own share - the one a shaft of light comes down onto from the roof when he dies: 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. The claws and the egg are only a chance for whoever has done 5,000 damage to him; dying or leaving the hall wipes what you have done, so a player who falls and runs back down starts again from nothing. Every kill is counted, like the Sand King's. Once you have emptied your share, the raid is over: the mountain puts you out on the black sand of Cinder Cove, by the ferryman.

Your own dragon

The egg hatches. Carry one of Ashmaw's eggs in your bag and it slowly comes alive: eight hours of play with it on you, and it cracks a little more as it goes (you can see the cracks on it in your bag, and Inspect tells you how far along it is). In the bank it goes cold and waits. What comes out is a small dragon, blue, green or red by chance: Iskaryn if it is blue, Vaelmyr if green, Drazhkael if red. One dragon a person: a second egg lies still while you have one.

• It grows over twenty hours of play - wherever it is except the bank.
• A hatchling walks at your heel and bites at whatever you are fighting. Right-click it to pick it up (it sleeps in your bag, still growing); Put down (or drop it) to let it out again. Bank it and it stops growing.
• At about a third grown it can fly and is too big to carry. It keeps to the sky after that: press F to call it, from far off. In a fight it comes down on your enemies in passes of fire; with nothing to fight it keeps you company for a minute and goes back to the sky. The older it is, the harder it hits.
• Full grown - fifteen metres of it - it lands beside you when you call. Space or right-click it and Mount to climb on. S takes it up (the higher it goes, the slower it climbs), W dives and flies fast, A and D turn. With neither held it glides, slowly losing height, and comes in to land. Dive or glide into the ground and it lands on its feet; on the ground W walks it on and S takes off again. Space jumps off - safely on the ground, but from high in the air you fall, and a long fall kills. It will not fly out over the open sea.
• Hold the left mouse button to breathe fire at the ground under the cursor, and drag to sweep it across whatever is down there. Five seconds of fire and it has to draw breath.
• Its fire is napalm: it sticks where it falls and burns for eight seconds, and whatever walks in it is set alight and burns on for a few seconds after. It grows with your own strength. Nothing else in the game does as much.
• Up there its hide is between you and everything: four times your health. High in the air nothing on the ground can reach you; fly low and blows land on the dragon. Brought down, it throws you off and goes away to heal for a few minutes.
• Married? Your husband or wife can ride behind you: Space beside your dragon while it is on the ground, and off again (Space) once it has landed.

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. She comes back four minutes after she dies. Blink cannot cross the cave's walls.

Creatures

The Underdune

The Amber Sands sit on a buried civilisation, and every floor down is older than the one above it: cisterns and cellars from a city a few centuries gone, the market that city was built over, something that tunnelled up under that, a temple on a lake of brine, sand fused to glass by a single stroke of lightning - and at the bottom, stone that was cut before there were people to cut it. So the levels climb as you go down. Every trip down is a descent, a raid of your own: the creatures stand thick, nothing you kill comes back while you are down there, and you go on down only over a floor you have cleared.

The way in. The old well, in a back lot under Zafira's north wall just west of the gate: the ground gave way under it, and a rope goes down the shaft. Beside it is the death chest: nobody goes down without putting 2,000 gold in it. It is on the world map.

A descent. Each floor has a way down at its far end, and it stays shut until every creature on the floor is dead; the place card in the corner counts how many are left, and the shut way down says which rooms they are in. Nothing you kill comes back while you are down there. And nothing gives up on you: once one is after you, it follows you anywhere on its floor, through the doorways, until one of you is dead. There is no going back up a floor: every way up is the way out.

Out alive, by the way up on any floor, and the 2,000 gold is yours again; the floors fill behind you, and the next descent starts fresh. Die, and the Underdune keeps the gold: you wake beside the death chest with nothing on you, and everything you wore and carried is in the chest to take back. Every descent starts at the first floor: come up for anything, and you clear your way down again from the top. Nothing down here is shared: other players on a floor can be seen, but your creatures are your own.

What lives down there

Each kind has one thing about it to learn; the game tells you the first time you meet it.

What comes up out of it

• Off the creatures, nothing but now and then a Shard of the Before (below): no coins, goods or seeds. The descent's loot is Ysmeer's casket.
• Shards of the Before, off anything on any floor, the deeper the likelier: 1 in 200 on the Cisterns, 1 in 100 in the Buried Bazaar, 1 in 50 in the Hive, 1 in 25 in the Salt Temple, 1 in 13 in the Glass Deep, 1 in 6 on the Before. Ysmeer always leaves 4 to 15. And anywhere in the Amber Sands above ground - the dunes, the towns, the Sand King's tomb - anything you kill leaves one, one time in 500. The Hunter's Lodge sells them for bounty marks, ten for 10 marks. They cannot be traded or sold: Vael, the hooded figure beside the old well, takes them, and shows each class only its own set: a wizard the Hollow Sky (and Nadir), a ranger Aether's Edge (and Meridian), a monk the Infinite (and Aeon). The prices are the same for all three: boots 1,000 shards, cloak 1,500, helm 2,000, legs 3,000, body 3,500 and the weapon 4,000.

Bounty Hunts

Quests tell stories; a bounty is a hunting job that comes round again. The Hunter's Lodge stands outside King's Port's south gate, on the grass where the lighthouse road turns off the harbour road - a log hall with antlers over the door - and Hesper Vane keeps it. There is no bounty skill: what grows is your reputation with the Lodge, and with it your rank.

• Wanted signs stand at fixed places (they are on the world map, with the region's tier on the notice and a pip for each tier you have been paid for). Somebody keeps most of them; in the back of beyond there is only a board and a chest.
• Three tiers a sign. Easy: a number of something common. Medium: a number of something tougher. Hard: a named target or a rare beast. A board of the region's second tier (the Shepherd's) wants a Rookie, one of the third (the well's, the Sawpit's) a Tracker; King's Land's is open to everyone.
• Every board at once. You can work all the boards at the same time. To begin with you carry one notice from each board; the Lodge's stores sell room for a second and a third from the same board, for good, so that you can hunt a board's easy, medium and hard notices together. A finished notice is carried until you go back and are paid.
• Take a notice, kill, come back. Click the board or talk to whoever posted it. Only kills made after you take a notice count, each one is told in the log - [Bounty] Desert jackal killed - 2/15 - and when the count is made you go back to the sign to be paid. Online, everybody who struck a creature gets the credit for it - except in the rat cave, which everybody shares: there a kill is only the one who struck the last blow's.
• What it pays. Bounty marks, experience in your class's fighting skill, gold, reputation - and now and then something left with the bounty (a seed, a sunstone).
• They come round. Easy and medium notices change every day at midnight UTC, hard ones every three days. Each tier of each sign has a small pool of jobs and a different one is drawn each time, the same for every player. A notice you have already taken stays the job it was until you are paid.
• The featured sign. One sign a day has a star chalked on it and pays half as many marks again - to those of Stalker rank.

Marks are the numbers above. Experience is 400 for each mark, times the region's tier; gold 25 for each mark, times the tier; reputation 10 for each mark.

Rank

Marks are what you spend; reputation is what you keep. King's Land's board is open from the first day; the Shepherd's wants a Rookie, the well board and the Sawpit's a Tracker. It decides what the Lodge's stores will sell you (below). Each rank has its own emblem, worn before your name where everybody can see it, and the Lodge keeps a chest for you at each new one.

The Lodge's stores

Hesper Vane's shelves, at the Lodge: ask her what your marks will buy. Each rank can buy everything the ranks below it can. Marks buy convenience, style and company - never the best gear in the game - and nothing bought with them can be traded. You carry one notice from each board until you buy room for more of the same board's here; there is no limit on how many boards you work at once.

Venom. A pit viper's bite, or a wandering spider's, on Jadewater: you move 40% slower and it takes 5 to 20 health every 10 to 15 seconds, armour or no armour, until it runs out (two minutes for the viper, forty seconds for the spider). Your health arc turns dark green for as long as it lasts. Anti-venom ends it.

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, roach, perch, bream, 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 32, jackal pelts 48 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. His shelves run out, though, and they are your own shelves, not shared: 20 silk, 25 saffron and 60 each of beads, dates and salt at the most, filling again at 10 silk, 12 saffron and 30 of each of the others an hour whether you are there or not (pointing at a ware says when the next comes in). A full stall carried to Marla is about 4,450 gold of profit, and it comes back at about 2,200 an hour. Water never runs out.

Madame Orra in the ribcage on the dunes sells the Grim Plow for 15,000, the Grim Axe for 20,000, the Ancient book for 10,000 and the Weather chart for 10,000; monks and Beauty also see the Iron Jaguar Claws for 90,000 (Attack 50 to wear them, on a monk's fists or the Beast's paws). Wizards also see the Barrowroot staff for 150,000 (Magic 50 to wield it). Rangers also see the Rimewing crossbow for 130,000 (Ranged 50 to wield it) and Viper venom for 60,000: Use it once and every arrow you loose from then on, from any bow, poisons what it hits for half its damage again over 4 s. The poison's numbers float up dark green. A new arrow on a poisoned creature starts the 4 s again with the stronger dose; the poison does not stack. 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; 30 on the board at the most, 15 more an hour), 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 3,500,000, 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 66 for iron ore, 78 for an iron bar, 145 for deep iron ore, 175 for a deep iron bar, 50 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. Every contract in the game, his included, only runs down while you are signed in: sign out and it waits for you. He keeps the light booked a stretch of days ahead, counted in sunrises — 3 to begin with, 5 at Business 15, 10 at 35, 15 at 57, 20 at 82, 25 at 96. 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 35 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, willow 20, yew 30, oak 32, mahogany 60, 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: Aldous in King's Port, Nadir in Zafira, and Orsa Ledgerhand in Anvilmere, Thornreach's dwarf village, just south of the square. 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.