THAWFALL / A PERSISTENT CIVILIZATION EXPERIMENT / PRE-PRODUCTION
The world turns.
History stays.
You arrive through a door nobody can destroy. Everything around it can be built, traded, taken — or lost when the door moves.
Enter the atlas · Read the public rules
7 gates · 1 persistent overworld · No public test season
Most servers ask you to wait for the next chapter. Thawfall asks you to notice what was already there.
Ice closes one road and opens another. A dormant deposit grows richer while nobody guards it. A door that made a city powerful can leave without touching a single house.
The world does not tell you what to want.
Evidence, not genre.
A year with teeth, not a timer with snow.
The calendar is public. What you do with it is not.
Autumn / 7 world-days — Measure what may leave.
Deposits appear. Gate instruments begin to drift. Mooring is a choice, not an admin event.
Winter / 18 world-days — Hold the site, or let it ripen.
A supplied hearth gives you a foothold and draws the deposit down. Leave it dormant and it matures for whoever arrives first.
Thaw / 5 world-days — The race becomes physical.
Auric extraction opens at full rate. Ice roads give way. Every stockpile, treaty, and scout becomes useful—or does not.
Summer / 18 world-days — Build what survives the next turn.
Early Summer still allows reduced extraction. The rest belongs to construction, trade, exploration, and gate science.
World time is strategic time. Safety and detention limits use real UTC.
The door moves. The city stays.
Gates are the only indestructible things in the world. Their surroundings are not.
Fortify the plaza. Charge a toll. Maintain a mooring. Learn the precursors. None of it makes the surrounding land safe from history.
If a gate relocates, its registry and frame move. Player buildings do not.
BEFORE / THE ROAD ENDS HERE · AFTER / THE ROAD REMAINS
Relocation sites are revalidated. Player construction is never deleted to make room for a gate.
Two scarcities. No single ladder to rule them all.
Auric — The seasonal prize
Matures through Winter. Extracted during Thaw and early Summer. Spent on reinforcement, winter equipment, tools, and hearth insulation.
Auric never buys gate power.Harmonic cores — The exploration prize
Found far from gates and in deep-Winter sites. Useful in resonance lamps. Consumed by outbound experiments.
Cores never mint auric.Annual opportunities are placed away from gates. Gate ownership is not a resource-printing license.
Use → Observe → Predict → Stabilize → Steer
Gate science is not a quest chain. Instruments respond. Experiments repeat. Records can be traded, stolen, or burned.
Identical complete inputs produce identical results. Administrators never decide that it is time for the next discovery.
The Charter explains what can be observed. It does not publish destinations or the physics function.
Agency beyond the sword.
Build and contest
Reinforcement matures and decays. Wards deny placement but can be besieged. Territory can change hands without requiring total erasure.
Watch and respond
Listening posts provide evidence only while maintained. Patrols matter. Logs expire. Alerts have limits.
Trade and specialize
Exchange chests support asynchronous barter without a server currency or admin shop.
Judge without disappearing people
Vigil stones have participation upkeep, public destructible custody, and a 14-real-day maximum. Cheats and harassment remain admin matters.
History deserves more than a promise.
The design includes coordinated world/database snapshots, restore drills, conservation audits, idempotent recovery, feature kill switches, and a published catastrophic-failure policy.
No honest system can promise that corruption or failure will never happen. It can promise not to hide the outcome.
The build baseline defines 112 acceptance tests. These are launch requirements, not a claim that the implementation has already passed them.