The world gets its depth

A 2D game with 48-pixel characters will not win a contest of spectacle. It can win on connection: every truth in the world sits in several places, on a grave, in a letter, on a pay slip, and in no place whole. For that, there is now a world book of about 3,000 lines.

Time counts from the Riving

The sea ran out 31 years ago, and Vessar has counted its years from that day ever since. Year 0 is the Riving, and the Grey Water Accord falls in the winter of the same year. The wiki writes BR and AR. In the game nobody uses abbreviations: the Chancery writes "year 31 after the Riving", the Banners say "thirty-one winters since the sea went". The timeline has 30 entries, ten of them withheld.

The world book and the archive

The world book was made with AI tools, as research and draft. I made every decision in it myself, sixteen of them in one evening. 274 names were checked against the wikis of the big fantasy worlds that belong to others; one failed and was replaced. What may be public now lives in the archive register: cosmology, the three accounts of the Riving, the places from Whitmere to Lanterhall and transcripts of the documents you can open in the game.

Three questions without answers

The world carries three questions, and none of them will ever be answered in full, not later either:

• Who made the Tidewall, and was it a wall or a door?
• Whose is the third hand on the Accord?
• Will the sea come back, and what will it bring?

The wiki does not fill these gaps. Where something is missing, it says "[entry withheld]".

The flame

Every Warden carries a brass lantern, and in it lives Neap: a flame that remembers what you have seen and knows nothing else. She has 19 occasions to speak, warns you on One Life and stays quiet if you want her to. She is not AI. Every line she has is written and read before it goes into the game. You may rename her.

The code

Depth should hold you, not pressure. So from today the code page lists what Saltwarden will never do: no daily login rewards, no streaks, no loss when you take a break, no honour reserved for a few, nothing that makes a character stronger for money. Eight rules on how the game holds you and a list of things that will never exist.

Next I read the roughly 2,200 words of new game text myself, chain by chain.

Saltwarden Online is inspired by classic MMORPGs and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any other game or its publisher.