Cities
Dense, permanent, player-governed. Where most lives are actually lived.
A surface to live on, and a frontier beneath it
Civilization above. Below it, an enormous Labyrinth that is not a dungeon but an ecosystem — one that remembers what was taken out of it.
Where lives are actually built
The whole world is not a labyrinth. Most of it is somewhere people live: permanent, governed, contested and worth defending.
Villages
The first thing a group of citizens can hold together without a charter.
Wilderness
Unclaimed ground. Dangerous, resource-bearing, and the reason frontiers exist.
Kingdoms
Federations of settlements with borders, law and a foreign policy.
Trade routes
Roads, rivers and sea lanes. Cut one and an economy notices within hours.
Oceans
Distance, navies, freight and the places maps stop being reliable.
Mountains & ruins
Defensible ground and the visible remains of ages that already ended.
Settlements
Ground claimed and constructed by players, permanent until someone takes it.
Thousands of kilometres of underground civilization
Five depths. Risk, reward and lore all increase together, and the deeper humanity collectively goes, the more of the world's history is uncovered.
- Ancient ruins
The Labyrinth's shallow shelf. Small creatures, readable corridors, the first place a new citizen learns that the ground moves.
- Lost cities
Underground settlements that failed. PvPvE, relics, and the first depth where other people are the harder problem.
- Faction kingdoms
Inhabited depth: standing armies, raid-scale creatures, rare resources that surface industry depends on.
- Distortion
Where the rules bend. Civilizations that predate the surface, and artifacts capable of changing the world above.
- The Abyss
Almost nobody arrives. What is found here becomes the lore of the age that finds it.
It reacts, and it does not forgive
Not procedurally generated corridors — a simulation. Cause on the left, consequence on the right, and no undo button anywhere.
- A region is hunted outPredators migrate. So does everything that fed on them.
- A guild over-mines a seamThe seam is gone. Not respawned — gone, and the price above moves.
- An ancient thing is releasedNeighbouring regions mutate around it.
- A dam is destroyedTunnels flood. Routes that ten thousand people used stop existing.
- Civilization pushes too deepWhat lives down there comes up. The surface pays for the ambition.
- A settlement is cut offIt starves, empties and becomes a ruin other players will find later.
Entire underground settlements can disappear. Years later, people will still say: you should have seen the Obsidian Kingdom before the Collapse.