ARCHITECT — The Guide: contents (text edition)

Welcome

Thank you for playing ARCHITECT. Genuinely. This is a text game in an age that doesn't make many of them, and somebody deciding to sit down and read a city is the whole reason it exists.

On the surface it's simple. You read where you are, you type what you want to do, and the city answers. That's deliberate, and you can play a long time on nothing else.

Underneath, there's a great deal more, and none of it'll jump out and introduce itself: trades only spoken about in whispers, arguments between factions you can take a side in without ever choosing from a menu, weather that will kill you, a whole aircraft under a tarpaulin, and verbs that work perfectly well while appearing in no list anywhere. Find it at whatever pace you like. This guide covers the parts you would rather not learn the hard way, and stops well short of spoiling the rest.

You don't have to read any of it to start. Part one is the only one that assumes you have never typed a command in your life.

If you're reading this with a screen reader, type displaymode log once you're in, or choose the Log rung on the login screen. The whole game then arrives as one plain transcript that only ever grows downward. There's also an accessibility command, which opens those settings directly and deliberately has no tablet requirement.

The parts

Part one — your first hour. What you're looking at, what to type, and what will kill you. The screen, the verbs that matter, food and water and warmth, your first fight, and the handful of mistakes that end a new character early.
Part two — everything you can do in Coldwater Basin. The nine competing orders and the argument they're having. Mutation versus chrome. The flight simulator. Chess, poker and the card machine. Running a shop, or a corporation with a protection racket. The chemistry trade. Weather that kills. Television with a cast that has to turn up to work.
Part three — the two questions and the nine orders. Keep this city or leave it, and what humanity should turn into next. All nine orders and what each one actually wants, where they're stationed, how you end up siding with one without ever picking from a menu, and what that does to your prices, your doors and your body.
Part four — the deep end. The systems you only find because somebody mentioned them in a bar. Programming the client until it plays half the game for you, protection rackets, the chemical trade, trading cards, and making a living hauling freight across the waste.
Appendix — the client itself. THOMAS is the client and engine ARCHITECT is built on, and this is the only page that documents it rather than the world: panels, keyboard, macros, triggers, aliases and accessibility. Read it when you want the tool rather than the city.