ARCHITECT — Part four: the deep end

The client is a machine you can program

ARCHITECT runs on THOMAS, which is a MUD client that happens to have a game bolted to it. Underneath the room pane and the map sits a full automation layer: scripting, pattern matching, timers, key bindings and output routing. None of it's required. All of it's there from your first login, and it follows your account rather than your browser.

What's in it

• Macros. A named script of commands, chained with semicolons. It takes arguments, it has if/else, it can call other macros and return a value, and it can be bound to a key or a smartbar button.
• Triggers. A pattern that watches the log and runs a script when it matches: a regular expression, a channel such as @loot or @say, several lines at once, or once and never again.
• State triggers. on hp_pct < 30 = drink stim watches your own vitals rather than the text, and fires on the crossing rather than on every update you spend below the line.
• Timers. Run a script every few seconds, or once after a delay. A one-shot retires itself properly instead of coming back after your next reload.
• Aliases. Rewrite what you type before it's sent. One expansion pass, so an alias can't quietly recurse into itself.
• Expressions. Conditions are real expressions, with booleans and comparisons, over your vitals, your flags, your inventory and anything a trigger just captured.
• Speedwalk. 3n2e walks it. A speedwalk has to contain a digit, deliberately, because otherwise use is a speedwalk and so is sew.
• Routes and panes. route @say = Chat sends chat to its own window. Panes exist because a rule names one, and closing a pane hides it rather than deleting the rule.
• Gagging, highlights and transcripts. Hide the lines you're tired of, colour the ones that matter, search the scrollback, and save the session to a file.

There's also voice input, which is off by default and which corrects speech recognition against the verbs actually on your screen rather than guessing; Read Aloud for the log; tab completion; scroll lock; and three display modes that swap graphical panels for written records, so the entire game can be played through the log.

The power guide

All of the above has its own manual: the THOMAS power-user guide. Twenty-two sections, all of them worked examples — triggers, gagging, state triggers, timers, aliases, variables, the script language, expressions, wait for, key bindings, speedwalk, routes and split panes, voice input, Read Aloud, accessibility options, setup that follows your account, and what THOMAS deliberately won't do.

Protection rackets

A corporation that controls a zone can lean on the shopkeepers standing in it, and take a cut of every sale they make. It's some of the best money in the game per hour, and it's the only income in the game that dies if you stop showing up.

How it works

• You need the street first. Rackets ride on corp territory control. Lose the zone to a rival and the book stops paying that day.
• shakedown is the verb. It's a skill check against a frightened person, in public, and it costs you your standing with them for a long time.
• Fear is a number, and it decays. Every shop on your book has one, with a half-life of about ten real days — and nothing tops it up for you. No collection tick, no reminder, no renewal. Somebody has to physically walk back in and lean on them again.
• The cut follows the band. Terrified, Cowed, Wary, Slipping, Lapsed: a fifth of every sale at the top, and nothing at all at the bottom.
• The money comes out of the till. It isn't minted for you. An over-milked shop with an empty till pays nothing, so greed caps itself without anybody tuning a knob — and every credit you skim is a credit a rival can no longer crack out of that shop's safe.
• Somebody sees you do it. Extortion is witnessed like any other crime, the law works on evidence, and a shopkeeper who has been leaned on remembers it at the counter for a long time afterwards.

corp racket list is your book, and how frightened each name on it still is. corp racket drop <shop> lets one off the hook.

Rackets are one lever of several a corp can pull; the others are territory, legitimate ventures, influence and open war. Corps have members, permissions, a treasury and a war of position with the NPC organisations who already own most of the map. Part two has the overview.

The chemical trade

There's a manufacturing industry in Coldwater, from raw supply to street sale, and it is the deepest economic system in the game. It's also the one thing in this guide we're being deliberately cagey about, because finding your way in is the first half of it.

What we will tell you

• Everything you can take, somebody makes. Every drug in this game has a supply chain, and every link of it's a place a player can stand.
• Synthesis is a real bench. Precursors, glassware, a workspace display that tracks what's actually in the vessel, and a step that's a genuine minigame with a genuine failure mode. A bad run wastes stock. A very bad run does worse.
• Quality is a number. What you make has a purity, and purity is what a buyer is paying for. Two people cooking the same thing don't produce the same product.
• Selling is social, not a shop. Moving product means finding people who want it, at a price they will take, somewhere nobody is watching. Some of them haggle. Some of them are police.
• Heat accumulates. There's a city-wide enforcement programme with its own priorities, and it notices patterns rather than incidents.
• Concealment is part of the craft. There's furniture whose entire purpose is that a search doesn't find what's behind it.

What we won't

Where the doors are. Who opens them. What you have to have done first, what you have to be carrying, and which conversations simply don't happen until somebody has decided you are worth the risk.

None of it's behind a quest marker and none of it's on the job board. It's behind people. Drink in the wrong bar, do somebody an unreasonable favour, and be the sort of person who gets offered things.

Worth knowing before you go looking: there's a whole separate layer for taking the stuff — tolerance, withdrawal, overdose, hallucination, and the dissociatives that open a dreamzone you have to walk back out of. You don't have to be a chemist to end up in that one.

Trading cards

A card is a frozen snapshot of somebody: what they were wearing, what they were carrying, what they had done, and one line they said. Three kinds exist — players, NPCs and enemies — printed on one shell. Only players mint themselves: the system deliberately doesn't follow anybody around, so a player has to walk somewhere and hand it the moment.

• Minting yourself. Walk to a mint terminal, pay the fee, and the card takes what you handed it: gear, condition, standing, and a quote you write. You choose when you're worth printing, and you can't do it often.
• Packs. Foil sleeves come out of powered vending machines. Buying and opening are two separate acts: the sleeve is a real item that holds no result, and the roll happens when you tear it open, not when you bought it.
• The pull. Opening one is a card-by-card reveal. Common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary — and a sleeve is guaranteed never to be all commons. Some sleeves run hot. A very few are mis-cut long.
• They're items. Cards can be given, sold, stolen off a corpse, or scrapped for a fraction of what a pack cost — deliberately less than the pack cost, so the scrap is never the reason to buy one.
• The back of the card. Text is budgeted, never truncated: a clause that won't fit is dropped whole. Condition is spoken rather than numbered — a battered coat has "gone thin at the shoulders".
• The shelf. cards is your collection, by rank and by series. NPC and enemy cards are struck from the world itself when a series opens, so a completed checklist is a picture of who was actually in the city that season.

There's no card game. You can't play them against anybody and there's no plan to let you. They're a record of people, in a game where people leave.

The Long Haul: trucking

The road between regions used to be a hard walk you endured. Now it's a rig, a corridor, and about a quarter of an hour of changing country with a city coming up out of the haze. Trucking is a career: you buy the truck, you fuel it, you wear it out, and the market does not care whether you made money.

The fleet

Wages, or enterprise

Hauling freight is wages. A board at each depot pays a fixed fee to move somebody else's box. It's how you learn the road and how you afford the second truck.

The commodity market is enterprise. Six goods — baled alloy, potable water, protein slurry, industrial chems, machine parts and medical stock — priced by region and by the day, bought with your own money. Medical stock is light and dear, so you can carry a fortune in it; water is heavy and cheap, so a full trailer of it's a lot of diesel for a modest margin, which is why the weight limit is a number you have to think about.

The profitable cargo out is never the profitable cargo back. Coldwater makes things and sits on a basin, so parts, chems and water are cheap there and scrap is dear. The Reach is drowning in salvage and has no water at all. Run parts out, bring alloy home. An empty backhaul is a mistake you're allowed to make, not a shape the game forces on you.

It's also the only part of the system where you can finish a run poorer than you started it.

Keeping it running

• Fuel is per truck and per tank, and a heavy right foot is a line item.
• Condition runs Sound, Worked, Tired, Ailing, Derelict. The top two bands cost you nothing, so an honest working truck is never a chore.
• Damage is per component, and the panels are separate from the mechanicals. Dents do nothing to how it drives — they come off the price when you sell, which is the bill for how you drive arriving late rather than never.
• Breakdowns happen out there. Fix it if you have the spares and the fabrication for it; call a tow if you do not, and a tow isn't cheap.
• Kits and tuning. An aero kit, a long-duration cam, a three-stage Jake brake, an auxiliary saddle tank — and a workshop instrument set that lets you take every dial past where a hand and an ear can safely go.
• Paint, because it's your truck.

Out there

• The verge is a law, not a wall. You may leave the road. Open country is passable, slow and murder on tyres. Far enough off it and you bog — stalled, penalised in time, and put back on the shoulder facing the right way. There's no geometry out there to hit.
• The CB. Voices on the corridor: a man describing his divorce to nobody, two drivers arguing about a diner that closed before either of them was driving. Mostly it is quiet. Then it tells you there's a rig on the shoulder a few miles up, and whose it was — because a wreck out there's a tile where a real driver stopped, and it remembers who.
• Hijackers. A loaded trailer is worth taking, and it isn't a cutscene. They're on the road with you, and the answer is either the throttle or getting out of the cab.
• The drive is the crossing. You're genuinely out in the waste, so everything that happens to a person crossing it on foot can happen to you in the cab. Break down badly enough and you finish the crossing walking.
• Or read it instead. The whole drive has a written mode. If you play in the log you get the road as a record you steer with commands, not a windscreen you cannot see.
• The yard. Your fleet, its condition, what a dealer would give you for it, and the bench. Park a truck somewhere and it's still there tomorrow.

And the rest of it

Systems that don't need a page each, but that people play for months without ever finding.

• Bounties. Put money on another player's head out of your own pocket. The head is a physical item in the corpse, so a bounty pays whoever walks up to the board holding it, not whoever did the killing. The sheet names nobody; the target pays to find out.
• Your own shop. Buy a deed, stock the shelves, price the wares, hire staff, and empty the till before somebody cracks it. Other players buy from it while you are logged out.
• SPECTER. Run a spy network: informants, cameras, coverage of the streets you care about. It's also how crime gets witnessed at all — the law works on evidence, and evidence has a source who can be found and bought.
• Jail. Go down while wanted and you wake in Holding with your gear in an evidence locker. The cell door is hackable. Serving the time isn't the only way out.
• Instruments. Sit at the piano and play it, key by key, on your own keyboard. There's no skill roll — the skill is your hands — and the room hears what you actually play.
• The library. Nine complete public-domain books, read on the tablet, with a tap-to-gloss vocabulary layer over prose that's never rewritten, and a narration mode that highlights the line being spoken aloud.
• Cooking. Forty-seven authored recipes, plus improvised dishes named from whatever you actually put in the pan. Invent one, name it, save it, teach it, or sell it as a card. A heads-up display proposes the steps, every one of them a command you could have typed yourself.
• Mixology. A finished drink lives on the glass rather than as a new item, because the whole point of a mug is that you keep it. How drunk you get is derived from what actually went in.
• Durability and repair. Gear wears with use, never with the clock. A masterful hand repair leaves an item tougher than it was, which a workbench can never do. Run it to zero and it's gone.
• Being remembered. Every NPC tracks how well they know you and how they feel about you, separately. Some conversations only exist near the top of that ladder, and it decays if you stop turning up.
• Filth. You smell of what you have been doing and other people can tell. A room you own keeps its mess for a full rent cycle. That's why you would carry a mop.
• Dreams. Sleep and your mind goes somewhere built for that sleep, three or four rooms of it. Your body stays in the room — lootable, killable, and entirely unaware.
• Chess and poker. Full legal chess on a two-seat table, and a poker table with NPC regulars who will take your money and be pleasant about it.
• Cathode. There's a stray cat with a bionic paw, and she hides. Be patient and kind and she comes when you call her. Hurt her and she never comes back, and nothing in the game ever explains why.
• Searching. You can search anywhere. Most of the time you find nothing — and a room with nothing in it looks exactly like a room you were unlucky in.