Part four · The deep end
Parts one to three told you what the game is. This one is about the systems you only find because somebody mentioned them in a bar.
How to program the client until it plays half the game for you. How to take a cut of a shop that never agreed to it. What the trade in chemicals looks like from the inside. Why people collect cards. And what it takes to make a living hauling freight across a hundred kilometres of poisoned country.
This page assumes you've played a bit. Part one is your first hour.
Text-only edition of this page — plain, linear, screen-reader first.
What's in here
The part nobody tells you about for a month
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 is required. All of it's there from your first login, and it follows your account rather than your browser.
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.
A pattern that watches the log and fires a script when it matches. Match on a regex, on a channel, across several lines at once, or once and never again.
"on hp_pct < 30 = drink stim". Watches your own vitals rather than the text, and fires on the crossing, not on every update you spend below the line.
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.
Rewrite what you type before it's sent. One expansion pass, so an alias cannot quietly recurse into itself.
Conditions are real expressions, with booleans and comparisons, over your vitals, your flags, your inventory and anything a trigger just captured.
"3n2e" walks it. It has to contain a digit, deliberately — otherwise "use" is a speedwalk, and so is "sew".
Send chat to its own window with one rule. Panes exist because a rule names one, and closing a pane hides it rather than deleting your rule.
Hide the lines you're tired of, colour the ones that matter, search the scrollback, and save the session to a file.
All three of triggers, timers and aliases end at the same runner, with the same step budget and the same abort flag, so a runaway script gets switched off and tells you why rather than quietly spamming forever.
There's also voice input (off by default, and it 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.
Twenty-two sections, all of them worked examples: triggers · the script language · expressions · wait for · key bindings · accessibility · what it deliberately won't do.
Organised crime, organised properly
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.
"corp racket list" is your book, and how frightened each name on it still is. "corp racket drop" lets one off the hook.
Territory income asks nothing of you once the zone is yours. A racket asks constantly, which is why it pays better.
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.
We aren't going to spell this one out
There's a manufacturing industry in Coldwater, from raw supply to street sale, and it's 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.
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're worth the risk.
None of it's behind a quest marker and none of it's on the job board. It is behind people. Drink in the wrong bar, do somebody an unreasonable favour, and be the sort of person who gets offered things.
If a guide could hand you an entire industry in a paragraph, it wouldn't have been worth building one.
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.
A collectible in a world with no merchandise
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, and the system never follows anybody around, so you walk somewhere and hand it the moment.
Walk to a mint terminal, pay the fee, and the system takes the moment you hand it: gear, condition, standing, and a quote you write. It never follows you around taking snapshots. You choose when you're worth printing, and you can't do it often.
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.
Opening one is a fullscreen reveal, card by card. 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.
Cards trade like anything else: 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.
Text is budgeted, never truncated: a clause that won't fit is dropped whole. And condition is spoken rather than numbered — a battered coat has "gone thin at the shoulders".
"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.
A job with a balance sheet
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 doesn't care whether you made money.
Krell stopped making these long enough ago that nobody agrees which decade. Three of them in a trenchcoat. The heater works, which the previous owner mentioned first and at length.
A stubby rigid box on a short wheelbase. Turns in like something half its age and carries about as much.
The one everybody learns on. Nothing about it's remarkable and nothing about it has ever stopped working.
A long-nose sleeper built for people who see their own bed twice a month. Slow to wind up, slower to stop, and it'll take a whole market with it.
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, 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 is 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.
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.
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's quiet. Then it tells you there's a rig on the shoulder a few miles up, and whose it was.
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.
You're genuinely out in the waste. Everything that happens to a person crossing it on foot — encounters, traces, the bad places — can happen to you in the cab. Break down badly enough and you finish the crossing walking.
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 can't see.
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.
The drawer of short answers
Systems that don't need a page each, but that people play for months without ever finding.
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.
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're logged out.
Run a spy network: informants, cameras, coverage of the streets you care about. It is also how crime gets witnessed at all — the law works on evidence, and evidence has a source who can be found and bought.
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.
Sit at the piano and play it, key by key, on your own keyboard. No skill roll — the skill is your hands. The room hears what you actually play.
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.
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 HUD proposes the steps — every one of them a command you could have typed yourself.
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.
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 is gone.
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.
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.
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.
Full legal chess on a neon isometric board, and a poker table with NPC regulars who will take your money and be pleasant about it.
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.
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.
Coldwater Basin
Register a character and you're in the vat inside thirty seconds. The rest of it's out there, and most of it's behind somebody.
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