ARCHITECT — Part one: your first hour

1. How it works

Reading, typing, and a city on a clock.

ARCHITECT runs in a browser tab and it's built on writing: you read where you are, and you type what you do. Everything in it's reachable that way. The map is a command. The pocket tablet the city issues you is an index of verbs. A television is furniture you sit at and listen to. Lock-picking, hacking, poker and chess all have written versions you play, live and timed.

What it doesn't have is a pause button. The city keeps its own time whether you're logged in or not: a day passes every eight real hours, weather rolls across the map, streetlights come on at dusk.

You're one person in that city. You have a body with meters attached to it, an inventory, a bank balance, and skills that get better only by being used. There's no quest arrow. The game's answer to what should I do is generally whatever you can afford.

Setting it to run as a transcript

Once you're in, type tutorial. It's a short spoken walkthrough of the seven things worth knowing, it waits for you rather than running on a timer, and tutorial done ends it. tutorial tablet walks the tablet the same way. Both replay any time.

The two sizes of a room

Nothing announces this one, and it's worth the habit.

Walking into a room gives you the short version: the name of the place, how dark it is, anything about to hurt you, who's here, and the way out. That's deliberate — a hallway shouldn't be twelve lines every step.

Typing look gives you the long version, always: the prose, the furniture, what you can sit on, everything the short version folded away. Nothing is ever hidden from you, only held back until you ask. Use it in any room you actually care about.

Asking for the rest

Everything the game knows about you or the city is a verb away, and these are the ones you'll wear out.

How a turn works

You read what just arrived, then type one short instruction. The answer comes back in the same stream, under your own command echoed back. A sample exchange:

> x sully
A heavy man in his sixties with a burn scar up one forearm. He has the
expression of someone who has heard your story before.

> talk sully
Sully: "You look like six credits and a bad decision. Drink?"

> north
You step out onto the quay. Rain, and the smell of the water.

Commands are verb, then thing: x sully, take bottle, attack rat. Short and flat. If you type something the game doesn't recognise it says so and nothing happens, so experiment.

2. Where you wake up

The vat, the tablet, the street.

You start in a cloning facility, because in this city dying is a service you subscribe to. Before you're even out of the room a hatch spits a tablet at you — map, bank, messages, reference library. Open it early.

Then the door opens onto Coldwater Basin and you're on your own.

Moving

The world is a grid of rooms joined by compass directions. Every room lists its exits. You travel one room at a time.

Buildings are entered by walking at the door from the street outside, and left the same way.

3. The five things keeping you alive

Your body, tracked in real time. These drain continuously — while you play, and while you're away.

None of these will kill you in the first hour. All of them will kill you in the fifth if you ignore them. Check with stats; buy a meal before you need one.

The fixes are the obvious words: eat <thing>, drink <thing>, sleep in a bed, and a clinic for radiation. use works on most of it if you can't remember which.

4. Money, and getting some

Currency is credits (₵), held in two places: cash on your body, which anyone can take off your corpse, and a bank balance, which they can't. ATMs are scattered around the city.

Early income is honest work: a job board with small rotating gigs, things worth scavenging off the ground, and vendors who'll take junk off your hands. Later income is less honest. That's between you and the police.

5. Carrying things

Gear wears out with use. A coat that's taken a beating says so when you x it, and there are people who repair things for a fee. Gear at zero condition is destroyed outright — don't ride a good weapon into the ground.

6. Violence

Slow, decisive, and worth avoiding. Fighting resolves on a cooldown of a few seconds. Mashing keys gains you nothing. Choosing your fights gains you a great deal.

> attack scav
You swing the pipe wrench at the scav's head — it connects with a wet crack.
The scav lunges, opening a gash across your left arm. You're bleeding.

> attack scav
Your wrench takes him down. He doesn't get up.

> loot corpse
You take: 41 credits, a chipped blade, half a ration bar.

Hits land on specific body parts, armour soaks specific damage types, and bleeding keeps costing HP after the fight ends. Bodies stay lootable by anyone for an hour of real time, including yours.

Three things you can do mid-fight

Once you're swinging, the swings happen on their own. What you decide is this:

Aiming is opt-in and easy to overrate. aim head, aim left leg, aim auto to stop. A called shot costs accuracy, and at low skill it costs a great deal of it — a head shot from an unskilled hand mostly misses. Aim at a limb you want to wreck, or once you're good enough to afford it. Otherwise leave it on auto.

pow and dodge share a cooldown, so you're always choosing offence or defence, never both. pow is a wind-up, not an extra swing: it takes longer to land and hurts far more. It's how you finish something, and a bad trade when you're the one running out of HP. dodge gives up your attack for a few seconds of much better defence — for when a fight has turned and you need one exchange to go your way.

And you can leave. flee breaks off a fight you're losing, sneak keeps you out of one — each observer notices you separately, so one person spotting you doesn't mean everybody has.

> aim head
You'll go for the head. Called shots cost accuracy.

> pow
You plant your feet and draw the wrench back.
You drive the pipe wrench into the scav's head — CRITICAL POWER.

Two kinds of ground

The city is three bands stacked from north to south:

1. Coldwater Basin, the city. Bars, shops, clinics, apartments, the job board, banks. Other players can attack you here — nothing stops them but the cameras. Draw on someone in the open and you're witnessed, wanted, and hunted by police who escalate. Spend your first hour entirely inside this band.
2. The Curtain, running along the southern edge, with one way through it: the South Gate.
3. Beyond. Full loot, live player-versus-player, and things that hunt you.

The city core is watched ground, not safe ground. Past the edges, in the badlands west of town and the wastes south through the Curtain, nobody is watching at all, and whatever you were carrying is theirs if they win.

Dying

You wake up back in the vat. You keep every skill you ever earned; you lose what was on your body, which is now lying wherever you fell for anyone to pick up. Death is a setback and an errand.

7. Getting better at things

Twenty-six skills, no experience bar. You improve a skill by doing the thing. Picking locks makes you better at locks; missing punches makes you better at punching. Check progress with skills.

None of the cooking, the fishing, the chemistry or the mining is locked behind a level. It's locked behind having tried it a few times and been bad at it first.

8. Other people

The NPCs remember you. Talk to the same barkeep enough times and he stops greeting you like a stranger; some will do things for someone they know that they'd never do for a walk-in. Rudeness persists too.

9. Living here

The first thing to get is somewhere to live, and what you're buying is the lock. Sleeping leaves your body lying in the room where you slept, and a body is lootable and killable whether or not anyone's home behind it.

You can't just doss anywhere, either. The game only lets you sleep in a place you rent, a tagged sanctuary, or a flat somebody left unlocked — and the last two mean anyone at all can walk in on you while you're under.

A place of your own

Vacant units advertise themselves. Stand in one and type rent. From then on it's yours: it locks, it holds your things, and sleeping in a safe room you own recovers you faster than dossing anywhere else.

Rent falls due every seven days on the city calendar, and the city clock is fast — a day is eight real hours, so a week's rent comes round in a couple of real days. Miss it and you're out. The tablet's calendar tracks the due date — tabletnav calendar, and remind sets an alarm against it.

The kitchen

Cooking is a full craft, not a crafting menu. You chop, season, heat and time things, and the pan can be wrong in ways it'll tell you about.

One thing catches everyone out: dry starch needs liquid. A pan of pasta with nothing in it refuses to cook, so fill a vessel at a water source first.

The bar

A finished drink lives on the vessel. That's why a good mug is worth owning. mix at a bar, brew if there's a machine for it, and drink it where you are — anything worth finishing takes long enough that leaving the room cuts it short.

The television

Every set in the game is a real piece of furniture on the real power grid.

Channels run a genuine schedule, and the programmes are assembled live rather than replayed — news, sport, talk shows, films. It's worth an evening on its own once you have somewhere to sit.

The game's on

Two sports run real seasons with real standings: Deadball (baseball) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and Cluster Puck (hockey) on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Games are simulated fresh and called by commentary.

A bar with the set on is the room's game, not yours: sit down, order something, and let the place watch it with you.

Weather, which is trying to kill you

The forecast runs seven days ahead and you read it on the tablet (tabletnav news). Most of it is texture. Some of it's not.

• Severe weather is lethal — but only to the unprepared. The right coat turns a killer into an inconvenience.
• There's no free safe haven indoors. A blacked-out building has no heating, and cold kills inside just as well as out.
• Wind costs stamina on every outdoor step. It never blocks you; it just bleeds you.
• Named events happen. Acid rain. An ion storm that drops the entire city grid — lights, ATMs, televisions.
• The warning is vague on purpose. A severe band on the forecast tells you something is coming that week. It doesn't tell you what, or exactly when.

10. Your first hour

Grady, two clonejackers, and a hole in the road. You don't have to invent something to do. There's a proper opening chain, and it's built to teach you the game by making you use it.

Find Grady

Off Ironside there's a cramped front room made of corrugated sheet and honest intentions, with flashlights and coils of spare cells hanging off every nail: Two-Cell Supply. Behind the crates that serve as a counter is Grady "Two-Cell" Okonkwo, who watches the door the way a fisherman watches a net.

He sells the boring things that keep you alive — water, jerky, bandages, batteries, lights — at prices a newborn can afford. talk grady.

The First Hour

Grady has a complaint. Clonejackers are working the strip south of the Embassy, and they're killing his business by killing his customers — people exactly like you, about an hour younger. He'd like two of them gone, and his stolen flashlight cells back.

1. Head south past the Embassy's warm lights. A quest plots the route for you and tells you how many stops away it is; say yes to auto-walk and your legs do the rest. gps <place> plots one to anything you can name, and walk or run sets you going.
2. attack clonejacker. Twice, on two different clonejackers. This is your first real fight and it's meant to be winnable.
3. loot the bodies until you find Grady's cells.
4. Walk back and hand them over.

He pays ₵120, some jerky and bandages, and a lucky flashlight. Take note of that flashlight. It isn't a souvenir.

Down the Drain

Because his next problem is underground. The storm drain on Ironside is backing up with vermin, and vermin work their way up — toward the vats where people like you're grown.

So you go down the rusted ladder into the Under, the sewer level beneath the city, and cull six of the things living in it. Rats, roaches, slimes; they all count. It pays ₵180.

After that

1. stats — see what's draining. Spend some of Grady's money on food and water before it matters.
2. Buy something to wear and something to hit with. equip both.
3. Head for the franchise strip job board — rotating legal gigs, small money, no way to die.
4. Bank what you don't need to carry. deposit at any ATM.
5. Walk down to the South Gate and look at it — the guards, the turrets, the killing ground past the Curtain. Don't walk through. That's for a later night, with a full pack and someone else along.

11. A day in the life

Much later, when the city is yours. None of this is hour one. It's what an ordinary day looks like a long way in, here so you know what's out there. A city day runs eight real hours, so what follows is an evening or two of play, not a career.

06:40 — your flat: wake up somewhere that's yours

You come round in a rented unit with the door locked behind you, which is already a different game from sleeping rough. Sleep ran its recovery; if you dreamt, that was its own thing — three or four rooms generated just for you and dissolved when you woke, while your body lay here in the dark being lootable. Verbs: x mirror, shower, stand.

07:10 — the kitchen: coffee, and the news

brew something hot — it stays hot on a derived timer, so don't leave it. On the tablet: overnight headlines and the seven-day forecast. There's a severe band on Thursday. You make a note to have the coat by then.

08:30 — the strip: work, of whatever kind you've chosen

Maybe it's honest: a shift, a job off the board, a shopfront you hold the deed to, with staff you hired and stock you ordered. Maybe it's a corp, and your day is territory and influence and somebody else's treasury. Maybe it's the other kind: somebody's lock, somebody's pocket, a batch cooking in a cabinet that shouldn't be there.

11:00 — out past the rim: get something out of the ground

Fishing off the quay with the right rod, mining a deposit with the right tool, scavenging a ruin on a perpetual search that runs until it empties out or something interrupts it. All three are postures: you start them, and they keep going while you watch the water.

13:20 — your kitchen again: cook properly, for once

Not a ration bar. Something chopped and marinated and watched, off a recipe you worked out yourself and saved under a name only you use. The good stuff is worth real money to people who can't cook, and the very best of it can't be improvised — it has to be learned.

15:00 — somewhere private: the business you don't advertise

A bench behind a cabinet that doesn't look like a lab. Synthesis, splicing, something curing. Or the other trades: a lock that isn't yours, a pocket that isn't yours, a network of eyes you've paid for reporting who walked where. All of it's witnessed by somebody eventually, and the city keeps a wanted level.

18:00 — the bar: a beer, and the game's on

Sit down. Order. Drink it slowly, because that's the only way it works. The set in the corner has the Deadball game on and half the room is watching it — there's money on it, some of it yours. Somebody's at the piano and is actually playing it, key by key, on their own keyboard.

20:30 — upstairs: cards, chess, or a worse idea

A poker table with real seats and a host who deals. A neon chess set. The casino, if you hate money. Or trading cards — packs from a machine, and the odd feeling of opening one to find a stranger who minted themselves at a terminal last week.

23:00 — the gate: out, if you're going out

The Under for something specific. The badlands with people you trust. South through the Curtain into the Wildlands, which is the version of this where you write a will first. Full loot, live player-versus-player, and things that hunt.

02:00 — or a cell: however it ends

Home to your own bed and a mess you'll have to mop yourself, because a room you own keeps its filth. Or Holding, with your gear in an evidence locker and a cell door somebody could hack. Or the vat, with everything you were carrying lying somewhere out in the dark for whoever finds it first.

12. When you're stuck

Five commands that always answer.

For everything else: try the verb. If it doesn't exist the game says so and you've lost nothing. Half of learning this city is discovering that fish, cook, mop and gossip all do something.