ARCHITECT — Part two: everything you can do

The city doesn't wait for you to log in

Everything is simulated. A day passes every eight real hours. Weather rolls across the map. Streetlights come on at dusk because a power grid decided they should. Shopkeepers walk home and go to bed. None of it's on a script that starts when you arrive.

By the numbers: eight real hours make one city day; the forecast runs seven days ahead; there are 26 skills, all learned by use; four of the nine orders are live and five are previewed; and the ways to die badly aren't enumerable.

• A real power grid. Generators, substations, fuses. Storms fault them. Blackouts are simulated, not announced — the lights just go out, and the ATM stops working.
• Smell and sound. Rooms have odours and noises that travel. A gunshot next door is something you hear. So is somebody who hasn't washed.
• NPCs who remember. Familiarity and warmth, tracked per person. The barkeep stops greeting you like a stranger. Some doors only open for someone known.
• Cooking, simulated properly. The pan tracks its own contents, heat and doneness. Chop, season, stir, flip, taste — timing is a real variable, and a dish you invent is yours to name and sell.
• Gear that wears out. Condition degrades with use, not with the clock. Repair it well and it comes back tougher. Ignore it and it's destroyed.
• Mess that persists. Unowned rooms get swept nightly. A room you rent keeps its stains for a full rent cycle. That's why you'd carry a mop.

Nine orders. Two questions. Pick a side or don't.

Something much smarter than people built this place and may still be running it. Everyone in Coldwater Basin has a theory about what to do next, and the theories don't get along. Standing with an order is something you keep being — stop showing up and you drift back to being nobody in particular. Five of the nine will actually take you in today, and each of them has a real discipline behind it: bought chrome, survived mutation, or a lifetime's training that leaves no mark on you at all. The rest have creeds and a seat on the chart, and you can read them but not yet join them.

Part three goes deep on this — the two questions every order is answering, all nine of them side by side, where they're stationed, and exactly what siding with one does to your prices, your doors and your body.

Mutant, machine, or master of the trade

Three ways to stop being an ordinary body, and the first two are a genuine fork in the road.

• Mutate. Radiation is patient. Let it build and it rewrites you — permanent mutations with real benefits and real costs. Free, random, and not your decision once you've let it get that far.
• Get chromed. Cybernetics are the opposite: chosen, paid for, slot-limited, removable. Subdermal weave is armour under the skin. A cortical backup means dying is a rollback.
• Master a craft. 26 skills, no experience bar, no level gates. You get better at picking locks by picking locks. You become whatever you keep doing.

Aircraft

Flying is the one system built around a window. It's a continuous simulation flown by looking out of a cockpit, and read as a transcript it's a thin version of itself — the airframes, the fuel, the weather and the contracts are all still there, but the flying is the part you're not really getting. Everything else on this page reads the same either way.

What survives as text: you can hold a licence, own aircraft, keep them in a hangar and insure them, and take cargo, medevac, VIP charter, survey and relief contracts — including the ones that don't file a flight plan. If you want the flying itself, that's a session with the display in visual mode. If you don't, nothing else in the game needs it — the work, the money and the places are all reachable on the ground.

Sit down and play something

Real games, fully implemented, with other people at the table.

• Chess. Complete legal rules — castling, en passant, promotion, repetition — verified against known move counts. Rendered as an isometric neon set, and playable entirely through typed moves.
• Poker. Seats, blinds, a host who deals, spectators behind you. Play it on the felt or have the whole table called out to you in words.
• The casino. Slots and a poker room at The Lucky Bastard, for when you've decided money is a burden.
• Trading cards. Mint yourself at a terminal and become a card someone else can pull out of a foil sleeve. Packs roll when you open them, never when you buy them.
• Fishing and mining. Cast and wait, or work a deposit. Both are postures: start them and they keep going while you watch the water.
• Instruments. Sit at the upright and play it, key by key, on your own keyboard. The room hears what you play. No skill check — the skill is your hands.

From counting rats to running the block

Honest work

A rotating job board of small legal gigs — deliver a parcel, sweep a lot, count the rats, sit in a seat somebody needs filled. Steady shifts. Fishing and scavenging for what you can carry.

Your own shop

Buy the deed to a storefront and it's yours: set the wares, order stock, hire and sack staff, work the till, pull the shutters at night. Rename it something worse.

Your own flat

Rent a unit, lock it, upgrade the lock before somebody picks it. Sleep safe, store your things, and deal with your own mess.

Or run a corporation

A corp is a faction with an owner, a treasury, members and territory — and territory is a tug-of-war you can lose. Five levers of influence, and a war phase for when influence stops being enough.

A whole chemistry set, and a market for it

Taking them

Timed effects that ramp and fade. Addiction rolls, tolerance, withdrawal, overdose. Taking anything is an act you have to stay in the room for.

The dissociatives take you out of the room entirely: your mind walks a handful of rooms that assemble themselves for the trip and dissolve when it ends, while your body stays exactly where you dropped it — in a real room, lootable and killable by anyone who wanders past.

Making and moving them

Synthesis and splicing on a real bench, behind a cabinet built to not look like a lab. Raw supply chains. Dealers to sell through, and a street price that isn't fixed.

All of it's witnessed by somebody eventually. The city runs a wanted level, police who will take you alive at the top of it, a jail, an evidence locker, and a cell door that can be hacked.

Get cold. Get wet. Get dissolved.

Severity is a live number, and how lethal it gets depends on your gear: weather will kill you, but only if you went out unprepared. The right coat turns a killer into an inconvenience.

• Hypothermia. Body temperature is tracked. Soaked clothing pulls heat out of you faster. Fall in the water and get out slower than you went in.
• Soaked through. Rain wets your clothes layer by layer, and wet layers stop working. Dry off or keep paying for it.
• Acid rain. A named hero event. It eats gear and skin. Being indoors helps; being indoors without a roof over the right room does not.
• Wind. Never blocks you — just charges you stamina for every step outdoors until you're too tired to be somewhere dangerous.
• Ion storm. An EMP that drops the whole city grid. Lights, ATMs, televisions, cyberware. The aftermath persists.
• No safe haven. A blacked-out building has no heating, so indoors is a different problem rather than a solved one.

Shows assembled live, performed by actual NPCs

Every set in the world is furniture on the power grid. Tune it and you get a show built fresh from what's happening in the city that day, acted by people who had to turn up to work.

• The talk show. A host and a sidekick who commute in on schedule. A guest NPC renamed to a new persona each day, who appears somewhere in the world and walks across the map to the studio — and if they don't make it, there's an authored no-show segment instead of an interview with furniture.
• News, with a weather desk. Stories sourced from real events in the world, padded out with wire copy and tabloid filler, read by fixed outlet bylines. The meteorologist works off the same seven-day forecast you do.
• Two live sports. Deadball on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Cluster Puck on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Real leagues, real standings, a postseason, a score bug, and a bookmaker who'll take your money on it.
• And a game show you can be on. Stand in the studio when a round opens and you're a contestant — answering on air, citywide, for money. One asks what things are worth. The other asks what you know about the city.

There are also morning shows, sermons, films that play in real time so you can join one already running, pirate broadcasts, and a bystander line that leaks in when somebody else is watching a set in the same room as you.

The world lives on without you

Log out for a week. The city doesn't pause, wait, or reset.

• Your rent falls due on the city calendar whether you're there to pay it or not.
• Your body sleeps where you left it — hunger, thirst and radiation hold until you're back. Log off in a bed and you wake rested.
• Weather rolls on — the storm you were warned about happens on schedule, with you or without.
• NPCs work their shifts, commute home, go to bed, and slowly forget who you were.
• Leagues play their fixtures and the standings move without a single player watching.
• Your corpse is still lying there if that's how you left. Somebody has probably been through it.