Every number in the game

00 Start here

The first ten minutes

If you have just run it and nothing seems to be happening, this is the part of the guide you want. The rest is reference.

1. The first kill stops the world. It drops a stick and waits for you to acknowledge it — that is the one moment the game has to explain that gear exists, so it does not let you walk past it. Click the notice and the party moves on.
2. Left click the strip to open the panel, then the GEAR tab. Right click an item in the bag to wear it; that is the whole interaction. Left click picks it up if you would rather drag.
3. Fill the weapon slot first, always. A weapon is worth two and a half times a helmet of the same grade, and nothing else in the table comes close.
4. Buy ARMS. It is 10 gold, it multiplies damage by 1.5, and it compounds. Boots and greed can wait; a recruit at 250 is the first thing worth saving for.
5. Then leave. It is an idler: shut the machine, come back tomorrow and it will tell you what it did. Nothing needs tending, and the bag never needs weeding.

To move or resize the strip, right click it and tick REPOSITION first — or open the panel and tick MOVE AND RESIZE HANDLES on the card under SETTINGS › THIS MACHINE. It is a mode, and it is off by default — with it off, nothing on the strip can be dragged at all.

01 The loop

Walk, swing, collect, repeat

The world runs at 15 ticks a second whatever the strip is doing on screen. Minimise it and the drawing drops to 1.5 frames a second while the game keeps its rate.

Walk

The party advances by its pace every tick: (0.35 + 0.10 × boots + PCE) × terrain world units, capped at 4.0 before the ground gets its say — and the ground can only ever slow you down.

Swing

Within 3 units of the next scarecrow the party stops and swings. A swing lands every round(8 − HST) ticks and never faster than every 3 ticks, however much haste is stacked. Each landing does party power × 1.5arms damage, where party power is 1.0 per member plus every point of PWR they are wearing between them.

Collect

A dead scarecrow pays 1.0035n × 1.3greed × (1 + GRD) gold, where n is how many have been generated so far. One kill in seven also drops a piece of gear.

Repeat

A floor has 3 to 7 encounters, including its boss. Field groups hold 2 to 20 bodies at a hashed 7–10-unit approach pitch, with at least 18 clear units before the next group. A deep boss can bring a court of 19. Nothing about the world is stored, which is what lets a night's progress be worked out from a clock reading instead of by replaying 1.3 million ticks.

02 The four stats

Everything you are comes off the gear

There are no classes. Every character starts identical and pooled — one party total, so a recruit with six empty slots is still worth having, and an item is worth exactly the same on anyone.

03 Slots

Six slots each, three of them at most

What an item is worth in points is slot value × grade × 10 × rarity. The slot decides which stat takes the lion's share.

A weapon is worth two and a half times a helmet of the same grade, so filling the weapon slot first is always right and never has to be explained to anybody. The primary affix always lands on the slot's own stat: a sword is mostly damage and boots are mostly speed, however the rest of it rolls.

04 The loot table

All twelve of them

One per slot you find in the first minutes, one per slot you find much later. Unlock is how many scarecrows must have fallen before it can drop at all. The four columns on the right are the primary stat at each rarity — exact numbers rather than ranges, because the primary is a function of the item and its rarity and nothing else.

The pictures are the game's own overlays, at the size the bag draws them. A trinket has no art on the figure, so the panel gives it a lozenge in its rarity's colour — that is what the last two rows are showing.

Item	Slot	Grade	Unlock	Primary	Common	Uncommon	Rare	Legendary
Stick	Weapon	0.4	0	PWR	1.0	1.2	1.4	1.6
Sword	Weapon	1.6	60	PWR	4.0	4.7	5.5	6.5
Rags	Body	0.5	4	HST	0.16	0.18	0.22	0.25
Plate	Body	1.5	90	HST	0.47	0.55	0.65	0.76
Wraps	Hands	0.5	8	PWR	0.5	0.6	0.7	0.8
Gauntlets	Hands	1.4	110	PWR	1.4	1.6	1.9	2.3
Trousers	Legs	0.5	6	PCE	0.030	0.035	0.045	0.050
Greaves	Legs	1.4	100	PCE	0.090	0.100	0.120	0.140
Straw hat	Head	0.5	10	GRD	0.10	0.12	0.14	0.16
Great helm	Head	1.5	120	GRD	0.30	0.35	0.42	0.49
Charm	Trinket	0.6	20	GRD	0.12	0.14	0.17	0.19
Sigil	Trinket	1.6	140	GRD	0.32	0.37	0.44	0.52

What the secondaries roll

Whatever the primary does not take is split evenly between the secondary affixes — not cascaded, because spending "half of what's left" at each step starves the last affix into noise. Which stats they land on is decided by the item's seed, and no stat rolls twice.

05 Rarity and drop rates

One kill in seven drops something

Which is decided by a hash of the scarecrow's index rather than a die — the same scarecrow always carries the same thing, which is what lets a night away be worked out rather than replayed. The very first kill of a new save always yields a common stick, and stops the world to say so.

Luck climbs with depth and stops improving at 400 kills. Neither end of the table ever closes: a legendary is possible on your first drop, and commons never stop appearing — a table that shuts off its own bottom end stops producing the small pleasant surprises that make the rare ones feel rare.

Rarity buys a bigger budget and more affixes to spread it over, and the second never cancels the first: a rarer item's headline number beats the tier below it by roughly 15%, every time. There is a test that fails the build if that stops being true.

06 The scarecrow

One enemy, and it doesn't fight back

That is the honest version: a scarecrow is a number with straw on it, standing in a field, waiting. What changes is how big the number is.

The bar over a wounded scarecrow's head is 8 pixels wide and only appears once it has been hit. Everything else about it — where it stands, what it is worth, what it is carrying — is derived from its index, and none of it is stored.

07 The ground

What you stand on decides how fast you get anywhere

Terrain changes every 640 units — about two minutes at the starting pace — and the game always opens in a wheat field.

Every multiplier is at most 1.0 on purpose: the speed cap applies to the party's own pace, and the ground may only ever take away from it. The look of a boundary blends over a 120-unit band so a field ends the way a field ends; the speed changes on the line itself, because the offline catch-up charges a whole stretch between two boundaries at one rate and a ramp would have no closed form.

08 The sky

The ground is where you are; the weather is when you are

Those are two different questions, and the game answers them separately. Terrain is a function of the party's position, so it changes because they walked somewhere. Weather is a function of the clock, so it changes because time passed — which means it can start raining while they stand still, and they can walk out of a swamp into a snowfield without the sky noticing.

A spell of weather runs twenty minutes nominally, but each changeover slides off its own line by a hash of itself, so the realised length is anywhere from ten to thirty. Without that the sky would turn on the clock forever, which is the one thing that would give away that it is generated. Every spell also takes 45 seconds to arrive and the same to leave, and it is genuinely clear at both ends — two spells never overlap, and the panel can honestly read CLEAR in the gap.

Slots are out of sixteen, and they are draw odds rather than time: consecutive spells that draw the same face simply run together into one longer one, which is where a clear afternoon or a two-hour front comes from without anything having to model one. Because a spell also reads as clear while it arrives and leaves, the sky is clear rather more than seven-sixteenths of the day. The first spell of a new save is never rolled — the game opens under a clear sky over a wheat field, for the same reason.

None of it touches the economy. No sky pays more, kills faster or slows the party down; the weather has a strength and a kind, which is the shape a rule like reeds pay more in the rain would key on when there is one, but today it only decides what gets drawn. The ground is still the only thing that changes your pace.

All seven, which you will not otherwise see

A spell lasts ten to thirty minutes and the sky is clear about half of them, so watching the strip for an afternoon is a fair way to meet two of these. Every picture below is the real renderer with its clock wound to the middle of a spell.

Nothing here is stored, seeded or advanced. Ask what the sky is at any tick, past or future, and the answer costs a hash — which is why a night away lands the party under whatever the sky is doing when they get back, with no new save key and nothing for the offline catch-up to learn. The same property that lets it cross a swamp it never simulated lets it cross a night of rain it never simulated.

09 Upgrades

Four things to buy, all of them permanent

All of them multipliers, too, which is why the numbers run away from you on purpose.

Arms is the cheap compounding one — 1.5× damage for a 1.65× price means each level buys slightly less than the last, which is the standard idle curve and the reason you keep buying it anyway. A recruit costs 63× the one before because it is a permanent multiplier on every point of damage the party will ever do, rather than another point of it.

10 The bag, and selling

240 slots, and no weeding

It never overflows

An overnight run fits. When it is full the worst thing in the bag is sold to make room, so a drop is never silently lost and the bag never has to be tidied — tidying a bag is the least interesting thing an idler can ask of anybody.

Scrapping pays little, deliberately

current kill reward × item budget × 0.35. A legendary sword is 116 budget points, so it fetches about forty kills' worth of gold. Selling is for clearing space, not for farming.

Filter, then sell in bulk

The bag card filters by rarity and by slot, and the SELL button destroys exactly what the filter is showing — the count on the button is a promise about what is about to go. It asks once first, and the question never appears under the button that raised it.

Left click picks up, right click wears

Left click selects; drag it onto a slot, onto the bag, or onto SELL. Right click on any item puts it on or takes it off without the drag. Right click anywhere else dismisses the panel.

11 While you're away

It keeps walking with the machine off

On the way back in the game reads the clock and works out what happened — for as long as the party can stay on their feet. There is no clock on it. The run ends when they are wiped, exactly as it would have on screen, and the panel tells you which of the two happened.

That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing which side you are on. A party clearing floors keeps clearing them for the whole week you were gone. A party stuck on a floor they cannot beat gets as far as the fight that stops them and no further — so an overnight grind will not buy you out of a wall any more. The way past is the bag, not the clock.

It is arithmetic rather than a fast-forward. Replaying a day would be 1.3 million ticks; instead the time to reach and fell each scarecrow has a closed form, so a day away costs one step per kill. It is spent a slice at a time from the frame loop rather than all at once on startup, so the window opens immediately and the strip says CATCHING UP with a filling bar while it works — a month away used to be a program that had not drawn yet, which from outside is indistinguishable from a hang. The one subtlety is terrain: the walk between two scarecrows is split at every zone boundary it crosses, and each stretch charged at its own rate. A test holds the closed form and live play within 10% of each other over four hours and a dozen terrains.

Gear found while you were away comes back as one line — "3 items" — rather than a hundred separate notices. A night away is not a reason for a hundred toasts.

That's the whole game

Twelve items, four stats, one enemy and a curve that never stops. It fits in half a megabyte because there is nothing in it that isn't listed above.

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