The world you ask for

Since 6 September the New Game page has had a box for what kind of world you want. Type a sentence, and the world is built with it in mind.

That was the idea. In practice the wish often lost.

Losing to the dice

Every world’s opening is partly rolled at random. Those rolls were made before anyone had read the wish, and when the two disagreed, the roll usually won. A player who asked for something grim could still get a world that opened on a comic note.

The reversal is that we did this on purpose. When the box arrived we ranked the wish deliberately low, so that a sentence typed on a setup page could never quietly overrule the world. It was a nudge, not a contract, and nothing checked whether it had been honoured. That caution was the bug. The things the wish lost to were mostly dice, rolled blind.

The player’s words outrank the rolls

As of 18 September they don’t. Where the wish says something different from a roll, the wish wins, and it shapes everything the opening writes.

One thing is never replaced: how strong you start. That is the difficulty you picked on the same page, a few lines above the wish, and no sentence in the box overrides it.

A run with an empty box is built exactly as it was before.

Saying one thing, writing another

The first live read of three wished-for worlds found the model agreeing with the wish and then writing the roll anyway. One wish asked for cheerful tropical islands; the world accepted the cheerful tone and in the same answer described its mood as folk horror. A wish for a pitiable, retired Demon King came back with him ruling openly as a crowned monarch. Everything built afterwards followed the wish, while the world’s own frame still said the roll.

We fixed it the same day. On the same seeds and the same wishes, the islands came back as “Sunlit horizons, laughter rising”, and the Demon King as a washed-up retired tyrant, barely remembered. And the wish stopped changing things it had never mentioned.

Two real runs

On 1 October we started two worlds on 0.9, both on Fair. The wishes are as the player typed them, typos included.

“A firey volcanic world.” became Cinderfall: “A world of ash, fire, and the slow kindling of ancient power.” Its Demon King is Vorath the Unmaker, the Ash-Crowned, a living volcano-god sitting unmoving on a caldera throne while his legions stand frozen at the Cinder Line.

“Industrial world filled with polution” became The Rusted Dominion: “A world of iron, ash, and the slow death of hope.” Its Demon King is Malkor, the Iron Tyrant, a demon bound into a suit of ever-rusting iron, believed dead a decade ago, whose factories still churn.

The seeds differ as well as the wishes, so the wish isn’t the only thing that separates them. But both were started on Fair, and both woke up at the same strength. The world bent to what each of them asked for. The difficulty stayed where they set it.