Design laws

What a law is, on this project

The design documents distinguish between a law, a decision and an open question. A decision carries an identifier like D-002 and settles one thing. An open question is marked as unanswered and stays that way until somebody answers it. A law is the layer above both: it is the constraint the decisions have to satisfy, and it is the reason a decision can be rejected without arguing about taste.

Where a law below has a decision behind it, that decision's reference is printed with it — so a claim on this page can be traced to the document that settled it rather than to a marketing sentence.

The seven

The binding laws

Everything else in this design — the clock, the queue, the order vocabulary, the report, the character model, the economics — is downstream of these seven sentences. They were written before most of the code and they have not moved since.

01

One action means one action

Movement, attack, spellcasting, healing, training, equipping, unlocking, opening, entering, searching, collecting, giving, gathering, repairing and revival are separate actions, and a character performs at most one of them per Tick. A single effect may still have several tightly related consequences: one attack may calculate accuracy, damage, armour, status effects, durability, aggro and contribution, and a fire spell may deal fire damage and apply a declared burning state. Those are one coherent resolution — not a licence to hide unrelated activities inside a single order.

D-002, D-004 · The test is whether the extra thing is a consequence of the one action, or a second action wearing the first one's name.

02

One Move means one square

A destination one hundred squares away requires one hundred Move entries and one hundred action opportunities. There is no travel order, no autopilot and no fast-travel purchase, because distance is one of the few costs in this game that everybody pays at exactly the same rate. Queue capacity changes how far ahead a player may plan. It never increases throughput.

D-003, D-077 · A longer queue is a longer horizon, not a bigger allowance. That distinction is what keeps queue length safe to vary and impossible to sell.

03

Failure never accelerates a queue

If an order succeeds, or is consumed by failing, the next queue entry becomes eligible at the following Shard Tick. A failure never causes another queued instruction to execute immediately. There is no catch-up, no compensation Tick and no double action, which means a wasted boundary stays exactly one wasted boundary and can never compound into a wasted afternoon.

D-009 · This is the whole anti-cascade rule. A bad Tick costs a Tick, and the report says why.

04

Absence must be survivable

The game should not demand constant presence. Queues, standing behaviour, warnings, notifications, recoverable defeat, protected loot and readable reports exist so that players can participate around ordinary life — around sleep, work, travel, children and everything else that makes a fixed daily window impossible. The same law states the limit in the same breath: none of that may turn a character into an unbounded bot.

The permission and the limit are one law on purpose. A standing behaviour has to be simple enough that a player can predict it, or it has stopped being a contingency and started being autonomous play.

05

Results must be explainable

For every Tick, a player can learn which intent was locked, which action became effective, what resolved earlier in the acting order, which statistics and statuses applied, what random result was used, why the result occurred, what resources changed, and what happened to the queue. A mechanic that cannot be explained in those terms is not a mechanic this game can carry, because a scheduled game asks people to accept outcomes they did not watch happen.

That only works if the server can show its work. Randomness is derived rather than streamed, so a draw can be quoted back exactly and cannot be quietly re-rolled.

06

Shards remain fair through isolation

Cadence, genre, economy, death rules, competition, roster and module settings may all differ between Shards. What may not differ is what crosses between them: characters, statistics, mastery, items, currency, property and every other form of mechanical power stay inside the independently balanced world they were earned in. A fast Shard can therefore never be farmed to dominate a slow one.

D-010 · Isolation is what makes variety safe. Without it, every Shard would have to be balanced against every other Shard, and only one cadence could ever exist.

07

Payment never buys game power

Core access and progression remain free — characters, Shards, Races, Classes, Jobs, Skills, Abilities, Clans, Guilds, quests, markets, property, companions and ordinary progression. If optional support is ever offered, it is cosmetic or voluntary recognition and nothing else. It never grants extra actions, faster Ticks, better outcomes, Classes, Jobs, Skills, Abilities, land superiority, exclusive systems or mechanical capacity of any kind.

D-011, D-028 · Nothing is on sale today and no store exists. This law describes what may never be sold, not what is being sold.

The seventh law, in full

What may never be sold

The seventh law is the one most often stated vaguely by games that intend to break it, so the design writes the forbidden list out rather than gesturing at a principle. This is that list, verbatim in substance.

Never purchasable

More actions, or faster Ticks.
A longer queue than other players in the same Shard.
Better standing behaviour.
Faster training, or higher initiative.
Superior loot odds.
Reduced consequences for ordinary defeat.
Mechanically stronger pets, companions or minions.
Superior land, shop positions or property capacity.
Core Classes, Jobs, Skills, Abilities, quests, Clan functions, NPC Guild access or markets.
Legal privilege, or priority in resolution.

What optional support could ever be

Approved appearance layers, compatible with your Race.
Class dress variations, portraits and profile frames.
Cosmetic pets with no mechanical power.
Property decoration and interface themes.
Commissioned custom character presentation.
Soundtrack, art and documentation extras.
Plain voluntary recognition, with nothing attached to it.

Not built yet

None of the right-hand column exists. There is no store, no payment path, nothing on sale, and no in-application purchase planned for a first Google Play release. There is also no advertising on any surface, which is a separate binding decision rather than a current state of affairs. The list is here because a commitment made before there is any money involved is worth more than one made afterwards.

The expanded set

The other nine

The master document states seven. The design chapter behind it expands the same material into sixteen, and the extra nine are narrower rules that each close one specific way a game like this usually goes wrong.

8 — A standing substitution is not a bonus action: A standing behaviour may supply the effective action when the queue cannot, and never after a legal attempt has begun. Once an attempt begins, the Tick is spent regardless of outcome.
9 — Future intent remains editable until lock: Everything behind the head of the queue can be rewritten at any time, right up to the moment the Shard locks. Only the head freezes. D-005
10 — Absence protection cannot become autonomous adventure: One standing behaviour, simple enough that the player can predict it. Not a scripting language, not a profit-seeking routine, not an automatic traveller.
11 — Identity does not create permanent initiative privilege: Acting order is recalculated every Tick, and ties break on a value derived from the Shard, the Tick, the actor and a server-held secret. A permanent Character ID never creates a permanent advantage. D-008
12 — Character occupancy does not block movement: A character cannot trap another by standing in a doorway or on a destination square. Combat is a contest for attention, not for space. D-007
13 — Ordinary overworld play is cooperative: Another player cannot attack an ordinary overworld character unless an expressly labelled Shard, arena or competitive zone permits it. The default is safety, and the exception has to be marked.
14 — Ordinary defeat is recoverable: Downed, revivable by an ally at the cost of their own action, and otherwise recovered at a sanctuary under a temporary or curable consequence. Permanent death is reserved for clearly marked Shards, disclosed before entry.
15 — Support is contribution: Damage alone cannot define participation. Healing, prevention, control and objective work count as genuine contribution and are recorded as such in the Tick report.
16 — Loot ownership changes predictably: Loot begins under a visible protection rule, becomes public at a known deadline, and expires at a known deadline — every one of them shown in real time and in remaining Ticks. D-102

Enforcement

The test a new mechanic has to pass

A law only does work if something applies it. The design carries a short review checklist that every proposed mechanic is put through, and it is deliberately blunt — the questions are answerable with a number or a yes, not with an opinion about how fun something would be.

A mechanic that fails these does not get built. That has already cost this design several ideas that would have been good in a different game: broad convenience orders, bundled loadout switching, follow-and-attack, and anything shaped like an offline profit routine.

The last question is not decoration. The browser client is the complete game and the accessibility-complete surface, and it has to work on a phone somebody already owns.

Mechanic review design/01, six of ten

How many player-directed actions can this cause in one Tick?
Can the player see every queued action it creates?
What happens when its target or prerequisite changes?
Can it be explained in one result report?
Does it reward constant availability?
Is it understandable on a mobile screen?

The studio's own checklist, applied to proposals rather than to finished work — which is the only point at which rejecting something is cheap. Six of the ten questions, quoted as written; the other four cover reward inflation, indirect grief in a cooperative Shard, power crossing Shard boundaries, and whether Continue waits for the next Tick.

The player promise

Eleven things the game commits to

The laws are written for the people building the game. This is the same material written for the person playing it — eleven sentences, taken from the design documents without softening, that say what a player is entitled to expect.

Your character acts only according to visible rules and recorded intent.
One order never secretly performs a chain of unrelated activities.
Moving across the Shard takes meaningful time.
You may plan far enough ahead to sleep, work, travel or step away.
You can change future instructions before they lock.
A failed instruction does not have to destroy the rest of your plan.
Ordinary defeat matters without casually erasing years of character history.
Supporting allies is recognised as genuine participation.
You are not disadvantaged because another player can remain online all day.
Different Shard speeds never import power into each other.
The server can explain every important result.

Its pace is an identity, not an inconvenience we are hoping you will not notice.

Every promise on that list is a constraint on the studio rather than a feature for the player to switch on. Several of them are the reason particular things are missing: there is no travel order because moving takes meaningful time, no offline profit routine because absence protection is not autonomous play, and no way to buy queue capacity because staying online all day must not be an advantage. The absences are the promise being kept.

Honestly

Laws are cheap to write and expensive to keep

Every game says something like this at some point, usually in a founder's letter, and most of those sentences are written before the first difficult trade-off and quietly abandoned after it. A list of principles on a website is worth almost nothing on its own. It costs one afternoon to write and it makes no promises that anybody can check.

What makes these worth printing is that they have already refused things. The order vocabulary is narrower than it would be without the first law. There is no travel order, no bundled loadout switch and no follow-and-attack. The queue is a planning horizon rather than an allowance, which is a worse pitch and a better game. Skills replaced a character level, which cost the design a familiar and easily explained progression bar. Every one of those was a real cost paid to a rule.

The remaining risk is not that a law gets broken deliberately. It is that a large body of written design sits above a narrower set of implemented actions — the project's own words for it are depth mismatch — and that the gap gets described more generously over time than it deserves. The defence against that is a page that lists the gap, item by item, and is updated when the gap changes rather than when it would be flattering to update it.

Where to check

The honest status page is where these laws are audited against what actually exists: what is built in code and tested in development, what is designed and unbuilt, what is deferred, and what has not been decided. Atomic Tick is not playable and there is no public server, so for now the laws are being kept in a codebase nobody else can run. That is the honest position, and the status page states it in the same words.