Straight answers, including the unflattering ones

No. Nothing about this game is reachable from the internet. There is no server to connect to, no account to make, no client to download and no demo to try. There is no client to open; play.atomictick.com is a page about where it has got to.

The part that does exist is the rules engine. Tick scheduling, order queues, the Tick snapshot, deterministic resolution, movement, map generation, combat, loot, equipment and Tick reports are written, and they pass their tests on the developer's machine. That is a long way from a game with people in it, and this site tries hard not to blur the two.

No, none of the three, and no newsletter and no notify me box either. Every one of those needs somewhere to send your address, and there is nowhere to send it: this site is static files with no forms on it at all.

That is deliberate rather than an oversight. The design documents rule it out in as many words — no newsletter capture, no waiting list, no account creation — because collecting addresses for a thing that does not exist puts an obligation on the reader in exchange for nothing.

If you want to know when something changes, the Discord is the only channel, and you can leave it whenever you like.

Unknown, and no date is going to be invented here. A date would be a guess wearing the clothes of a commitment.

What can be said is the order of work. The current focus is the browser game: sign-in, then Shard and character selection, then the map, the queue and the Tick reports, then character, Skills, inventory, equipment and settings. Underneath that, the progression loop needs per-actor Skill ranks, which nothing stores yet, and the order set needs Train, Rest, Revive, Drop, Use Item and Guard, none of which are built. When those exist and a server is deployed and running reliably, there will be something to play.

The honest status page lists what is built, what is only designed and what has not been started. It gets updated. It does not get promised.

The rules engine. The Shard clock, order queues and the snapshot that freezes intent at the lock, deterministic resolution with replay-stable randomness, Tick reports over an append-only ledger, hand-authored and generated maps, eight-direction movement, combat, equipment, loot protection and the six player orders — Move, Hold, Attack, Engage, Collect and Equip — are written and pass their tests in development.

Per-actor Skill ranks and practice, Train, Rest, Revive, Drop, Use Item and player-directed Guard, the whole Magic module, and the browser game that would connect any of it to a person are written down in detail with no code behind them.

The honest status page takes all of it item by item, including what each unbuilt thing is blocked on, and it is the copy that gets kept up to date.

The Discord. That is where progress gets posted and where questions get answered, and it is the only channel. Nothing will email you, because nothing has your email.

This site is also updated as things change. If you only bookmark one page, make it honest status — it is the page that has to change when the truth does.

A scheduled Shard-resolution event in which the server locks intent, determines acting order, resolves at most one effective action per character, applies declared passive phases, and records results. That is the glossary definition and it is deliberately mechanical.

In play it means this. A clock reaches a boundary. One minute before that, the Shard locks: whatever sits at the head of your queue is now fixed, and everything behind it stays editable. At the boundary every eligible actor takes one action, in an order the server computed and then sorted once and did not touch again. Afterwards you get a report explaining which intent was locked, which action became effective, what resolved before yours, which random value was used and why the result happened.

Boundaries are aligned to UTC rather than counted from the last Tick, so a Shard cannot drift, and a cadence has to divide the day evenly: five, ten, fifteen or thirty minutes, or one, two, three, four, six, eight, twelve or twenty-four hours. A thirty-seven minute Shard is not offerable, because it cannot be anchored. Thirty minutes and one hour are the two profiles the design has worked through in full. If a Shard misses a boundary — an outage, maintenance — that boundary is skipped, not queued. Six missed boundaries produce one Tick, not six.

One running persistent world, with its own identity, cadence, map, roster, economy, property, Clans, history and operations state. A Shard is not a theme and not a save slot. In the fiction it is a stabilised fragment of possible history left behind by the Atomic Bang; in the software it is a server world that resolves its own Ticks independently of every other one.

Shards are isolated on purpose. Cadence, genre, economy, death rules, competition, roster size and module settings may all differ between them, and nothing mechanical crosses: no characters, no statistics, no mastery, no items, no currency, no property, no power. That isolation is the only reason a twelve-hour Shard and a thirty-minute Shard can both be fair.

Three primary Shard families are designed — Fantasy, Science Fiction and Apocalypse — with a Convergence Shard that combines selected parts of all three through one coherent history, geography and economy. Convergence is the first concentrated design focus because it exercises the broadest reusable systems. Which Shard would be the first public one, what it contains and what it is called are all unresolved. The world page goes through this properly.

No, and the design treats needing to be as a defect rather than a feature. You write a queue of future orders, edit it freely until the Shard locks, and read the report afterwards. The server resolves whether anybody is watching or not.

Someone who sits on the page all day receives exactly the same one action per character per Tick that you receive while asleep. Being present does not add throughput; it only means you see the report sooner and can adjust one Tick earlier. There is no reflex component anywhere in the game, and queue capacity is meant to be equal for everybody in the same Shard.

That depends on what you left behind, and what you leave behind is under your control. Three mechanisms carry an absence.

The queue. Queue length is planning horizon, not throughput — a longer queue lets you plan further ahead, never act more often. The candidate range is twenty to fifty entries per character, configured per Shard and not finally decided. Fifty entries on a one-hour Shard is fifty hours of instruction; twenty entries on a thirty-minute Shard is ten.

Failure policy. Set per order or per character: either continue, which consumes the failed entry and makes the next one eligible at the following Tick, or pause, which records the failure and freezes everything behind it until you come back. Pause is what stops a queue from marching your character through a plan that no longer makes sense.

Standing behaviour. One selected behaviour, used only when the queue is empty, paused, or unable to supply an action that can begin. Hold, Guard, attack the nearest eligible hostile, train a selected track, rest, hide, observe. It is bounded on purpose and it is not permitted to become autonomous adventure: no travelling toward a distant goal, no choosing the most profitable action, no scripts with unrestricted conditions. If nothing else is legal it falls back to Hold.

A week away should mean coming back to a stack of readable reports and a character you still recognise, not an irreparable ruin. That is the whole point of the fourth design law: absence must be survivable.

Not in ordinary play. Reaching zero Health makes a character Downed: the queue pauses, normal orders stop, and allies get a limited window to revive. Reviving costs the helper their own action for that Tick, because helping somebody is an action like every other action.

If nobody comes, the character returns to a sanctuary under a temporary or curable consequence. Neither revival nor sanctuary recovery restarts your old movement or combat orders — you resume by deciding again, which is usually the correct thing to do after being knocked down anyway.

Permanent death exists only on Shards expressly marked as Hardcore, disclosed before you enter one. Those are designed and not built, along with arenas and competitive zones. Ordinary defeat is meant to matter without casually erasing years of a character's history.

Not in the ordinary overworld, and that is a binding law rather than a server setting. Another player cannot attack an ordinary overworld character unless an expressly labelled Shard, arena or competitive zone permits it. The default is cooperative.

Arenas, competitive zones and Hardcore Shards are all designed and none of them exist in code. If you never want to be somebody else's target, the intention is that you can play indefinitely without ever entering a space where that is possible, and that you will always know when you have.

That is the intent, and the vocabulary is already fixed so that each word means exactly one thing. Most games use guild for about four different concepts; this one does not.

A Party is a temporary social and encounter relationship among characters. It does not merge their queues, actions, locations or ownership. A Clan is a persistent player-created organisation with membership, permissions, projects, property, storage, treasury, contracts and shops. An Alliance is a formal relationship between Clans that shares nothing unless a named rule expressly shares it. A Guild is not a player organisation at all — it is a Shard-controlled institution that recruits, ranks, trains Classes, certifies Jobs and publishes work.

None of those are built. They are written down carefully and they resolve nothing today. What is built underneath them is the part that makes them possible: player characters and NPC actors sharing one identity model and one ordinary order path, so an NPC has no privileges a person lacks.

Six orders are implemented today. Move advances one adjacent square, in eight directions, one Tick each. Hold holds position and takes no active action. Attack attacks one target within reach and never moves. Engage closes on the nearest hostile and attacks it when in reach — at resolution it either moves one square or attacks, never both in one Tick. Collect picks up one item or legal stack from the square you are standing on. Equip equips a carried item, or unequips an equipped one.

Everything else is designed and unbuilt: Train, Guard, Rest, Revive, Drop and Use Item are the named next gaps, and behind them sit spellcasting, healing, crafting, gathering, searching, negotiation, market operations, property claims and the rest of a long catalogue.

Just as important is the list of orders that will never exist, because each would smuggle several actions into one: travel to a distant destination, follow and attack, clear room, loot everything, complete quest, gather until inventory full, train whichever skill is best, automatically heal and then attack, switch class and equip a complete loadout. How it plays goes through the whole vocabulary.

That is the intention, and it is a locked design decision rather than a marketing position. Core characters, Shards, Races, Classes, Jobs, Skills, Abilities, Clans, Guilds, quests, markets, property, companions and ordinary progression are all meant to be reachable without paying anything.

There is also a commitment to no advertising on any surface, and to no in-application purchases in a first Google Play release, if a Google Play release ever happens. None of this is testable today, because there is nothing to buy and nothing to be shown an advertisement in.

No, and the commitment is specific rather than reassuring. If optional support is ever offered it is cosmetic or voluntary recognition only: approved appearance layers, dress variations, portraits, profile frames, powerless cosmetic pets, property decoration, interface themes, a soundtrack.

The list of what may never be purchased is written out in the design so that it can be checked against later. More actions. Faster Ticks. Longer queues within the same Shard. Better standing behaviour. Faster training. 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, Guild access or markets. Legal privilege. Resolution priority.

The same principle covers time as well as money: you are not disadvantaged because another player can remain online all day. Somebody watching every Tick receives the same one action per character per Tick as somebody checking in once a week.

Space Junk Industries pays, and the design works hard to keep the bill small. A Shard's cadence is most of its operating cost, and a twelve-hour Shard resolves twice a day and costs almost nothing to operate. There is no live simulation to keep warm between boundaries, no matchmaking, no voice, no streamed assets, no required animation and no required audio. The client is static files talking to a small API.

The studio's own stated position is that a small or even empty free Shard can remain a worthwhile hobby and design achievement if its operating cost is bounded and the developer values it. That is not a business plan. It is the reason this game does not need one to keep existing.

A web browser. The browser client is the complete game and the permanent, accessibility-complete surface: no feature and no accessibility need is ever reachable only through an app. It is being built now and it is not finished, so there is nothing to open today.

The accessibility commitments are part of the specification rather than a later pass — scalable interface and report text, large touch targets, high-contrast modes, icons paired with text, no information carried by colour alone, screen-reader labels and logical focus order, complete plain-text reports, local time shown alongside the Shard Tick number, a reduced-animation setting, and a clear on-screen difference between prediction, locked intent and resolved fact.

The repository rule for the client is worth quoting, because it is the same rule this site follows: missing actions must be shown honestly rather than simulated in the client.

No, and possibly never. An Android client may be built after the browser game is complete and operating reliably, and only if discovery, installation, re-engagement and notifications on Google Play justify maintaining a second client. That decision has not been made and the question is recorded as open.

If it is ever built it uses Godot, carries substantial native play, and is explicitly not a full-parity client — long-tail systems stay in the browser behind an authenticated handoff. Google Play would be the only application store; iOS and desktop use the browser client, which is the complete one anyway.

In the meantime the browser client is designed for a phone screen first. One of the studio's own review questions for any new mechanic is simply: is it understandable on a mobile screen?

Scale, and status. Astral Sovereignty gives you an empire across a galaxy, and it is playable now, in alpha, at play.astralsovereignty.com. Atomic Tick gives you a person standing on one square, and it is not playable at all.

They share more than they differ, which is why one studio makes both. The two side by side sets out where they part company: orders per tick, what persists, how conflict works, and which of them you can actually play today.

An idle game runs while you are away and rewards you for the time that passed. Atomic Tick does not. Nothing accumulates because time went by; a character acts because you wrote an instruction and the server resolved it. Leave an empty queue and the character does the one dull thing you nominated, or holds. There is no offline progress to collect, no number rising on its own, and no reason to open the page except to read what happened and decide what happens next.

An energy bar meters how much you may do and then sells you more of it. The limit here is a clock, not a currency, and it cannot be topped up. Every character gets one action per Tick, the same one, for everybody, always. No amount of money, queue length, session length or connection speed produces a second action — adding one would break the first design law rather than merely be unpopular.

Stamina does exist, but it is not that. Effective actions spend it, consecutive exertion raises the cost to a cap, armour modifies it and rest decays it — and at zero it degrades accuracy rather than preventing you from acting. It shapes what an action is worth. It never decides whether you get one.

From play-by-mail games, honestly. Those ran on posted order packets resolved every week or fortnight, and the deliberation was the point: you studied what you had, wrote your orders, sent them, waited, and read a turn report that explained what everyone had done. What killed the format was the postage and the wait. Not the shape.

Atomic Tick keeps the shape and removes the postage. Continuously scheduled online Ticks instead of fortnightly packets, editable future intent instead of a sealed envelope, explicit failure handling instead of a plan that dies on its first surprise, bounded standing contingencies, and an authoritative history the server can explain line by line.

The design puts it this way, and it is a fair summary of the whole project: its pace is an identity, not an inconvenience to conceal.

One person. Space Junk Industries is a one-person studio, and it also makes Astral Sovereignty, which is playable in alpha. That is worth knowing before you form any expectation about scope or speed.

It is also why the design is written down at such length. A single developer forgets things, contradicts themselves and drifts, and a design document that argues with itself in public is much cheaper than a rewrite. The written design is the largest artefact this project has, and the code is measured against it in both directions.

People who would rather plan than click quickly. The target audience is thirteen and over. It suits anyone whose free time arrives in irregular pieces, anyone in a timezone that makes scheduled play awkward, and anyone who has ever resented losing to somebody with more hours rather than a better plan.

It is a poor fit if you want to play for three straight hours and see three straight hours of consequence, if you want reflex-based combat, or if you want a world that reacts the instant you touch it. Those are real preferences and this game is not built to serve them. Its pace is the identity, not a limitation being hidden.

Yes, and the most useful kind is criticism of the rules. The design has genuine open questions: how many Classes a character may hold or learn, what queue capacity should actually be, the initiative formula and its ranges, the default failure policy, how long being Downed should last, how long loot stays protected, and what the first Shard even is. An argument about any of those is worth more right now than encouragement.

The Discord is the place for it. Email works too: [email protected]. There is no paid role, no testing programme and nothing to test, because nothing is deployed — so what is on offer is influence over a design, not early access to a game.

Today, nothing, because nothing is collected. This site is static files. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, embeds nothing from anybody else, makes no external requests and has no forms, so there is nothing for it to gather and nowhere to put it. The privacy page says the same thing at slightly more length, including the one thing worth naming: the host keeps ordinary server request logs.

When accounts exist, the design is already specific. An email address is the only personal data collected. No password is stored anywhere, because sign-in is designed as a six-digit emailed code exchanged for a session token. No real name, date of birth, phone number, postal address or payment details. Deletion works by tombstoning: personal data erased, the account-to-character link severed, and pseudonymous character identifiers kept so that shared ledgers and other players' history survive rather than developing holes.

All of that is designed and implemented in development, and none of it is operating publicly. A full privacy notice will replace the current one before anybody can sign up to anything.