The world
Most games invent a world first and then bolt the rules to it. This one went the other way. The rules said that nothing consequential happens between scheduled boundaries, and the setting had to answer for that — which makes Atomic Tick the rare game where "why does the world only change on a schedule?" has an answer inside the world.
Not built yet
None of this world is anywhere you can reach. There is no public Shard, no server to join, no account, no character and no demo. What exists is a large body of written design, hand-authored maps kept as text in a private repository, and a codebase that can build a Shard from one of them and resolve Ticks in development.
Where something described here is also working code, this page says so in the same sentence, and the last section lists the lot.
The Atomic Bang
The Atomic Bang is the causality fracture after which reality no longer advances as one continuous universal history. Possible histories stabilised into Shards, and inside each Shard consequential change now occurs only at discrete Ticks.
Atomic describes one indivisible authoritative action. Tick describes the scheduled causal boundary. Atomic Bang names the setting event that bound reality to this rhythm.
That is the whole trick of the fiction, and it is the reason the fiction exists at all. A scheduled game usually has to apologise for its schedule — the world is described as continuous and the clock is admitted, quietly, in a help page. Here the discrete rhythm is the setting's central fact. It is a lore event rather than a product subtitle, and it is not necessarily a nuclear detonation.
The distinction the fiction draws is between consequential and presentational time. Only authoritative resolution can change position, health, resources, statuses, inventory, ownership, currency, property, market and contract state, spawns, loot or event progress. Everything else — weather, light, ambient movement, a character drawn mid-stride, a preview of the Move you just queued — may run continuously on your screen, and none of it is allowed to imply that an order already succeeded. The world looks alive between boundaries. It only changes on them.
Nobody inside a Shard agrees about what happened. The event predates every reliable record, and the cultures that survived it interpret it through whatever they had left to think with.
In a Fantasy Shard
A judgement, a broken working, or a god who stopped counting. Temples keep the calendar of boundaries because keeping it is an act of devotion, and the disagreements between traditions are older than any surviving city.
In a Science Fiction Shard
Something measurable, with instruments pointed at it and papers written about it. The rhythm is treated as a physical constant to be characterised, and the question of whether it can be influenced is an open research programme.
In an Apocalypse Shard
Remembered as an ending rather than explained as a mechanism. What matters locally is not the cause but the rationing, the salvage, and which of the old systems still answer when you switch them on.
All three accounts can be sincerely held, mutually contradictory, and — as far as the server is concerned — completely irrelevant. Interpretations conflict; the common law underneath them does not move. Every one of those Shards locks its queues one minute before a boundary aligned to UTC, and resolves at most one action per character.
Open questions
A cosmology that answers everything about itself leaves no room for a Shard's local religion, science or folklore to be wrong about anything. These are open on purpose, and the first public explanation has not been written.
DELIBERATELY UNRESOLVED
WHY LEAVE IT OPEN
Fix the cause and you have decided, from outside, which of the surviving cultures is correct — and quietly made every other Shard's account into a superstition. The interesting version is the one where a scholar, a priest and a salvager can each be partly right, and the game never adjudicates.
It is also a production honesty. The first Shard's local story, religion and scientific explanation are not written yet. Announcing a cosmology in advance of writing it is how settings end up contradicting themselves in public.
One guardrail applies regardless: Shards are not fragments of a magic gem or copies made by a named villain. The premise is fractured causality and discrete authoritative time, and the local histories have to be independently written.
The constraint on any future answer
No answer may permit a player to bypass one action per Tick, reroll authoritative history, or transfer mechanical power between Shards. That constraint is what makes the mystery safe to keep: whatever gets written later is a story about the world, and it is never allowed to become a mechanic.
Shards
In the fiction, a Shard is a stabilised fragment of possible history. In the software, a Shard is one persistent server world governed by one manifest, with its own map, roster, economy, property, Clans, history and operations state. The design uses one word for both deliberately, so that lore, product screens, the API, the operations tooling and players can all say "Shard" and mean the same object.
The vocabulary around it is narrow and fixed, because these words get slippery fast:
Two Shards built from one template are still two different worlds. They develop different populations, economies, histories and content versions from the first Tick onward, and they never exchange anything mechanical.
Precision
Isolation
Cadence, genre, economy, defeat rules, competition, roster limits and module selection may all differ from one Shard to the next. They can only differ because nothing mechanical travels: characters, statistics, mastery, items, currency and property stay where they were earned.
| What | Owned by one Shard | Held by the account |
|---|---|---|
| Characters | Yes | No |
| Statistics and mastery | Yes | No |
| Items and currency | Yes | No |
| Property and storage | Yes | No |
| Markets and contracts | Yes | No |
| Legal state and reputation | Yes | No |
| Action opportunities | Yes | No |
| Sign-in and identity | No | Yes |
| Friends and moderation | No | Yes |
| Accessibility settings | No | Yes |
| Historical records | No | Yes |
A fast Shard can never be farmed to dominate a slow one, because there is nothing to carry across.
This is the load-bearing reason a thirty-minute Shard and a twelve-hour Shard can coexist without one of them being the correct choice. If a single item, coin or skill rank could be moved between them, the faster world would immediately become the place serious players go to manufacture advantage for the slower one, and every balance decision in both would have to hold for the pair.
Comparison across Shards is still allowed, because comparison is not power. Account identity, friends, moderation, accessibility preferences, public achievements, historical records and Atlas comparison may all be account-wide. If a story ever depicts communication or observation between Shards, it may not import hidden information that invalidates a competition or a puzzle. Travel between Shards is not implied by any of this, and adding it would need a separate binding decision and a destination-legal character model.
Built in code: independent Shards resolving concurrently, and database constraints that make the isolation structural rather than a convention — one completed Tick per Shard per Tick number, one outcome per actor per Tick, one authoritative location per item instance, and a Tick that commits entirely or not at all.
Shard families
Every public Shard selects one primary family. A family changes which capabilities and content are switched on; it never creates a second engine. Identity, Ticks, queues, actions, effects, ownership and reports mean exactly the same thing in all of them.
PRIMARY FAMILY
Overt Magic and Mana where the template selects them, medieval or preindustrial cultures, and the adventuring shape most readers already have a picture of.
Normally absent unless a variant declares them: public digital networks, modern firearms, pervasive cybernetics, energy Shields and spaceflight.
PRIMARY FAMILY
Advanced technology as an ordinary fact of life, and the societies, supply chains and hazards that come with depending on it.
Cyberpunk, near-future, space opera, hard science and transhuman are variants of this family rather than families of their own. Psionics or overt Magic appear only where a template explicitly enables them.
PRIMARY FAMILY
What is left, who is holding it, and whether it can be repaired. Condition, scarcity and maintenance are systems here rather than flavour.
The cause is the template. Nuclear wasteland, magical cataclysm, machine revolt, alien occupation, ecological collapse and temporal rupture are distinct settings, not one assumed one.
On subgenres
Cyberpunk, Steampunk, Modern, science fantasy and the various collapses are variants, not a fourth pillar. Public navigation may promote a successful one, but the manifest still records its primary family and the exact modules it turned on. A module may add validation rules and records; it may never create a second queue, a second identity system, a hidden action allowance or an incompatible combat engine.
First focus
A Convergence Shard combines selected parts of all three families through one coherent history, geography, economy and counter system. It is a composition profile rather than a fourth equal family, and it is curated — never an unrestricted catalogue and never a random mixing bowl.
It is the first concentrated content-design effort because it exercises the broadest reusable systems at once. If a wizard, a robot, a mutant and an investigator can all be expressed through one rules language — one effect schema, one resource model, one set of source and counter tags — then the narrower Shards are comparatively easy.
Not decided, and not running
The first Convergence Shard has no name, no opening region, no bounded catalogue and no roster. Those are open decisions in the design, not announcements being held back. The regions above are the current direction of travel and could change before anything is built.
The Shard Atlas
The Atlas is an optional versioned framework of logical coordinates, topology and historical lineage. Related Shards can descend from one Atlas and express it completely differently — and a player who has walked one of them arrives in the next already half-oriented.
| Logical site | Fantasy layer | Science fiction layer | Apocalypse layer | Convergence layer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central district | Castle, temple and old town. | Arcology, civic core and transit hub. | Collapsed tower, crater and survivor market. | Overlapping districts with unstable boundaries. |
| River crossing | Stone bridge, ford and toll house. | Transit span and utility conduits. | Broken bridge and ferry camp. | A repaired crossing using mixed systems. |
| Northern boundary | Enchanted forest. | Research preserve. | Mutated exclusion zone. | Anomaly frontier with rival explanations. |
| Industrial basin | Mines and forges. | Fabrication and energy complex. | Salvage fields and workshops. | Clockwork industry around recovered machinery. |
This is the part worth explaining, because it is easy to mistake for a gimmick. A place you know in one Shard is a place you half-know in another. The topology says a crossing is probably at that bend in the river. It does not tell you whether it is a stone bridge, a transit span or a rope over a gap; who holds it; what it costs to use; whether it is passable at all in this era; or what lives underneath it. You arrive with a sense of the shape of the land and none of the local truth, which is a good deal closer to how travelling actually feels than either a fresh map or a familiar one.
Atlas reuse is stronger than texture reuse, and that is what keeps it honest. A layer may replace terrain and passability, structures and interiors, points of interest, roads and transit, biomes, weather, hazards, settlements, jurisdictions, Factions, NPC Guilds, quests, encounters, spawns, loot and every scrap of art and audio, while retaining meaningful coordinate lineage. The authoritative navigation graph always comes from the selected layer, never from what the client happens to be drawing.
No design gets distorted to preserve a correspondence. A template may do any of these, and the manifest states which:
Correspondence is cartography, not connection
A shared coordinate never means an actor at that coordinate in one Shard exists at the same coordinate in another. Nothing observes across, nothing moves across, and nothing you own comes with you. The Atlas supports lore, cartography and community comparison — and that is the whole of its job.
Where this stands: the Atlas is designed. One hand-authored atlas exists in the repository and Shards can be built from it in development. The multi-era layering described above is written down and has not been implemented.
The land
One Move order advances a character from its square to one adjacent legal square, and costs one Tick. Movement never continues by itself: if there is no further Move in the queue, the character stops where it is standing. A destination one hundred squares away is one hundred queue entries and one hundred action opportunities.
There is no travel-to-destination order, and there will not be one. "Travel to the capital" as a single instruction is on the design's permanent list of things that will never be one order, alongside "clear the room", "complete the quest" and "gather until the pack is full". Queue capacity changes how far ahead you may plan. It never increases how much you get done.
Movement runs in eight directions, so distance is Chebyshev rather than Manhattan: ten squares diagonally is ten Moves, not twenty. Diagonal travel across open ground is genuinely more efficient, and that is accepted rather than compensated for. What makes position expensive is terrain, not arithmetic.
A map is stored as plain text: one character per square, one line per row. The encoding characters are content identity rather than presentation — changing one would rewrite every stored map in the game — so the alphabet is short, stable and shared by every Shard.
A diagonal Move is legal only when both shared orthogonal neighbours are passable. Cutting the corner of a wall is not allowed, and the reason is structural: under the lenient rule a solid diagonal line of wall is crossable at every joint, and a room sealed by a diagonal corner is not actually sealed. If walls do not reliably block, terrain stops being tactical and the map stops meaning anything.
A diagonal blocked this way reports its own distinct reason, separately from ordinary impassable terrain. "The square ahead is open but you cannot reach it from this angle" is confusing enough to deserve its own line in the Tick report.
Terrain has no movement cost. One Move is one Tick regardless of what is underfoot, because a mud square that "costs two Ticks" has quietly reintroduced multi-Tick orders through the back door. Difficult ground is expressed as a state instead: walking into deep mud can apply a Bogged condition that affects the following Tick unless it is cleared. The Move still advanced one square, and the cost is visible in the report rather than hidden in the terrain.
Terrain also distinguishes passable from walkable. A square is passable when its terrain permits standing on it, and walkable when a character can actually get there from where characters are. A passable square sealed behind a diagonal joint is passable and not walkable — a place a player can see, plan a route toward, and never stand on. Every map is therefore validated for full connectivity from its starting region before it is ever written into a Shard.
The land is authored as text and reused across every Shard built from it, which makes it a permanent feature of the game rather than a property of one server. The generator still exists, for tests and throwaway Shards where a hundred random maps are worth more than one good one, but authored maps are the normal path.
Three reasons, and the third decided it. Balance needs a fixed subject: you cannot tune an encounter or a travel time against terrain that differs on every Shard. Learning the land is a reward, and only counts as one if the ford stays where the ford was. And a map in a repository changes through a commit somebody can read, with the previous version still there — a map in a database changes because somebody ran an update. The cost is honest: building a good map takes real time, and there is no shortcut.
A Shard receives a copy of the map at creation, not a reference to it, so a world in progress can never change shape because a file was edited. The atlas slug and version are recorded so the copy's origin stays knowable.
Regions are painted onto the same grid as the terrain — a forest is not a rectangle — and every square belongs to exactly one. A region carries what it spawns, how much of it, and how often.
| Kind | Spawns creatures | Hostiles may enter | Used for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wild | Yes | Yes | The ordinary world. |
| Safe | No | Yes | Camps, waystations, the edges of settlements. |
| Protected | No | No | Towns, banks, the tutorial yard. Used sparingly. |
| Starting | No | Yes | Where new characters arrive. |
| Dungeon | Yes, deliberately | Yes | Authored encounter space. |
A safe region is a place the world does not generate danger, not a force field. A wolf that follows you to the gate reaches the gate. Only a protected region stops a hostile at its boundary, and it is reserved for settlements rather than countryside.
Every spawning region has a population cap as well as a rate, and a map that omits the cap is refused at load — a rate alone quietly fills an unvisited Shard until the first player through the gate meets four hundred wolves standing in a field. A region that has never spawned fills to its cap at once, so a new Shard is populated from its first Tick. Every refill after that is gradual and proportional: a region recovers from empty in about eight intervals whatever its size, which is what makes clearing a camp mean something without making it permanent.
A creature appears on a passable square its region owns and never within three squares of a player, which is the difference between a world that is populated and one that is spawning at you. Its home is where it appeared, and its leash is measured from there. Population is counted by where a creature came from rather than where it is standing, so a wolf chased out of the forest does not cause the forest to manufacture a replacement.
Built in code: authored atlases, painted regions, connectivity validation, region-driven gradual spawning, shared creature templates, eight-direction movement with the strict corner rule, and the generator that remains for tests.
Conflict
Player characters cannot harm one another in the ordinary overworld. That is a Shard rule rather than a preference, and no hostility setting, flag or consent toggle overrides it. Competition exists, and it happens only after a deliberate entry into a space that has explained its own consequences first.
Characters do not collide. Any number may share a square, so a doorway cannot be blocked, a destination cannot be raced for, a party cannot interfere with its own routes, and a character cannot be trapped by somebody standing on the only exit. Only the Shard edge, impassable terrain and the corner rule can stop a Move.
Stacking removes collision, not tactics. Position still decides weapon and Ability range, line of sight, cover, visibility in darkness, exposure to area damage and healing, environmental hazards, stealth and detection, encounter objectives, and access to doors, containers, workstations and facilities. Standing in a crowd is still a decision with consequences; it is just never a wall.
DESIGNED, NOT BUILT
Non-lethal character-versus-character events. At zero health a participant is knocked out for the round: no ordinary Downed injury, no dropped items, no permanent statistic loss, and health restored at the proper event boundary. Open-build, normalised and event-loadout formats are all labelled before entry.
DESIGNED, NOT BUILT
A marked area on an ordinary map that stays non-lethal. Defeat there costs ejection to a safe square, a re-entry cooldown, event score or an objective — never ordinary injury or item loss, unless the zone advertises a different rule and requires informed entry.
DESIGNED, NOT BUILT
The only place permanent death exists, disclosed before entry and never applied retroactively to a world somebody already lives in. An ordinary Shard is not quietly convertible into one.
At zero health a character becomes Downed: the queue pauses, normal orders stop, and allies have a limited window to revive — which costs the helper their own action for that Tick, because helping is a real decision and not a free one. Unrevived, the character returns to a sanctuary under a temporary or curable consequence. Neither route restarts old movement or combat orders on its own; you come back and decide again.
Loot ownership changes on a published schedule rather than by reflex. An item begins under a visible protection rule, becomes public at a known deadline and expires at a known one, with both deadlines shown in remaining Ticks as well as in real time. In a game where you may be asleep when the fight resolves, "first to click" cannot be the rule.
Built in code: loot rolls and cadence-derived loot protection, and characters becoming Downed. Designed and not built: Revive, Rest, arenas, competitive zones and Hardcore Shards.
Honest status
Everything above is written design. Some of it is also code that runs and passes tests on a development machine. This is which is which, for the world specifically — the honest status page covers the whole project.
Built in code
Eight-direction movement with the strict diagonal corner rule, terrain passability, and the distinction between passable and walkable, all resolving through the same Tick machinery as everything else.
Built in code
Text atlases loaded and validated — terrain and region grids matched square for square, every region defined and painted, and every passable square proven reachable from the starting region before a Shard can be built from it.
Built in code
Weighted spawn tables, population caps, gradual refill, placement rules and shared creature templates, running as a settle-phase system after every actor has acted.
Built in code
Independent Shards resolving concurrently, an append-only Tick ledger per Shard, and database constraints that make the isolation invariants structural rather than a matter of good intentions.
Built in code
Races, Classes, Jobs, Skills, spells, creatures and items served from the server and validated in both directions against the design documents, so a catalogue and its documentation cannot drift apart silently.
Designed, not built
One hand-authored atlas exists. Multi-era layering, declared transformation packages, topology lineage and coordinate-compatibility levels are written down and not implemented.
Designed, not built
Quests, contracts and bounties; Factions, NPC Guilds, jurisdictions and local law; markets, shops and property; Clans and Alliances as playable systems. All specified in detail, none of it built.
Designed, not built
The whole of the marked-competition layer, including permanent death, exists as written rules and nothing else.
Not started
No server is deployed, no Shard has been named, and no date is being claimed. The current work is the browser client; a public world comes after it, and only when it is worth entering.
Where this is
If you want to follow the world being built — or argue with any of the decisions above while they are still arguable — the studio is one person and reachable on Discord. Nothing to sign up for, because there is nothing to sign up to.