Return of the Runes

A craft takes seven component runes and a stated intent. The components' tag vectors are blended and compared against the intent, and the closeness of that match decides what you get: flawless, flawed, or unstable.

1,625 runes are hand-generated and named across nine ranks. But any intent with any components is scored live by the same function — so a rune nobody has made before is real, and it persists to the shared database. The world's rune set grows once, for everyone.

The AI never touches power

The crafting interface is an intent box, and players never talk to a model. An optional server-side oracle can name and describe a newly discovered rune — it never decides what that rune does. The deterministic scorer does. That is an anti-exploit rule, and the oracle ships disabled.

A planet you can mine

The world is an Earth-scale sphere — 6,371 km of radius, with a playable shell about 8 km thick — carved out of a uniform cubic lattice at quarter-metre voxels. Cube-sphere projection is rejected deliberately: warped grids give anisotropic voxels, and that breaks mining volume, ore density and collision consistency all at once.

Storing that planet densely would take 268 exabytes. So nothing is stored. The planet is a seed and a generator graph under a megabyte, a coarse height and albedo map that ships with the client, and player edits.

Resolution barely moves that number, because the count of edited chunks is set by human behaviour, not by grid size. Compute follows the same logic: servers are player-driven bubbles that move with people, so there are no fixed regions and no handoffs at boundaries. Cells are an addressing scheme, not a server topology.

Where it is now

Around 32 systems are built and compile clean, and essentially none of it has been runtime-playtested yet. The first job on the next machine is a client and server playtest, not new features. Every balance number is a draft.