Built, running, and countable
What a player actually meets here, with the numbers that sit behind it. Nothing on this page is a plan. Where a system is written but not yet switched on, it is listed at the bottom under its own heading rather than quietly counted here.
Progression
A number going up is not a reward, so every skill lists effects that some other system reads. Levelling mining changes how mining behaves, not how mining looks.
The experience needed for a level is a hundred times the level to the power of one and a half. Level ten is around three and a half thousand all up. Level one hundred is a shade under a million and a half, which is a long haul for the people who want one and safely ignorable by everyone else.
Mining at a hundred swings nearly two and a half times faster, turns up rare finds three and a half times as often, and wears a pick down at under half the usual rate. Bartering at a hundred buys at eighty two cents in the dollar and sells at a dollar thirty. Every effect is a plain multiplier, read by name.
Repeat one action forty times inside ten minutes and the gains drop to a third until the window clears. It is not a lockout and it is not a daily cap. It just means the fastest way up is to do the work rather than to farm one node.
Coal, stone and iron are there from the first swing. Copper wants fifteen levels of mining, silver thirty five, gold sixty, and platinum eighty five. The stables read the same idea against Horsemanship, which is why a yard will show you a Turkoman you cannot ride yet.
Athletics comes off distance sprinted and swum, and toughness off damage survived. A long ride out earns something, and a fortnight of being shot at leaves a mark that is worth having.
Experience, prices, loot rolls and skill checks are decided on the server. The client draws them. That is a design rule rather than a feature, and it is the reason the economy can be balanced at all.
Eleven of them, one per kind of work
None of these is a moving bar you press at the right moment. Each has its own mechanic and its own look, and how well you play sets the grade of what comes out: a good forge gives a better ingot than a poor one that still counted as a success. How hard the check is comes from your level in the skill it belongs to.
Inventory
Forty cells and fifty kilograms. The shape is the point: a rifle is one cell wide and three tall and eats a whole column, and a log makes you think. A single row of forty slots would be no decision at all.
Past eighty per cent of the weight limit you slow down. Past a hundred, the pickup is simply refused rather than dressed up as a status effect.
A bare horse carries nothing at all. A saddle is three by two and eight kilos, saddlebags are five by three and twenty two, and the large bags are six by four and thirty five. Those you do not buy: a horse carries them once it has been raised past level fifteen and trusts you enough to stand still.
Carts are the real hauling. A farm cart matches your own satchel for shape and carries a hundred and fifty kilos. A freight wagon is twelve by eight and six hundred.
Go down and stay down and half the satchel ends up on the ground, where it sits for half an hour before it is gone. The rest stays with you, so a bad night is a setback rather than a wipe.
Money is not an item, which is deliberate. Cash, bank, gold and platinum are their own system, so there is one place a balance can change.
Banking
Deposit in Valentine and it is in Valentine. Ride to Saint Denis and that money is not there. One rule, and it gives the whole map a shape.
Valentine, Blackwater, Saint Denis, Rhodes, Annesburg, Strawberry and Tumbleweed. Each holds a visible balance up to a quarter of a million in cash, except Saint Denis, which holds twice that and is the hardest building on the map to leave. A new vault opens with a couple of thousand and forty gold in it, so an early robbery is not an empty box.
Moving money between towns costs four and a half per cent plus a handling charge, and takes a minute and a half plus eight seconds a kilometre, up to a quarter of an hour. Five transfers can be in flight at once. A courier who carries the cash himself beats the wire and undercuts the fee, and can be robbed, which is the entire point.
Cash, bank, gold and platinum. Interest is small on purpose: four tenths of a per cent a day, accrued hourly, on the first twenty thousand only. It exists so a bank beats a mattress, not so sitting still is an income.
Platinum is never accepted by a bank and can never be taken off a player. It is the one thing on this server that is genuinely yours.
The economy
A general store's shelf holds eighteen tins of beans. Buy eighteen and there are no more until the wagon catches up, three at a time, every four minutes. If the shelf were bottomless nobody would ever buy beans off another player, and half the map would have no reason to exist.
An empty shelf costs up to forty five per cent more than a full one. That applies to buying only, never to what the shopkeeper offers you, because a shortage is not a windfall for whoever caused it.
No shop will ever pay more than seventy two per cent of its own asking price, no matter how good the bartering, so buying and selling at the same window is never profit. Sell into a shelf that is already full and you get just over half of the usual rate.
General store, gunsmith, doctor, butcher, stable goods, saloon and fence. A butcher pays well for a pelt because that is his trade and a general store pays badly for one because he has to find a buyer. A fence takes what nobody else will, pays poorly for it, and has no marker on your map. You find one by being told where it is.
Saint Denis has the cheapest goods and the worst payouts, because everyone sells there. Tumbleweed charges nearly half again on everything, because getting goods to Tumbleweed is work. Annesburg pays over the odds for ore, the works being right there. Hauling between them is a living.
Law and consequence
What is seen brings lawmen now and cools off. What is suspected means the county knows something happened but has no name yet, and it becomes seen the moment a lawman lays eyes on you near the scene. A bounty is dollars posted on your head, and it does not decay at all.
Decided on the server, from the server's own idea of where everybody is. Inside a couple of hundred metres of a town there are always people about, so a crime in the middle of Valentine is very nearly always seen. Stealth shrinks both the radius and the odds, so a career thief genuinely works in a smaller circle.
One star is a fine and a stern look. By three there are three lawmen and they are mounted, which means they follow you out of town. By five it is five of them and two marshals. They arrive from a distance rather than appearing in front of you.
Heat falls slowly in town and roughly three times faster out past it, reaching the wild rate about a kilometre out, interpolated the whole way so the first mile already helps. Three minutes without anyone laying eyes on you doubles it again. Lying low is meant to be the best play available.
A bank job puts seven hundred and fifty dollars on your head, and no amount of hiding takes it down. It comes off by serving the sentence, by paying the bond at a sheriff's office with the clerk's cut on top, or by somebody collecting it.
They are not the law. Past a hundred and fifty dollars they get dispatched now and then, they ride, and they find you in country where no lawman would bother. Alive pays the full poster and dead pays a little over half of it, which is a decision rather than a preference.
Sentences run from two minutes to half an hour, scaled by how much heat you were carrying when booked. Coming quietly takes a third off. Breaking rock in the yard takes real time off the rest. Serving the whole term wipes the bounty, which is the reason to serve it.
There is a sheriff's office in eight of the nine towns. Van Horn has none, and that is on purpose. Somewhere on this map has to be lawless.
Medical
A shot that would kill you puts you on the ground instead, able to look around and to talk and to do nothing else. From there there are two ways out, and two minutes in which to find one.
A doctor is the good ending. Reviving is twenty seconds of two people kneeling in the dirt in the open, needs a suture kit and a bandage, and pays the doctor for the trouble. If either of you gets up and walks off, it stops. Doctors on duty are told about anyone on the ground within sixty metres of them, and a downed player can shout for one every forty five seconds.
Otherwise the clock runs out and you are offered a bed at the nearest surgery, with a small bill and less blood in you than you started with. Offered, never forced: being teleported out of a scene mid sentence would be a second punishment nobody asked for. If your pockets are empty you still wake up.
Quitting while you are down buys nothing. The clock is held on the server and it stops while you are gone, so you come back exactly as broken as you left.
Horses and stables
Anything wild, or broken in the field and never registered, runs at four fifths of what the breed is worth. That is permanent and it is not a debuff waiting to wear off. A stolen animal has no reason to run itself into the ground for you.
A fresh horse off the stable floor starts slower than the one you could have stolen. That surprises people, and it is the design. You did not buy a fast horse, you bought a horse that can become one: twenty levels, four levels of bond, and it ends up half again better than anything on the plains.
From an Ardennes that will not die on you to an Arabian that will not stand still. Temperament is printed on the stall card, so a buyer can weigh a fiery racer against a placid draft animal instead of finding out later.
Health and stamina fall as the animal is worked and come back with feed, rest and a brush. A horse ridden into the ground is slower than a wild one, which is the lesson. Board at a stable is free, because charging rent on a horse someone already bought is how you stop people owning horses.
One stable per town, five stalls and three carts on the lot, and the stock rolls every three days. The good animals show up in Saint Denis and Blackwater, and what survives out west shows up in Tumbleweed and Armadillo. Missing the one you wanted costs you something, which is what makes riding to a yard worth doing.
Two smaller things that matter
Food that only refills a bar is a chore with a bar on it. Every meal here grants a timed effect you notice while doing something else: wind back quicker, cuts closing faster, the cold working harder at you, a heavier load on your back, the pick lighter on the twentieth swing, horse and rider both lasting longer.
The cook's skill decides how strong the effect is and how long it lasts, and the stew wants meat from a hunter and vegetables from a farmer. Which is how a cook becomes someone worth having in a posse rather than someone worth being.
Proximity voice with three ranges: a whisper carries two metres, a normal voice six, a shout fourteen. Tighter than the usual defaults, so a crowded saloon is usable and stepping aside for a quiet word means something.
There are no radios. It is 1899, a handheld set is sixty years early, and it would undercut a server where distance is the whole point. The law and everybody else coordinate by riding to each other. The dead do not talk.
These are in the repository and are not running. They are listed here because a feature list that quietly includes them would be a lie, and you would find out in about ten minutes.
Everything else on this page is enabled on the server as it stands today. When one of the above comes on, it moves up the page.
The doors are not open yet. Getting on the list before they are takes about five minutes.