How a world plays
One shared village, a roster of Zips that each do exactly one thing, and a wave clock that keeps running after you close the tab. Here is the whole loop, in the order you meet it.
The first ten minutes
Founding a world takes a minute. Understanding one takes about ten. This is what those ten look like.
- 1
Found a world
A world is one save: one village, one map, one wave clock. Play it on your own, or invite people in and share every part of it except who owns which Zip.
- 2
Agree with a starter
Three young Zips are circling the camp when you arrive. You keep the one you pick, at level one, with a nature and a set of moods of its own. Every Zip after this one you go out and win over yourself.
- 3
Let Maren do the explaining
The valley's elder walks you through eighteen short chapters, ordered by what you need to understand next rather than by what reads best: wood, a Den, loyalty, stone, storage, the wall, then a wave. Each chapter pays a purse worth roughly six tenths of what the next one costs, so the tutorial keeps you moving without building the village for you.
- 4
Put up the first four buildings
The Timber Camp first, because everything else is priced in wood. Then the Den, so your Zip has somewhere to live. Then the Quarry and the Warehouse. A builder takes one order at a time and the queue holds three, so from the first minute the question is what is worth the queue.
- 5
Live through the first wave
The first poacher wave is already scheduled when you arrive, inside your first hour. You have three wall places before you have built any Wall at all, so put a Zip up there before dusk. A Zip that goes down is not lost. It is hurt, and it sits out at the Barracks until it is patched up.
All of this runs on a real clock
One village, shared by everyone in the world
Wood, stone and silver come out of one warehouse, and the build queue belongs to everybody. The buildings are the village's. What is yours is your Zips.
Town Hall
Levels to 25The only thing standing when you arrive. Its level decides how fast every other order is built, and most of the requirement tree is written against it.
Timber Camp
Levels to 40Wood, which everything in the valley is priced in first. A village that runs dry of it stops dead.
Quarry
Levels to 40Stone, which everything you want still standing in a hundred years is priced in.
Silver Mine
Levels to 40Silver, which pays for training, for spies and for the dearer end of the build list.
Warehouse
Levels to 35The ceiling on all three resources, plus a small amount of each that raiders can never reach.
Farm
Levels to 45Villagers. Every level you raise anywhere puts more of them to work, and the Farm is what houses them.
Barracks
Levels to 30The drill yard and the sick bay. Training benches are counted per player, and every level takes time off a knockout.
Wall
Levels to 25One more wall place for every level, and a multiplier on the defense of every Zip that meets a wave.
Temple
Levels to 30Favor, and the god you spend it on. Its level is both the rate favor gathers at and the most of it the village can hold.
Academy
Levels to 36Research, one technology at a time. Its level is what the deeper half of the tree is gated behind.
Cave
Levels to 10Silver kept apart from the warehouse, for bribing spies with. Fully upgraded it holds as much as you care to put in it.
Den
Levels to 25Where your active Zips live. Four places at level one and one more with every level after, counted per player, so a busier world never squeezes anyone's roster.
Sanctuary
Levels to 10Decides which of your Zips survive a prestige. Short, expensive, and never required to do one.
A full warehouse earns you nothing
One Zip is doing exactly one thing
There is no stack of flags on a Zip. It is in one state, that state is what it is doing, and putting it to work somewhere means taking it off whatever it was doing before.
The Den's level is how many Zips you can keep in play. Everything else waits in the Zipbox, which is free, unlimited and does nothing at all. That pair is the whole point: an unlimited collection stays collectable, while what you can actually field at once is a building you chose to raise.
- In the Zipbox
- Put away and not in play. It still counts toward how big the next wave is, and it does not survive a prestige unless the Sanctuary is sheltering it.
- Settling in
- Just moved into the Den and finding its feet. It cannot be given a job yet, which is what stops the Den being swapped around the moment a wave appears.
- Resting
- In the Den and free. Resting is how a Zip comes round to you fastest, and a well built Den makes that faster still.
- On the wall
- Standing watch, and one of the Zips that will meet the next wave. Guard duty is work, so loyalty comes in slower than it does resting.
- Training
- Occupied at the Barracks until its session finishes. Benches are per player, so nobody in your world can take them all.
- Marching
- Out with a squad, and no use to the wall until it walks home.
- Recovering
- Knocked out and being patched up. The Barracks level shortens it, down to a floor that keeps a loss meaning something.
- Captured
- Taken by poachers and held at a camp until somebody goes and gets it. Anyone in the world can be the one who goes.
Loyalty follows the state
A day resting wins a Zip over. A day on the wall roughly holds it. A day marching, or a day held at a poacher camp, wears it down. You can feed, groom and play with a Zip on top of that, and a Zip that trusts you fights like it means it.
A roster that never comes home slowly stops liking you.
The wall is the village's
A Zip is its owner's until they share it. Share one and any member can do anything with it: move it between the Zipbox, the Den and the wall, book it into the Barracks, shelter it, or take it out on the road. One rule rather than a table of them, so there is one thing to learn and one thing to change your mind about. A Zip you keep to yourself still counts toward the size of the next wave, so a roster nobody can reach is a wave nobody can answer.
Zips pool for defense, never for risk.
The wave clock does not care whether you are watching
Poachers hit the village on a timer a few hours apart, online or not. A wave that lands while you are asleep is resolved on the server and waiting in the battle log when you come back, turn by turn, exactly as it happened.
Being there counts
A village somebody is actually watching defends better. A live defender lifts the whole defending side by fifteen percent, and halves the chance that a lost wave takes a Zip away with it.
Presence is a bonus, not a figure of speech.
Wall places are per player
Three before you have built any Wall, one more for every Wall level after the first, and more again from Academy research like Rallying Horn and Grand Muster. One player's collection can never crowd out another's.
The Wall also multiplies what every defender can take.
What losing costs
A wave that gets through takes a fifth of the stores the Warehouse was not hiding, and knocks out about half of the Zips that met it. Poachers deal in Zips, so it can also take one, at most one per owner, to a camp you are free to go and clear.
A knocked out Zip is hurt, never gone.
What winning pays
Wood, stone and silver worth a bit over half of what your producers make between one wave and the next, experience for every Zip that fought, and now and then a freed Zip that its defender gets to keep.
A wave tops production up. It does not replace it.
Emptying the wall never makes a wave smaller
A wave is sized against the strongest Zips each player owns, wherever those Zips happen to be, down to the last one asleep in the Zipbox. It is fought only by the ones standing watch.
Any narrower rule would hand out a way to cheat the wave. Sizing to who was home would make marching out shrink it. Sizing to the Den would make putting your best Zips away shrink it, which is worse, because a wave met by nobody knocks nobody out.
Leaving the village is the interesting half
The map fills in around the village while you play: poacher camps, wandering poachers, resource nodes, wild Zips, merchants and the occasional abandoned shrine. None of it waits forever, and what a find is worth climbs the further out it sits.
A march is a real journey
You pick a squad and it walks out and back on the clock. Everything you send is off the wall for the whole round trip, and a small squad can only carry so much home, so how many go is a decision rather than a formality.
No road is ever safe
A march can be ambushed on the way. The chance climbs with distance and falls with squad power along a curve with no flat ends: every extra Zip counts at every scale, and no squad is ever strong enough to make a road safe. It never drops under two percent and never passes forty five.
You are told the real odds
Before a squad sets out, the game quotes the ambush chance from the same function that will later roll it. Nothing about the risk is hidden from you, and nothing about it is decided after you have committed.
Never certain, never hopeless, either way.
Losing a fight loses Zips, for a while
Zips that go down on the road are captured into a holding camp, and a holding camp never expires. Any member of the world can march out and clear it, and everyone held there goes home to their owner's Zipbox.
You always keep four Zips, because a rescue needs a party: two take that camp about six times in a hundred, three about six times in ten, four almost always.
Spying is a bribe, not a fee
The Cave keeps silver apart from the warehouse to pay spies with. You decide what to offer for a look inside a camp, and you never learn what that camp would have taken. Offer near its asking price and it is close to a sure thing. The top of the slider is still not a purchase.
The Trail has no clock in it
Follow the poachers' trail and the stages resolve back to back with nothing to wait for in between. Damage carries from one fight into the next, and after each one you choose whether to push deeper for a bigger haul or walk home with what you have banked.
What runs out is the party, not a timer.
What a village is working toward
None of this is finished in an evening, and none of it is a wall to grind at. It is five slow tracks running underneath the daily loop.
The Academy
One technology at a time, each level stacking on the last, and the deeper half of the tree gated behind the Academy's own level. Sharpened Claws and Toughened Hides at the bottom. Rallying Horn to put more Zips on the wall. Master Builders and Architecture to make the whole build list faster and cheaper. At Academy 36 there is exactly one study left, and it is the Rite of Ascension.
The Temple and its gods
Favor gathers at the Temple and buys blessings from the one god your village worships. Atlas, the Unyielding, for the village that is still standing tomorrow. Pelagia, the Tide Mother, for the one that grows fastest between waves. Ignis, the Everflame, for the one out on the map taking things. Aura, the Skyward, for the one that ranges furthest. Verna, the Quickening, for the one whose Zips are back on their feet first. Fornax, the Evenhanded, for the one that builds cheaply and keeps what it has. Every god answers one question and no two answer the same one. Every god pays favor at the same rate, so a patron is a choice about what your village is for, and turning away from one costs every point banked in their name.
The daily streak
A streak day is credited only when every current member of the world has been around inside the same day, so it belongs to the world rather than to whoever logs in most. Spark, Ember, Hearth, Bonfire, then Everflame at a month unbroken, lifting production by a fifth and build speed close to it. A world of one earns it by showing up.
The Zipdeck
Every species you see and every one you catch is written down, per world. Twenty species across fifteen types, each with a nature that lifts one stat and lowers another, moods that move all of them, and hidden values rolled the moment it exists. Roughly one Zip in four thousand is shiny, and a shiny survives a prestige without needing a place in the Sanctuary.
Prestige
A fully built Town Hall and the Rite of Ascension unlock the reset, and every current member has to agree to it. The village starts again, and you keep a permanent five percent on production and on Zip stats that stacks with every prestige after it. The Sanctuary decides who comes with you: sheltered Zips reset to level one but keep exactly who they are, and every prestige a Zip survives leaves it fonder of you than it started.
The valley is quiet right now.
Found a world, agree with a starter, and get something on the wall before dusk.
Free to play. No download, it runs in your browser.