Player wiki

Welcome to Riverside Village. Fifty people, eight places, one campfire, a forest full of berries, a river with buckets on its bank, and three wooden buildings that would burn very well.

You do not play a character. You watch a village live, and when you want to, you reach in: light a fire, drop a stranger into the square, turn the cold off, and see what the village makes of it. The game's promise is that whatever happens, you can click it and ask how did this happen? — and get an answer in plain words that reaches back through causes until it finds you, or the world's beginning.

Start here

Riverside Village
The map, the places, who lives where.

Villager
What a person senses, needs, remembers and decides.

Ways to play
Watching, tinkering, and the rungs still to come.

Explain this
The question you can ask of anything.

The world

	Page	One line
	Time	Days, nights, the clock, and why you never see a tick.
	Fire and heat	Campfires warm, building fires spread; heat is what people actually feel.
	Food	Berry bushes, meals, regrowth, foraging.
	Water and buckets	Five buckets, one river, and why the water is in the bucket.
	The campfire	Why everyone is at the fire pit at night, and who fetches the wood.

People

	Page	One line
	Villager	The main page for people.
	Needs	Hunger, warmth, safety, rest, curiosity — what pulls a person.
	Personality	Cautious, curious, sociable, aggressive — why two people in the same spot do different things.
	What villagers know	Seeing, remembering, forgetting, and being wrong.
	Death	How people die, what they leave, and what remains of them.

Ways to play

	Page	One line
	Watching	The feed, the spotlight, interesting moments.
	Tinkering	Start fires, spawn people, change the rules.
	Explain this	Causes, in words.
	The timeline	Rewind the last day, step, replay.

What's new: Phase 1 · Words: Glossary

Status

Everything in the player wiki is designed · Phase 1 unless a page says otherwise. The numbers are the design's numbers; the harness tunes them, and the pages follow.