FOOTHOLD

How to play

Controls, then the numbers that matter

1. 01

   Fall 26 tiles below the source row and you wake on your bed, an intact hearth or the source. The void keeps every block and material you were carrying; tools, buckets, relics and briefs stay with you, chests keep what is in them, and the world is untouched. Die any other way and your bag waits where you fell, as one bundle: walk into it to take everything back.

2. 02

   The first time each phase begins, the source hands over a chest and a gift: a bucket of water and an empty bucket at Thaw (no sooner than 115 harvests and the third dawn), a bucket of lava at Ember (no sooner than 160 harvests and the fourth dawn). That lava is all there will ever be: a door will not shut on it, and if the void would take it, it goes back into a bucket.

3. 03

   A room calls a settler when it is closed, 60 tiles or fewer, with a back wall on every tile, a door, a bed, a floor to stand on and a light near the bed. A balloon comes 45 seconds later: a trader first (it buys seeds, and up to 64 blocks a day), then a farmer, then a mason. Right-click a bed you can wake on and, until its room counts, it names the first thing the room lacks.

4. 04

   Every settler living in a room asks for something built each dawn, a new shape each time and somewhere new (a build you already made will not do twice), until it has asked for all it wanted; a paper mark hangs over a settler with a request. Take it and a Brief goes in your bag: build it anywhere, stand on or in it, and select the Brief and click, or press Present here in the bag. Short of it, you are told the first thing missing; met, the pay waits with the settler and the line goes in the Ledger on the Esc menu. A settler's panel also says what it would still like in its room, and one with nothing left to ask offers extra deals.

5. 05

   A day lasts 300 seconds and a night 180. At night shades rise from your own dark blocks 8 to 40 tiles away, never on a block within 8 tiles of where you would wake, and dawn burns the ones under open sky. They never break a block: light them out, wall them out, or carry a sword.

6. 06

   Saplings become trees in 90 to 180 seconds. Crops take 40 seconds a stage, twice as fast within 4 tiles of water, and from 50 tiles above the source they grow twice as fast again and yield double. Rain collectors fill only from 30 tiles up, and past 40 the wind pushes you. While you are away, saplings, crops, flowers and rain collectors go on growing for up to eight hours, and when you come back the game says what grew.

7. 07

   The Make list starts empty and grows from what you pick up: a recipe appears once you have held any one of its ingredients, and the rarer ones (the chisel, cloth, lanterns, pigments, the cold-made materials and the like) once you have held all of them. Cob is the first thing you can make.

8. 08

   The void is not as empty as it looks. Now and then the source beats twice and the next harvest brings something with it; things drift past, the first of them slowly along your own row; a bird visits the highest thing you built, moths find your lights at night, fireflies rise from what you planted, and a falling star can be caught on something tall. Every world has a tune of its own.

9. 09

   Once you have met a settler's request, each day (Taipei time) puts a request for the day in your bag: one build, the same for every player that day, from a tower, an arch, a stair, a lit floor below the source, a landing, a garden or an orchard. Meet it that day or the next, somewhere new as with a settler's; its pay comes straight to you, a day missed costs nothing, and The day on the Esc menu lists the newest 14 you met.