How Emerge works

Getting started

1. Connect a wallet. MetaMask or Trust Wallet, on Robinhood Chain (chain 4663). If you have more than one wallet installed, pick the one you mean — the game will ask rather than guess.
2. Sign in. One free signature on a plain sentence, good for a day. It is not a transaction and moves nothing; it proves the wallet is yours so nobody else can spend, claim or speak as you.
3. Claim a plot. Pick land on the world map. You pay in $EMERGE, it is burned, and the plot is yours.
4. Then just watch for a while. Nothing needs doing immediately. The settlement runs whether or not you are there.

Everything you own is keyed to your wallet address, not to your browser. Connect the same wallet on a different device and your worlds are there.

Land and ownership

A plot is a seed. The same number that generates its rivers, hills and woodland is the number that identifies it, so no two plots are the same land and the ground you see before you buy is the ground you get.

One owner per plot, always. A claim is written once and cannot be overwritten; if two people go for the same land in the same instant, exactly one gets it and the other is refused before paying. Your land is held against your wallet address, so it survives clearing your browser, changing device, or coming back months later.

Nothing is recorded until it is paid for. The registry reads your burn off the chain before it writes a title — right wallet, right amount, settled, not already spent on something else. There is no way to get land without paying for it, and no way to pay without getting it.

Resale is player to player. A plot you put up for sale shows on everybody’s map with its price. The buyer pays your wallet directly in $EMERGE — a plain transfer, nothing burned, nothing taken by the game — and the registry moves the plot to them once it has read that transfer off the chain, from their wallet, to yours, for at least what you asked. The settlement goes with the land. The world holds room for about 357 plots across twenty-one charts, and the map says how many are claimed and how many are left.

Offers. Any plot can be offered for, listed or not: name a price on its card and the owner sees it in their On-Chain panel and gets a card saying so. Accepting holds the plot for that bidder at that price for two days; they pay your wallet to take it, exactly as for a listed sale. Nothing is escrowed — an offer is a price, not a deposit — so a bidder who walks away costs nobody anything, and the hold simply lapses.

What a plot costs

Priced by what the land supports, from the seed alone:

You may hold as many plots as you like. Only the first 5 you claimed earn — see below.

What things cost

Every charge goes into the vault, and most of it is burned there. Not sent to us, not collected by anybody: one transfer into the vault at 0x282f…6062, of which the vault burns 60% itself, from its own key, so the supply falls with every charge, keeps 25% to pay withdrawals from, and sets 15% aside for the weekly GLD dividend. What players spend is what players are paid from, and the book is public at /api/vault: paid in, kept, owed to the burn address, burned, and the burn transactions. There is no address the project takes a cut into, because there is no cut.

Building, demolishing, moving people around and everything else inside your settlement costs Gold, not $EMERGE. Gold is the settlement’s own money and never leaves it.

Expanding a plot

An expansion makes the plot itself bigger. A ring of new ground appears on every side of the land you have — about half as much land again — with the river running on into it, wildlife on it, and the wood on it yours to clear or build over. Nothing you have built moves: the settlement stays exactly where it is and the edge moves out. It costs 1,000,000 $EMERGE, burned like every other charge, and can be bought once per plot, from the On-Chain panel inside the world. The registry records it against the plot, so it follows the land to any device and to a new owner if the plot is sold.

Earning

You are not paid for holding land. You are paid for running it well, and the rate is worked out fresh every day from the state of your settlement. This section is about $EMERGE coming to your wallet; the Gold your citizens earn is a separate thing and has its own section below.

It accrues against the clock, open or closed: the stretch since the game last paid you is paid at the attention it actually had through it, so a day away is a day of a slowly falling rate, not nothing. What comes to more than the day’s ceiling stays banked in the world for tomorrow.

Quality is how the place is actually doing — housed (25%), fed (25%), employed (20%), content (20%) and safe (10%). Attention is how recently you did anything about it: full if you have just acted, sliding down over about a day and a half of silence to a floor of 8%. A world nobody touches earns a fraction of one that is being run. Attention is yours, not the plot’s: with two or more plots you can only have one open, so acting on any of them keeps every plot you own attended, and the ones you are not looking at go on earning at the shape you left them in. The vault judges it the same way, from your presence anywhere in the game.

All figures are $EMERGE per real day. Only your first 5 plots pay, and 1,000,000 a day is a hard ceiling per wallet — so no amount of money buys past it. That is deliberate: the cap is what stops the game being a machine for turning capital into tokens.

Earning without land: hired hands

You do not need a plot to earn, only a job. An owner can open one on their plot; a player with no land of their own who holds at least 50,000 $EMERGE takes it from the world map and goes to work. Work is a visit that pays: while you have that settlement open and in view, you are paid 10% of what its stewardship comes to, up to 25,000 $EMERGE a day, by the vault — never out of the owner’s yield.

The owner gets something real for it: while a hand is at work the plot counts as attended, so their rate holds while they are away. One hand per plot, one job per wallet, and never a landholder — a landholder has their own plot to run. Your shift starts at full rate and slides the same way an owner’s attention does, so a tab left open all week earns about what it would earn an owner: very little.

Eras pay more

Each era a plot advances to lifts its daily ceiling by 15% of the base: a township can earn up to 15% more than a settlement, an industrial city 30% more, a modern one 45% more, an AI-era city 60% more. The stewardship score and the attention rule are unchanged; the ceiling they multiply is what grows. The payout route reads the era from the claim row, which only the gated, burn-verified advance can raise, so the higher ceiling cannot be reached by editing a save.

City levels

Since v2.0 the ceiling runs on what the plot has become, not only on its era. Every plot has a city level, one to ten, read from the people living there and the buildings standing. Size earns the next level; Gold pays for the public works that confirm it. The CITY card in the Bank shows the level, what the next asks, and the button. A plot’s daily ceiling runs from 40,000 at level one to 156,250 at level ten, times the era, so a level-ten city in the AI era can earn up to 250,000 a day and a fresh claim earns a fraction of it. Growing what you have is worth more than claiming another plot.

The payout route reads the level from the copy of your world the registry holds, the same way it reads the era, so the ceiling cannot be reached by editing a save. A city that was already the size of a level-four town when v2.0 arrived is a level-four town, with nothing to pay for the levels it had grown into. The level is also on the era gate: three for the township, five for industrial, seven for modern, nine for AI.

A charter lifts the ceiling by 20% for 30 days, for four days of the plot’s own ceiling: 160,000 $EMERGE for a new plot, 1,000,000 for a top city, the same bargain at every level. Buying another while one runs adds the days on. It is recorded on the claim row, so it follows the plot to any device and the payout route counts it.

The GLD dividend

15% of every charge is set aside in a pool. Each Monday the vault sends 30% of it to development, swaps the rest into GLD on Robinhood Chain, and books the GLD to holders: 55% to land, weighted by the level each plot is judged at and the days its owner was present that week; 15% to soft stakes, which are a registration rather than a lock: register once on the Bank’s DIVIDENDS card and your lowest $EMERGE balance through the week counts, from 100,000 up. Sell mid-week and the week is forfeited. GLD waits under your wallet until you claim it, and the vault sends it. The settlements are on the public book at /api/dividend.

Judged, not reported

What the vault pays is decided on the server from three things the browser cannot write. The level a plot is paid on is the smaller of what its published world shows and one level per three days its owner has actually been present, which the heartbeat records. The score is computed from the published world with the same function the settlement runs. The attention is the owner’s last heartbeat on that plot. The payout route pays the lesser of what the client claims and ceiling × score × attention, so a scripted client earns what a present, well-run plot earns and nothing more, and a level-ten snapshot on a day-old claim is paid as level one.

The settlement’s own money

There are two moneys in Emerge and they do different jobs. $EMERGE is yours: it lives in your wallet, it buys land, and every charge burns it. Gold is the town’s: it pays the people who live there and buys the things they cannot make. Your citizens earn it, spend it and are paid it all day, whether or not you are watching.

How a settlement makes money

Four ways, and three of them are the townspeople rather than you:

It is a circle, not a tap. The treasury pays wages in the morning; the people who were paid buy bread, clothes and furniture from the stalls during the day; most of that money comes back to the treasury as household spending and food sales. A settlement that produces more than it consumes ends the day up. One that does not ends it down, and you will see it in the Bank the same evening.

What it pays out

Wages are the big one, and they are per person per day:

If the treasury cannot cover the payroll, everybody is paid a share of what there is and the feed says so. Nobody is sacked for it, but people get poorer, and poorer people buy less, which is how a settlement talks itself into a slump.

What you pay them

You set the wage, from 50% of the going rate to 160%, in the Bank. It is a dial with a cost at both ends and no free setting.

Those numbers are not a guess — the curve was set by running eight settlements for a hundred and fifty days at each setting. An earlier version gave generous pay a large production bonus, and the extra goods sold more than repaid the extra wages, which made generosity free. It is not free now.

Why the world market matters to your books

Exports and imports are both priced by the shared market, so what your land is good at is now worth real money. A settlement sitting on a surplus of something scarce across every world sells it dearly; one that has to buy in what everybody else is also short of pays dearly for it. Nine biomes support different trades, which is what makes a plot’s biome an economic decision rather than a colour.

Your citizens read this too. When the world pays well for metal, more of them take up mining and smithing — unless the town is hungry, in which case they farm, because feeding themselves comes first.

Deposits and withdrawals

Gold funds your settlement; $EMERGE is the token behind it. You can move your own money both ways.

Deposits are the one thing not burned, and for an obvious reason: it is your own money and the withdrawal door has to be able to give it back. Deposits go to the vault and are credited only after the chain confirms they arrived — from your wallet, specifically, so nobody can claim credit for a deposit you made.

Withdrawals are automatic. Press withdraw and the vault signs a transfer to your wallet there and then; the Bank hands you the transaction so you can check it yourself. Nobody approves it and nobody can decide not to. What you can take out is what the chain says you put in — so it is the same figure on every device, and no one can withdraw more than they deposited.

Gold your settlement earns on its own is not withdrawable — see the settlement’s own money for what it is and what it does. What comes out of the vault is what you put in, plus stewardship yield when that opens.

Buildings

You cannot tell anybody what to do, so a building is how you say what the settlement needs. Raise one and somebody will decide it is theirs — immediately, if it is standing empty. Each holds two workers, except a mine, which holds three.

Everything costs Gold and materials out of the yard, so what you can raise depends on what your woodcutters have felled and your quarry has cut. Every building also costs Gold every day to keep standing, for as long as it stands, and a quarter more per era it was raised in: a modern block costs more to keep than a cabin.

A house sleeps as many people as it has room for: 3 beds at level one, 5 at level two, 7 at level three, which is what improving a house is for; the house’s card says who sleeps there against the beds. Families share a roof when there is room, the largest family first, so a newcomer who came alone does not take a whole house for one bed. The feed says who moved in where.

Festivals. The CITY card in the Bank can hold one a day: 25 Gold a head, and everybody comes back happier and closer to their neighbours. It is the cheapest way to lift the stewardship score, and the treasury is what it is for.

The settlement builds for itself. When the treasury holds twice a building’s price and a fortnight of wages and upkeep besides, and the yard has the timber and stone, it raises what it is short of without being asked: a roof for anybody sleeping rough first, then a farm or a woodcutter when the stores are thin, then whatever the plot helper would tell you next — a store, a cafe, a school, a clinic, a lab, a trade the land supports. One building a day at most, and the feed says what it built and why.

People and training

The People panel in the bar is the whole workforce at a glance. One tab lists every adult with their trade, their skill and where they work, the unemployed first and filterable by trade. Another lists every trade with its workers against the posts its workplaces offer, and how many stand open. A third lists every workplace with its crew and its posts, ruins flagged. It is how you see what a building is and which jobs you are missing once there are thirty of them.

Training is the lever. Retrain one person into any trade that has a workplace, or fill every open post in a trade at once with the people who can best be spared: the unemployed first, then anyone in a trade with more hands than posts, then the least skilled; never the last farmer, fisher, hunter or forager. It costs Gold a head, takes effect at once, gives the trainee a head start in skill (doubled by a School), and holds them to the trade for forty days against the settlement’s own daily reshuffling. After that they are the settlement’s to move again.

The trades

Nine of them turn land into goods, and each is a link in a chain:

Per worker, per day, before the land, the season, the weather and what you pay have had their say. A farm on fertile ground grows more than the same farm on sand; a farm in winter grows less than the same farm in summer; and everything is multiplied by the wage you set. “Out of” is what the trade consumes — a baker with no flour bakes nothing, however many bakers you have.

Fishing, hunting and foraging

Three trades work out of doors, and the settlement is a better thing to watch for it. A Fishery puts fishers on the bank nearest the hut, rod out over the water. Every fisher goes through 2 Gold of bait a day, booked under “Bait and arrows” in the Bank, and about one day in seven a rod snaps and3 timber goes to a new one. No Gold for bait or no timber for a rod halves the catch until there is. Winter and storms slow it; a coast or a river speeds it.

A Lodge sends hunters after the animals that actually live on the plot. Every land has its own — deer, boar and fox under trees; goats and elk on the shelf; antelope on the steppe; gazelle on the dunes; ducks on the fen; boar and a gator in the swamp — and they graze, wander and bolt from anybody who walks too close. A hunter picks one, closes on it, brings it down and carries it back to the store: the kill is credited the moment it happens, game and hides both, scaled by skill. Each hunter uses 1 timber of arrows a day, and a short quiver means lighter kills. The herd comes back a head or two a day up to what the land carries, so a lodge that hunts faster than that empties its own wood. Hunters also count toward readiness for wolves.

A Forager camp sends people onto the open ground for berries and herbs, heavy in autumn and thin under snow. Fish, game and berries are eaten alongside bread; hides and herbs are sold, and herbs are the dearest thing a small settlement makes.

Everything else

What improving does

Every improvement does something, and the building’s card says what before you pay. Workplaces make 22% more per level. A house adds two beds. A school, library, lab, clinic, hospital, cafe, tavern, chapel and the rest do their job a quarter more strongly per level. A market sells exports for 5% more per level; a bank makes every building’s upkeep 5% cheaper per level; a town hall lifts stewardship quality 2% per level; an improved store counts half again toward readiness; stables, stations, depots and pod hubs move people 10% faster per level; an improved jail halves the odds again and stops a rogue sooner.

One of each

A town hall, a jail, a tavern, a school, a harbour: every building whose whole effect is that one stands is unique to the plot. The Build panel marks the one you have as Built, the cursor refuses a second, and the settlement’s own builder never raises one; a ruin of it is rebuilt rather than replaced. Houses, stores and every workplace with posts in it are the ones worth more of. Improve the one you have: an improved jail holds the town better, an improved house sleeps more.

Bridges by hand

The settlement builds bridges on its own when it is rich enough and the far shore is worth it; the Build panel’s Bridge tool is you choosing the far shore. Tap land across the water and the crew stakes out the narrowest sound crossing to it, for 600 Gold up front and timber and wages by the day. When the yard is short of timber the crew buys it in with Gold at the market’s price and a half, rather than standing idle, so a town that has run its woodcutters down still gets its crossing. One crossing at a time.

Clearing trees

The Build panel carries a tool for the wood: tap the ground with it and every standing tree within reach is felled, for 12 Gold a tree, with 3 timber each going to the yard. Cleared ground stays cleared through a reload and grows back over the following days, the same way a woodcutter’s work does, so clear where you mean to build rather than for the view.

Moving and improving

A building’s card has two buttons besides the trade it does. Move picks it up and arms the placing cursor: tap the ground and it goes there, for 35% of what it cost to raise. Roads are cut to the new spot and anybody who was walking to the old one is given somewhere else to be. Nothing is lost by moving except the Gold. One rule for placing anything, moved or new: it must leave room to walk between it and its neighbours. Two buildings that touch make a seam nobody can pass, and the cursor will refuse the spot and say so.

Improve spends Gold and materials to take a building up a level, to a maximum of 3. The first step costs 80% of the original price, the second 140%, in Gold and in timber and stone both — so the top level is a decision, not a formality. Each level adds about 22% to what the building produces and 50% to its upkeep. It does not hold more workers — and it shows: lanterns and a banner at the second level, a glass annex, a taller frame and gold along the eaves at the third. An improved workshop earns its keep if it is staffed and supplied; an improved one standing idle is simply a larger bill every day.

Anything can be pulled down from its card except the market, the bank and the town hall — those hold the settlement together — and any house somebody still lives in. Pulling something down salvages half the timber and stone back into the yard. The Gold is gone; what you get is the upkeep stopped, and that is usually the point of doing it.

Eras

Every plot begins in the Settlement era: timber and thatch, hand tools, dirt lanes, everybody on foot. When it has earned it, the owner can advance it one era at a time. There are five, and all of them are built.

The days are counted in the era the plot is in, and the checklist is drawn from things the settlement already measures. Both are shown on the ERA card in the On-Chain panel, line by line, with a tick against each one met. When every line is met the button offers the step for 1,000,000 $EMERGE, burned like every other charge. The world is published first and the registry judges the checklist on the copy it holds, so nothing on your own device can be edited into an era. The era is recorded against the plot and follows it to any device and to a buyer.

What a township changes

• The look. Buildings raised or improved after the step are stone with tiled roofs; the ones you already had keep their timber until you improve them, so an old stone chapel in the middle of a modern town is the right picture. Dirt lanes become cobbles. People wear wool coats and hats.
• Carts. A Stables puts every working adult on a cart while they are on the move, four tenths faster than walking. The cart is drawn under them.
• The ferry. A Harbour puts a boat on every channel. People cross open water on it where there is no bridge, and every island counts as reachable, so a settlement hemmed in by water can spread to all of its land. Bridges stay, and the roads still run over them. If the Harbour is ruined, anyone out on the water swims for the bank.
• Six buildings. Chapel (company and purpose), Guildhall (learning), Brewery (company), Printer (purpose and learning), Stables, Harbour. They cost Gold, timber and stone like everything else and appear on their shelves in the Build panel once the plot is a township.

The later eras

Each era follows the same rails as the township. The look changes: brick and iron with setts and rails on the roads, then concrete and glass with tarmac, then white composite with light strips, roof gardens and pale quiet roads. People change clothes with it. Buildings already standing keep their look until you improve them.

• Rides. A Railway Station puts working adults on the rails, faster than carts. A Bus Depot puts them in cars, a third of them on bikes. A Pod Hub puts everybody in autonomous pods, fastest of all. Each ride is drawn under the person, and a town that loses its newest transport falls back to the one before.
• Boats. The Harbour’s ferry becomes a steamboat, then a motorboat, then a hydrofoil.
• Smog. An industrial town without a Gasworks lives under smog, a slow drain on everybody’s happiness. A Gasworks clears it, and the modern era leaves it behind.
• Industry. Factory, Foundry, Power Plant and Research Campus each add to what every trade produces, on top of the Lab.
• Care. A Hospital is a Clinic with wards: it takes more of the risk out of a bad week and a plague.
• Company and purpose. Telegraph, Stadium, Office and Drone Port put something back into people every day; a Supermarket and a Vertical Farm keep the larder full; a Data Centre and the Research Campus make trades learned much faster.
• Gates. Some of the checks name buildings from the era after the one you are in, a Hospital for Modern, a Research Campus for AI. Those can be raised as soon as the era before opens them: the Hospital is modern, so an industrial town cannot build it. The gate counts what stands when the button is pressed, so raise them the moment you arrive in the era that allows them.

Shelves

The Build panel sorts every building onto a shelf: Homes, Food, Materials, Civic, Care and learning, Leisure, Transport and Utilities. A building from a later era is shown greyed with the name of the era it belongs to, so you can see what is coming. The settlement’s own builder raises only what the plot’s era allows.

Reading your settlement

The panel in the corner is the settlement’s vital signs. None of these is a score you are given — each is measured from the people who live there, and each has something you can actually do about it.

Happiness is the one that pays. It is one fifth of the stewardship score, and it is the fifth you have the most direct hold on — the other four are housing, food, work and safety, which are all buildings and preparation.

Everybody carries all six needs separately, and you can read any one person’s by tapping them. A settlement whose average happiness is fine can still contain somebody cold, friendless and about to change trade.

What can go wrong

Seven things, and none of them is random punishment: each wants particular conditions, and each has something that answers it. A hazard that arrives at a settlement which is ready for it costs close to nothing. One that arrives at a settlement which is not can take a building, a harvest, or somebody’s life.

Three of them are disasters that run by the hour and can be watched. An earthquakeshakes the whole plot for hours, cracks walls, brings some down and rattles the rest with aftershocks. A tornado comes down at the edge of the map and crosses it, wrecking whatever it passes over, until it lifts. A flood climbs the bank over days and takes the buildings standing in the water. A plague passes between people standing together, slows the sick, and kills some of them; herbs in store are the physic, one a day per patient.

You can spend Gold against any of them, once. The red bar under the clock, and the What could go wrong panel, offer the one thing that answers each: bucket chains, burning the blighted rows, a night watch, sandbags along the bank, shoring up the walls, storm crews, a quarantine. The price scales with how bad it is and how much town there is to save, and each does exactly what the panel says. Buildings a disaster wrecks are ruins — out of use, smoking, a heap of stone — until you rebuild them from the building card for about six tenths of the Gold and materials they cost new. Damage short of a ruin the carpenters patch on their own, two timber a day.

The What could go wrong panel shows how ready you are for each, as a percentage, before anything happens. That is the whole point of it: readiness is something to build in a quiet week, not something to read afterwards.

People who turn

Once in a while somebody turns on the settlement: the miserable, the purposeless, or somebody with a real enemy in the town. They take up a torch and set about the nearest building, and it comes down in a few hours. You have no hand in it. You cannot lift them away, and you cannot lift away the people who go after them. The three nearest adults awake drop what they are doing and give chase; when one gets within arm’s reach there is a scuffle, and it ends with the rogue thrown in the jail, or — twice at most — broken free and off after the next building. Somebody who has already brought two buildings down is not taken alive. Every Jail standing halves how often anybody turns, down to a tenth, and with a jail a rogue in a scuffle breaks free once in ten rather than once in three; without one, the market cellar holds them.

No disaster can flatten a city. An earthquake or a tornado can damage at most 25% of what stands, and never fewer than three buildings. Insurance, 150,000 $EMERGE on the On-Chain panel, halves whatever any of them does for 30 days.

Nor can one rogue. Without a jail a rogue brings down three buildings at most; with one, three, two or one by the jail’s level, and any rogue still loose by morning is cornered by the whole settlement. The jail’s level is what counts: a level-three jail cuts the chance of anybody turning to an eighth.

Readiness is not a purchase. It is counted from what is actually there — wells within reach and enough people awake nearby, food put by and somewhere to keep it, fires burning through a cold night, buildings set back from the water. Safety is a tenth of the stewardship score, so a settlement that is never ready is quietly paid less for it.

The world itself

Every being on your plot has their own hunger, energy, trade, friendships and grudges. They wake, work, argue, fall in love, raise children and bury their dead whether or not you are watching. You cannot tell anyone what to do. You can build them a workshop and watch somebody decide it is theirs.

What you actually control is the place: fund the treasury, raise houses and workshops, pull down what is not working, cut roads and bridges to land nobody can reach. A camp of eight becomes a town of thirty because of decisions you made, or it does not.

Seasons turn, weather lands, food runs short in a bad winter, and a settlement with no farm in a desert will struggle exactly as much as you would expect. Nine biomes, each supporting different trades — which is why they are priced differently.

The colosseum

An island nobody owns and anybody can walk into, whether or not they hold land. Players enter a citizen; the arena pairs two of them and runs a bout every three minutes, and everybody watching sees the same fight at the same moment.

Sending somebody

The Arena panel lists the five people in your settlement most fit to fight. Fitness is not a hidden combat stat — it is rest, food, warmth and clothing, so the way to a good fighter is to run a good settlement. Skill is the trade they have spent their life at. Strength decides only how often somebody lands a blow, never how hard, which is why even a lopsided pairing is worth watching.

An entry is good for one bout. Whoever is drawn comes off the roster the moment the pairing is made and goes home when the bell goes. Sending them back out is a decision you make again each time, not something that keeps happening to them.

Betting

Two minutes of each bout are open for betting; the last minute is the fight. Stakes come out of the settlement’s treasury and wins go back into it, booked in the Bank’s daily accounts so you can see exactly what the arena has cost you. Bets settle against the house at the odds shown, which are measured from the fight itself — several thousand simulated bouts of that exact pairing — so the price you are offered cannot drift from what actually happens. The house keeps a margin, and over time the arena takes more than it pays.

The result cannot be known early and cannot be rigged. The arena draws a secret when it makes a bout and publishes only its hash. Betting runs against that hash; the secret is released the moment betting closes, and the fight is computed from it. Nobody, the house included, can know the winner while money is going on — and afterwards anybody can check that the secret matches the hash published beforehand. The Arena panel does that check itself, in your browser, and says either way.

Arena Gold is Gold, not $EMERGE. Winning at the colosseum makes your settlement richer; it does not mint anything and cannot be withdrawn as a token.

Other players

Every plot anybody has claimed sits on one shared map. You can visit the settlements other people have built — tap a marker, or tap somebody’s name in chat — and see their world as they last left it.

A visit is a visit: you can watch and follow people around, but you cannot build, pull anything down, or earn there. You cannot see their treasury either. The one thing a visitor may do is put Gold into a settlement they like the look of, up to 2,000 Gold at a time, paid for in $EMERGE at the usual rate.

Chat has a global channel and one for the world you are standing in. A message posted under a wallet is signed by that wallet — so a name with a badge beside it really is that address, and cannot be worn by somebody else.

You can look before you connect anything. The front door has a just watch button: a spectator walks the world map, visits any settlement and talks in chat, marked as a spectator on every message so nobody mistakes them for a landholder. Claiming, building and earning still need a wallet.

Your settlement follows you. It is saved in your browser every fifteen seconds and published to the server; whichever copy is further along is the one that continues when you open the world anywhere, and the server refuses a copy that would put the world backwards — so a tab left open on an old device cannot undo a week of building on a new one.

Update notes

What is settled, and what is not

The useful question about any game like this is which parts the chain enforces and which parts are a company’s word. Here is the whole answer.

Two things worth knowing plainly. Gold and everything inside a settlement is game state, not money — the only door out of the game is withdrawing what you deposited. And the land record lives in a database we run: no other player can take your plot, but it is our word rather than the chain’s until the contract ships.