The Waking World

0.3.0-beta.1 "Crown and Tower"

The dark mage. A tower on a crag, and in it a mage who is neutral until you are not. He keeps an Asking Stone: set it down, pay the price in items, and he calls a cataclysm down your bearing — a volcano ninety blocks out, a falling star, a tornado, a quake — five rites, each explained as you go. Strike him and it is a four-stage boss fight: seven attacks, a ward to break in every stage, four forms that come apart rather than grow, his own boss bar and window, and battle music that turns over when his stage does. The last blow does not kill him. It folds him into a jar.

The Pocket Mage. Carry the jar and he walks behind you as a companion: three stances (Meek, Defend, Guard), and deeds of his own — Mend, Light, Gather — on their own timers. Or hand him to a king, who digs a cell under the bailey and keeps him. One at a time.

Kingdoms that grow. A walled town now has a standing with you (−100 … 100), moved by what already happens: trade at the market, a Colossus Heart given to the king, a giant put down in his country, an offence. Standing sets the town's tier, one step per review, reviewed once a day while somebody is near — and the tier is visible: lanterns on the wall walk, the town's colours on the towers, flower boxes in the streets, works outside the moat (a farm, a mill, a watchtower, a market, and for a city a catapult), a march wall far out in the country from tier 3. The border is the Named Lands — one land per tier, its own first — and a claim places no blocks, so it can never annex your base. The king has a charge for you: a levy of goods, or a contract against the mage.

The suburb. A town that grows grows outward: houses along the roads out of its gates — six for a town, thirteen for a walled town, twenty-two for a city — raised a few at a time, so you watch it happen. Six designs (the cottage, the longhouse, the jettied townhouse, the smithy, the tavern with its sign, the chapel with a bell in an open belfry), five timber-and-roof palettes, every house footed, floored, furnished and lit, with a garden, a tree, a hedge or a yard wall; lamps down the lanes, a well at the head of each back lane, the road paved out to the march wall. A house stands on a hillside up to twelve blocks of rise — the plot is cut and terraced, the door always meets the street — and the trees round a plot come down for it. The people move in when the masons finish.

The masons. Everything the kingdom raises goes up course by course, in front of you. And the same masons repair: after a cataclysm the town rebuilds its damage from the hourglass's own record — damage only, so a corner you rebuilt yourself is left alone — and it fights its fires and its lava.

The engines. A city raises a catapult. Blow the Horn of Waking at a giant within the town's reach and the engines answer with a volley of stones that strike the colossus where it is weak and break its cores — once per giant, never the Titan. The new Signal Horn calls them onto whatever you are looking at, 160 blocks out, once every five minutes.

Commands, for operators: /wakingworld kingdom [at] [standing n | repair | build | engine | houses [n] | houses redo | houses forget], /wakingworld bombard <at>, /wakingworld kingdomscan (prints the exact /place structure line for every cell that would take a kingdom).

Off switches. features.mage joins the [features] section of the server config, next to kingdoms; a part switched off never generates and never runs.

A beta, on purpose. The growing kingdoms are a big new system and this is their first meeting with worlds that are not the author's. Known: the works want fairly level ground (a plot with more than a few blocks of rise is passed over; houses take up to twelve), so a mountain town grows more slowly than one on a plain. Kingdoms from 0.2.0 join in: they are reviewed like any other once you are near. A suburb raised by a dev build gets its doors with /wakingworld kingdom houses redo.

No dependencies. Works on servers. Full changelog: https://github.com/Lovkar-Squid/the-waking-world/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md