the glass box

free forever

mosswane is free to play and stays free. there is no paywall, no premium tier, no energy meter, no pay-to-skip. the whole game is reachable by playing it.

no costume

most onchain games this year are a money-machine wearing a game - you feel it in thirty seconds. mosswane is trying to be the other thing: a creature, a frontier, and the rot. if an economy ever comes, it sits on top of a game that already works, last, and in the open.

there is nothing to buy today and nothing to shill today. the only thing offered to the early ones is their place in the world - a founding bloodline mark, earned by being here early. no allocation, no airdrop, no promise of money.

the token never gates play

if a token ever ships, it is an information layer only. two rules are absolute:

• never gates play - the entire game is free without it. no feature, zone, or cosmetic is locked behind holding anything.
• never run-power - it can never be read by a descent. movement, loot, decay, the rot-tide, extraction - all frozen, all byte-identical whether you hold zero or hold a lot.

today the token status line in the hub ships dark, flagged off by default. when there is something real to say, it flips on deliberately, with review. no specifics are invented before then.

gold, and where it goes

gold is the in-game currency, earned by extracting hauls. it has exactly two kinds of destination:

• three run upgrades - swift · satchel · cure. these bend risk/reward inside the frozen frontier; they are the only things gold buys that touch a run, and they are bounded and tuned (see the wiki).
• open-ended cosmetic sinks - the refuge you reclaim, the line you feed. these grant zero run-power. they exist so late gold never orphans - there is always a next thing to pour into, and none of it is an advantage.

the vault - a glass-box preview

there is a designed-but-inert engagement layer: a conversion vault and a seasons scaffold. both ship flagged off - they are a pure, tested simulation with no live money and no UI surface until reviewed and turned on deliberately.

the vault is built so it cannot misbehave by construction:

• it is a finite pool that releases a capped fraction of what remains each epoch - never a fixed rate, so hyperinflation is impossible by construction
• the "yield" it shows is a simulated display number from a finite, only-shrinking pool - it is never a payout and never a real reward
• when it ever goes live it becomes a gold sink: gold burned is destroyed for real, a meta sink like the refuge - the run is never touched

the seasons scaffold is cosmetic top to bottom - the only thing a season ever grants is a badge or title, never gold, never power. season activity is earned from honest play (showing up · a clean extract · the size of an honest haul); it is never a progress-burn, and a shared community pool only ever grows, never zero-sum.

the exact simulation knobs are listed on the wiki - the box is glass on purpose.

anti-bot stance

because nothing gates play and nothing pays out, there is little for a farm to extract - the design is the first line of defense. cosmetics and identity carry no monetary value by construction, so grinding an account confers a look, not a withdrawal. any honest-play signal (season activity, the founding ledger) is read post-run and server-side; the cap on founding ordinals is enforced on the server regardless of any client flag.

built in the open

the plan is public and ordered. the core loop, the refuge, and the bloodline are now. deeper frontiers, a companion, and the long collection are next. an economy, and maybe a token, are last - only ever on top of a game that is already good without one.