Village Life Official

VILLAGE LIFE

Everything added to the game recently lives under one entry in the game menu called Village life. There is nothing to memorise and no commands to type: open the game menu, choose Village life, and pick a category.

THE CATEGORIES

Today's tasks. A short list of jobs for the day, a reward at the end of the week, and your own record.
Living off the land. Fishing, farming, foraging and beekeeping, hunting, mining, cleaning work, your own animals, fishing nets and compost heaps.
Kitchen and health. Your cooking skill, what you have been eating, gem cutting and pottery, the workshop bench, and the ammunition bench.
Work and money. Your trade and wages, trading with people, your safe, your group's vault, market stalls, gifts and express parcels.
Home and comfort. Your own place, barbers and tailors, your aquarium, and the inn.
Town and law. The mayor, the notice board, the town office, the institutions, the courts, guided tours and the rescue drill.
People. Friends, the community board and your profile.
Family. Your partner, the family tree, the newspaper and apprenticeships.

TAKING UP A TRADE

Open Village life, work and money, work and jobs. Pick a trade and the work you already do starts paying a wage. Each trade has a daily quota and a daily wage: do part of the quota and you draw part of the wage, do more and the extra is paid at half rate. What you earn in a trade becomes your standing in it, from newly started up to master, and a higher standing adds up to twenty per cent to your pay. Your first trade is free; changing later costs five hundred points and a day's wait.

Police officer, teacher and guide are different. There are only so many of each on a map, so you apply for them and the mayor decides. Write in your own words why the post should go to you. If nobody looks at your application for two days and there is a seat free, it is granted anyway.

FOOD FROM START TO FINISH

Fishing. Take a rod to water, use it to cast, and use it again the moment you hear the bite. Twenty species live in these waters and each prefers a particular bait and a particular time of day. Every fish now has its own dish: stand beside a lit fire and use the raw fish to cook it. Never eat raw river fish.
Farming. Plant a seed, water it regularly, and harvest it when it is grown. Manure makes a crop grow faster and makes bare ground richer for next time. A crop belongs to whoever planted it.
Foraging. The woods give mushrooms, herbs and flowers. A wild mushroom you picked yourself is unidentified and can make you very ill; mushrooms you grew on a mushroom log in a cave or a mine are always safe.
Bees. Put up a hive on open ground, near wild flowers if you can, and lift the comb for honey and beeswax.
Hunting. Set snares where animals walk and bait them if you can.
Cooking. The more you cook, the better you get, and a skilled cook turns out meals that do you more good.

MUCK, MANURE AND COMPOST

THE TOWN OFFICE: OFFICERS, TEACHERS AND GUIDES
Every map that elects a mayor also has posts the mayor grants: three officers, two teachers and two guides.
An officer keeps order. Patrol tells them whether anybody wanted is standing nearby, and arrest takes a wanted person next to them to the cells. Nobody becomes wanted on one person's word: two different players have to report the same person within a day before a warrant exists.
A teacher takes new players in hand, gives them a lesson standing next to them, and draws a graduation fee if the pupil is still playing days later.
A guide writes a route across a map, a list of stops with something to say at each one, and walks a group round it. Anybody can join a tour that is running.
To apply: Village life, work and money, work and jobs, then apply for a post that needs a charter. The mayor of the map reads the applications and decides. The same page explains it all in game, from the mayor board or the work menu.

MINING, BARS AND WHAT THEY ARE FOR
Ore veins open by themselves in the mining maps: the abandoned mine, the mine road, the cave, the hidden cave and the mountain. An ore detector tells you the direction and distance of the nearest vein; stand on it and use a pickaxe. A vein runs out after a while and another appears somewhere else.
There are three picks. A plain one lasts about 250 swings and finds ore half the time, an iron one about 400 swings and seven times in ten, and a bronze one about 700 swings and roughly six times in seven.
Two ore plus a piece of wood on a fire make a bar. Iron bars make pickaxes, ore detectors, glass bottles, snares and leather gear. Two copper bars and one tin bar make two bronze bars, and two bronze bars with wood forge the bronze pickaxe. Gold is rare and is for show only: one gold bar with a stone mould on a fire casts a golden ring, and two bars cast a golden necklace. Both can be worn.

ANIMALS OF YOUR OWN
Wild animals can be tamed. Buy tame_feed from the points shop, stand a few steps from a wild animal and use it. Rabbits, chickens and goats come round easily; wolves and coyotes take a lot more patience. Five attempts a day is all any animal will put up with, and each attempt uses one tame_feed.
Animals you have tamed need animal_feed once a day, or they lose heart and eventually walk away. A barn kit puts up a barn on open ground, which is where chickens and goats live; standing at your own barn once a day gets you eggs, milk and a load of manure for the fields. Everything about them is in Village life, living off the land, animals of your own.
Please note: wild chickens and goats do not appear anywhere in the world yet, so at the moment only rabbits, wolves and coyotes can actually be found and tamed. The barn is ready and waiting for when they arrive.

Clean out a dirty toilet, or muck out your own barn, and you come away with a pail. Put the pail down on open ground and it becomes a compost heap. Add as much as you like to it, leave it about four hours, then lift it as manure from Village life, living off the land, compost heaps. Manure on a planted crop makes it grow noticeably faster; manure in bare ground makes the soil richer for everything you plant afterwards.

MAKING AND MENDING

The workshop bench turns sand into glass, hides into leather, herbs into remedies and meat or worms into prepared bait, which is the best bait in the game. Rough gems can be cut and clay can be thrown into pots and bowls. Wheat you grow is ground and baked with a skillet into two loaves of bread. A tree you grew is cut with an axe into twelve lengths of wood. Bones crushed with a hammer become compost, sinew twists into string with a knife, and beeswax melted with herbs makes a salve.

AMMUNITION

Firing a modern weapon usually leaves the brass case behind, and it is worth picking up. At the ammunition bench, under kitchen and health, three pieces of scrap metal beside a lit fire cast two lead shot, three lots of ash and two matches make a measure of gunpowder, and a case with powder and lead becomes one working round of that calibre. None of it comes from a shop; all of it is work.

MONEY BETWEEN PLAYERS

Trade face to face on a proper trade screen that shows both sides of the deal, so nobody has to hand anything over first. Keep valuables in your safe, where they can never be taken from you. Set up a market stall where people walk past and it keeps selling while you are offline, and check the market board to see what things are actually going for. If somebody cheats you, report it: the report follows them.

YOUR HOME

Your own place has a washroom, a bath, house parties, a visitors' book that records who came in, and a wall for photographs. You can pick your home up and set it down somewhere else for five hundred ln credits, with a confirmation first; everything inside stays exactly as it is.

PHOTOGRAPHS

From the camera menu there is now one entry for albums, walls, the exhibition, the studio and evidence. Sort your photographs into named albums, hang up to six on the wall at home for visitors to read, take a posed portrait with a studio backdrop, and enter one picture a month in the exhibition, where the whole entry pot goes to whoever the village votes for. A photograph that actually caught somebody can also be handed to the police or filed as evidence in a court case.

THE TOWN

The mayor makes promises that can be held against them and can be removed by the people who elected them. A map can post its own rules, and breaking one can be reported. The town office keeps the record of the village: past mayors and winners, the crime record, public polls, your identity card and what things cost region by region. The institutions are a school, a library with a reading room, guilds, an animal shelter and a charity box. An arrest opens a court case, where witnesses give evidence and a lawyer may speak for the accused.

THE RESCUE DRILL

A mayor or the staff can call a practice muster once a week on a map. Everybody has ten minutes to answer the call and reach the muster point. Everyone who arrives in time is noted, and once a week that is worth points, with a little more when four or more people turn up. The point is the practice: knowing the way, and knowing who turns up.

TWO THINGS ON ONE SQUARE

Nothing can be placed on a square that already has something on it, and the game tells you what is already there. If two things do end up sharing a square, pressing shift and enter opens a short menu asking which one you want. That way a courier board, a doorway or a restroom door can never be hidden by something left on top of it. Nothing at all may be left standing in the casino or in the public restrooms.

IF THE SERVER RESTARTS WHILE YOU ARE IN THE ARENA

Your inventory is put back automatically the next time you log in. Nothing is lost.

HOME AND COMFORT
Your home, the barbers and tailors, your aquarium, the inn and its tables, and your car all sit here. A car
is hired from the shops, set down outdoors and driven with the arrow keys; there is a full page about cars
in the help section.

STANDING ON SOMETHING AND PRESSING SHIFT AND ENTER
Almost everything you set down answers shift and enter when you stand on it: your compost heap, your
beehive, your mushroom log, your barn, your market stall, your fishing net, your car, a planted tree, a
piano, a music box and a trashcan. If two of them share a square, a short menu asks which one you meant.
Snares need nothing from you: what they catch comes to you wherever you are. Ore veins need a pickaxe.

LESSONS FROM A TEACHER
The mayor appoints teachers, and a teacher has real work. Stand within five steps of somebody, open village life, work and money, and choose to give a lesson. Pick mining, fishing or hunting; for the next thirty minutes your pupil does noticeably better at it. Teaching counts as a shift, so the teacher draws wages for it. A teacher can give one lesson every ten minutes and a pupil can take one every two hours.

MASTER AND APPRENTICE
If you have been here thirty days and have a trade, you can take a beginner (under twenty-one days) under your wing. They keep every point they earn; you are paid a tenth on top out of the town purse each time they draw a wage. After twenty wages they graduate: you both take fifteen hundred points and the pairing ends. Nobody can be an apprentice twice. Village life, work and money.

THE WEEKLY CONTEST
Every week one trade is picked, going round mining, fishing, farming and foraging. You do not enter: everything you do in that trade counts by itself. At the end of the week the first three take five hundred, three hundred and a hundred and fifty points, provided at least three people took part. Village life, town and law, this week's contest, shows the board and where you stand.

THE TOWN TREASURY
Half of every market stall fee paid on a map goes into that town's treasury. The mayor can pay it out, split equally, to the officers, teachers and guides in office. Nothing is printed: it is money people have actually paid in. Anybody can look at the treasury from the mayor's board.

WEATHER
Rain comes and goes on its own. You hear it start and stop. A fire left burning in the open is beaten down by it and will go out, so keep an eye on your fire when the weather turns; fish, on the other hand, bite better in the rain.

WHAT SHOULD I DO NOW
The first entry in the village life menu. It looks at your bag, your trade, your home, your car and today's tasks, and tells you one concrete thing to go and do. If you are ever stuck for a next step, start there.

EGGS IN THE KITCHEN
Tame a chicken, put up a barn with a barn kit, and call in once a day for eggs. Two eggs and a skillet on a fire make fried eggs. Three eggs and two milk make an egg custard. Two eggs and three wheat make fresh pasta. All three fill you up better than the egg on its own.

NEW SINCE THIS PAGE WAS WRITTEN (August 2026): the Governor's Mansion stands in the village east of the shops, and the office of Governor sits above every mayor (see the help page The Governor). The village menu has grown: Leaderboards, The season, an item catalogue of everything in the game, and Invite a friend are on the main list; My land (buy a land deed, claim ground of your own) is under Home and comfort; a fridge and a cabinet from the shops give any home real storage; and talking villagers now stand on six more maps beyond the village, each one knowing their own ground.